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.
[4] Since then HOL has received this award two more times in recognition of new content libraries added to its constantly expanding database.
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".
[9] Significantly, among "Research Institute Libraries" HOL ranked first while the much larger Lexis and Westlaw dropped to third and fourth.
[11] 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.
"[14] 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.
In addition, other competitors often edit or delete cases and documents, or change pagination, formatting, and the use of various typefaces such as italics.
"[15] 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.
Because Hein uses PDFs, rather than keyboarded text, every document shows original pagination, punctuation, spelling and typesetting.
For example, Hein publishes the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (IFLP) for the American Association of Law Libraries.
In addition to traditional periodicals, the IFLP also provides index access to more than 50 collections of essays, conference proceedings, and festschriften.
In an interview setting, librarians at law firms noted that access to the Federal Register and every law review ever published in the United States allowed their firms to discard bound volumes, reduce subscriptions to some materials, and at the same time reduce the need to order materials on inter-library loan.
"[28] As a journalist noted in writing a history of HOL, the online product has allowed all libraries to cope with "the over burgeoning shelf space devoted to law reviews".
[3] In a 2017 "Peer Review" of HeinOnline, in Connections, the official publication of the Association of Independent Information Professionals, Dan Odenwald, of Capstone Information Services & Consulting, noted that "With material dating to 13th century English Law Reports through contemporary American statutes and commentary, Hein is an indispensable tool in many research arsenals, providing access to current must-haves as well as historical obscurities."
"[30] At the same time, he praised Hein because "Search help and history are easily located; document printing and downloading are simple; and customer supports – training guides, webinars, live chat and toll-free hotlines – are ubiquitous.