MEDLIB-L Archives

June 1999, Week 3

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From:
"Marix, Mary" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Marix, Mary
Date:
Fri, 18 Jun 1999 09:51:19 -0500
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Several librarians were having this discussion at an Outreach Contacts 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.

NLM finally saw the light and has gone with a commercial integrated system (Endeavor
Voyager).  Why not do something similar with MEDLINE and the other databases that
they create?

Mary L. Marix, M.L.S., AHIP ([log in to unmask])

"Burdick, Amrita J." wrote:

> I am really concerned about the loss of access points which will happen with the
> switchover to the web-based version of searching.  While PubMed has some
> advanced options, many databases -- such as AIDSLINE are available only through
> Internet Grateful Med.  Are we really going to lose the capability of searching
> many fields (such as chemical registry number, textwords with adjacency, author
> institutional affiliation, etc.)  that have been helpful in complex searches?  I
> contacted MEDLARS who told me to just enter textwords as MeSH headings which is
> an automatic mapping.  The method they suggested for institutional affiliation
> simply didn't work. I haven't explored all the other fields and which ones work
> and which ones won't but it doesn't look good.
>
> I don't mind learning new forms of access (as long as they work efficiently) but
> I am reluctant to lose the complex searching capabilities of Elhill!!!
>
> Amrita Burdick, Clinical Medical Librarian
> UMKC Health Sciences Library
> 2411 Holmes St.
> Kansas City, MO  64108-2792
> [log in to unmask]
> (816) 235-1876


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