I've read all of the e-mails posted regarding Elhill's shut down at
          the end of Sept. and the one that made the most sense to me was the
          suggestion that NLM stick to the indexing business and get a
          commercial vendor like Ovid to provide the search engine. It was a
          suggestion I made to them many months ago. While, in my estimation,
          Elhill had many advantages over Pubmed it was never as slick as any
          of the commercial search engines; the inability to scroll for
          instance was a constant irritant as was the inability to hide your
          codes. There are lots of improvements needed to Pubmed.. I need to
          be able to do a save search (sn) which I can update every week
          (requiring ranging dates using (em) and (da). The equivalent of
          Elhill's "prt ar comp include ad" would be very helpful. Cleaning
          up the  screen would certainly save me some money and maybe a few
          trees to boot. I am not almost blind and neither are the people I
          do searches for..a normal courier font would serve me just fine
          and, please, just the citations maam just the citations. Separating
          Premed and Oldmed  would also be helpful since they can only be
          searched with textwords. Being able to stack your searches would
          also be nice..I like to know how many citations there are at some
          Mesh headings...sometimes because of the numbers, I change my mind
          and will redo a whole search statement or add more limits. I like
          the flexibility of being able to do that. But, folks, I suspect all
          of the people who attended the focus groups NLM organized said
          exactly the same things we're saying and they all returned to their
          regions saying all was going to be fixed..don't bellyache ! I think
          a lot of mistakes were made from the "get go" on this project and
          I am very concerned that they are never going to be straightened
          out. And I am equally concerned that MLA has not been the
          intermediary I would have hoped for.

          Miriam R. Geller, Librarian
          William B. Stem Memorial Library
          Children's Hospital, Boston 02115
          e-mail:[log in to unmask]
          tel.: (617)355-5840p