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Eric Clore
Jason Wallace
COMPETITIVE RESEARCH PAYS OFF
By Bayard Stern, Assistant editor, Florida State Times
When Eric Clore and Jason Wallace were called down to the principal's office in March, they thought, "Oh no - what did we do?"
What they "did" was make it to the finals of the first FSU/LEXIS®-NEXIS® Great Online Research Challenge - a national competition for high school students who can do Internet research, fast.
The winner is the team (one or two persons make a team) that can find out almost anything, more quickly than anybody else can.
Clore and Wallace were that team. They won two four-year tuition scholarships to Florida State University and other gifts, including Internet research services for their school, Wakulla County High School in Crawfordville, 25 miles south of the FSU campus.
Florida State and LEXIS-NEXIS teamed up to design the research competition. LEXIS-NEXIS is the world's largest full-text, on-line information provider with more than 1.4 billion documents, and growing daily.
The research service the contestants used in the contest - and the one they won for their high schools - is LEXIS-NEXIS ACADEMIC UNIVerse.
It offers full-text access to documents from 18,000 sources. It was developed and tested at the FSU School of Information Studies and is now free to all FSU students, faculty and staff.
Each of the finalists won an all-expenses-paid trip to Tallahassee to compete in the final round of the online contest. They had defeated 424 other teams from 42 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Territories, in two rounds of competition.
In the final round they answered multiple- choice questions by searching the LEXIS-NEXIS ACADEMIC UNIVerse.
The questions came from the social sciences, geography, sports, politics and the basic sciences.
Franklin D. Murphy, FSU's director of communications, said the competition has done its job: showing off what's available at Florida State:
"We believe that this contest has called attention to the fact that when it comes to Internet access, e-mail and electronic libraries of all kinds, no university in the world offers more to its students than does FSU."