HeinOnline

HeinOnline (HOL) is a commercial internet database service launched in 2000 by William S. Hein & Co. (WSH Co), a Buffalo, New York publisher specializing in legal materials. The company was founded in Buffalo, New York, in 1961, and is currently based in nearby Getzville, New York. In 2013, WSH Co. was the 33rd largest private company in western New York, with revenues of around $33 million and more than seventy employees.

HeinOnline is a source for traditional legal materials (reported cases, statutes, government regulations, academic law reviews, commercially produced law journals and magazines, and classic treatises), historical, governmental, and political documents, legislative debates, legislative and executive branch reports, world constitutions, international treaties, and reports and other documents of international organizations. The database includes more than 192 million pages of materials "in an online, fully searchable, image-based format".

In 2001, HeinOnline received the coveted "New Product Award", from the American Association of Law Libraries. Since then HOL has received this award two more times in recognition of new content libraries added to its constantly expanding database. In 2002, HOL was named as a "Best Commercial Website" by the International Association of Law Libraries. In 2007, EContent Magazine listed HOL among the hundred "companies that matter most in the digital content industry". The list "represents the best and the brightest digital content companies". More recently HOL's World's Constitutions Illustrated was named by Choice magazine as an "Outstanding Title" for 2010. A little more than a decade after HOL went live, a publication of the American Association of Law Libraries referred to it as a "groundbreaking product" and as "a leader in online legal literature".

In 2013, a survey of law librarians ranked HeinOnline as one of the three most popular "subscription databases" among law libraries throughout the world. This survey ranked HOL just behind the much larger and more highly capitalized Westlaw and LexisNexis. According to this survey, conducted by a London-based law librarian, "These top three easily dominated the subscription database market across all major law libraries, across the world." They also "dominated University law school libraries". Significantly, among "Research Institute Libraries" HOL ranked first while the much larger Lexis and Westlaw dropped to third and fourth. HOL and Westlaw were tied for first among the most popular "subscription databases" in Public Libraries. Among North American law libraries HOL, Lexis and Westlaw were tied for the highest number of subscriptions, in Asia (excluding the Middle East) HOL was tied with Lexis for second place behind Westlaw and in Europe HOL ranked third, behind Westlaw and Lexis. This suggests that the smaller HOL has as great a presence at home and nearly so in Europe and Asia as its much larger competitors, but that it has been less successful in penetrating markets in Africa, Latin America, Australia/New Zealand, and the Middle East.

In 2010, a survey found that 72% of all law firms subscribed to HeinOnline. The author of this article noted that "Academic law libraries quickly embraced HeinOnline in its early years" but expressed "surprise" by "the popularity of HeinOnline in law firms, at 72%." The explanation for this unexpected survey result rested on economic considerations interwoven with HOL's content: "as law firms reduced office space dedicated to print collections, the ever-increasing breadth of HeinOnline's historical, and now more current, publications has made it a pragmatic and sound business investment." This analysis dovetailed with earlier explanations by law firm librarians.

All materials on HeinOnline are available as downloadable and searchable PDFs of the original and complete documents. Unlike its major competitors, HOL does not keyboard the content of documents, cases, and statutes, but instead scans them with high-end optical scanning technology. This approach avoids the introduction of typographical errors. In addition, other competitors often edit or delete cases and documents, or change pagination, formatting, and the use of various typefaces such as italics. Because of HOL's use of pdfs of all original documents, the materials appear exactly as they did in the original publication.

HeinOnline initially focused on traditional legal materials. Indeed, when first released, HOL provided full online access to only 25 academic law reviews, but by 2006 the database of law reviews had expanded to more than 800 journals. Starting in 2007, HOL provided full-text searchable access to "every 'flagship' law review published by an accredited U.S. law school." At the time of HeinOnline’s inception, Lexis and Westlaw did not offer access to older law reviews, but only to those published since the 1980s. Thus, HOL initially envisioned itself mainly as a historical archive, but this changed due to market demands by professors, scholars, and law librarians, who wanted access to HOL's scans of the more recent journal issues as well, rather than the keyboarded version in Westlaw and Lexis.

Even before HOL expanded to include all new law review issues, it was adding other material, starting with the Federal Register in 2002 and a Supreme Court library that included PDFs of all volumes of United States Reports. Significantly, Hein offered the full and complete version of all reported cases, while its competitors often provided truncated and edited versions, with changes in spelling or punctuation to reflect modern usage. This was especially true for 19th century cases, which contained extensive lawyers' arguments in the U.S. Reports. These were often deleted in the Lexis and Westlaw versions, but are fully available on HOL. Libraries of Treaties and Agreements, legal classics, U.S. Statutes at Large, all Federal Regulations (including those that had been long superseded) were added by 2007, and more material including extensive state material followed.