I read the note on the demise of Medlars access (see below)

I disagree that PubMed should be dropped, I came up searching through the
ranks, not having to go to Washington, but it was still a one week training
session, I believe that we as librarians need to keep up with the changes
and the newer modalities that are being offerred to us as well as the
health professional and the lay public.  We can still use those finely
tuned strategies that we learned with the new search engines.

I think that IGM will in time disappear (my own opinion) and that more
time/money will be used to continue developing PubMed.  Already at MLA I
saw some of the changes that will be coming.

If only the commercial vendors remain, Ovid or Silverplater, etc.,the cost
of these databases will skyrocket, because there will be no competition.
The for profit industry is 'for profit' after all.

Ovid does have a very fine search engine, but I think the cost/benefit
ratio is too high.

Just my 2 cents, I'll get off the soap box now.

[outreach meeting in]Houston a couple of weeks ago.  One of the suggestions
that was made, and that several people liked, was for NLM to continue doing
the excellent job they do with the indexing but to stop providing the
search engines.There are several great interfaces for searching MEDLINE (I
am thinking of Ovid & SilverPlatter) already on the market.  Surely the
money that is being invested in providing the two competing systems, PubMed
& IGM, (which most librarians trained as searchers don't like) could be
more productively used in an arrangement with one (or both) of these
companies.

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  Margaret Vugrin MSLS, AHIP      Voice:  806-743-2241
  Reference Librarian             FAX:    806-743-2218
  Preston Smith Library
  Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center
  3601 4th St.
  Lubbock, TX  79430              e-mail: [log in to unmask]
                                  web:    http://www.lib.ttuhsc.edu

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