A new Web site available to Iowa State students, faculty and staff will help corral the Internet’s vast sources of news and legal information from the comfort of desktop computers.

Academic Universe (www.lexis-nexis.com/universe) has been brought to ISU by Parks Library, but users don’t have to go to the library to access it, said Jan Fryer, assistant professor of library.

Fryer said the server has quite a few purposes.

“You can get to material with legal importance — cases, laws,” she said. “You can get to various sources that have information on businesses and companies.”

The site has information on five areas: news, business, legal research, medical and reference.

The server also can provide material from different reference sources, Fryer said.

“There are actually two news components — today’s news and news — and within those are information from wire services, other newspapers, that kind of thing,” she said.

Kristin Gerhard, collections officer of Parks Library, said she thinks many students and faculty will find the site very useful.

“It’s an online product that provides both indexing to and full text of legal and news information,” she said.

Gerhard said the library in the past had subscribed to Lexis-Nexis, another online research tool, although that program could only be run on certain terminals.

In August, when the payment plan for Lexis-Nexis changed, the library at first could not find funding for it, and later ended up paying for Academic Universe.

Unlike Lexis-Nexis, however, Academic Universe can be run from any on-campus computer connected to the ISU network.

“Because of the subscription we’ve got, it’s going to be desktop access,” she said. “You don’t have to come to the library to use it.”

However, Fryer said the Academic Universe is available only to people with ISU affiliation.

“It’s the licensing agreement we have with Academic Universe,” she said.

A few months ago, Parks Library bought Statistical Universe (www.lexis-nexis.com/statuniv) for the ISU campus.

“It’s just as good for statistical information as Academic Universe is for news and legal information,” she said.