DESCRIPTION & ENTRY
	Melody Lembke Los Angeles County Law Library melody@lalaw.lib.ca.us

You knew they were coming. Now they are here. The title pages with the latest merger blasted across them (well at the bottom in the imprint area anyway) have arrived. LEXIS Publishing is starting to appear on the chief source of replacement volumes for titles that were previously published by Michie and briefly by LEXIS Law Publishing. I have also noted the change on a recent Matthew Bender annual title.

LEXIS Publishing^TM
LEXIS-NEXIS§MARTINDALE-HUBBELL
MATTHEW BENDER§MICHIE§SHEPARD’S

The brand has yet to appear on the chief source of any of the Bender loose-leaf titles, but I expect the change will be appearing there soon as well. However, just to make your life interesting, even though the name LEXIS Publishing appears above its various component publishers on the former Michie/LEXIS Law and Matthew Bender titles, the imprint areas for Shepard’s and Martindale-Hubbell publications are to retain these names in prominent locations with LEXIS likely to appear only on the spine.

As far as bibliographic description is concerned, I don’t think we need to worry about the legal issues involved with this merger. Regardless of who holds the copyrights on the intellectual content, the new brand configuration appears on the title pages in a publisher imprint area. Recording this publisher change in the bibliographic records for the two title pages that I have in hand for the General Laws of Rhode Island, 1956 and Bender’s 2000 Tax Return Manual would involve two different approaches. The volume for the General Laws... is a replacement volume. Thus the 260 itself should be corrected with the new name and a note made about the old publisher name.

    260  Charlottesville, VA :$bLEXIS Pub., $c     
    500  Previously published: Indianapolis :
         Bobbs-Merrill (1957-1981) ;
         Michie(1982-1994) ; Michie
         Butterworth (1995-1998)
    500  Description based on: t.p., v.2, pt.2
         (1999)

This is basically the same technique to use on any of the Bender loose-leaf titles that start appearing with LEXIS Pub.

The Bender title I mentioned above is a serial and would have only a note to reflect the publisher change.

    500  Published: New York : M. Bender
         (197- 1998) ; LEXIS Pub. (1999-   )

The editorial department didn’t change the title even though the publisher changed. Guess we’ll get to do maintenance for that change next year!