In This Issue:
New
NLM Web Site
 MEDLINE
Logs Ten Millionth Citation
Betsy
Humphreys Heads Library Operations
ELHILL
and TOXNET Change
Regents
Chart New Course
Honoring
Elsie Werth
Native
American Youth Visit
Dr.
Spann Retires
Public
Health Center Named for Dr. Mel Spann
NLM
Rolls Out New Booth
Dr.
Harold Schoolman Retires
Dead
Sea Scrolls
Emerging
Health Information Infrastructure
Worthy
of Note: BLAST
Partners
In Information Access Awards
Bosma
and McCutcheon Appointed Section Heads
NLM
Director Visits University of Colorado
Training
NLM Associate Fellows
"Breath
of Life" Exhibit
Dr.
Allen Dies
In Every Issue:
Names
in the News
Products
and Publications
NLM
in Print
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NLM's MEDLINE Logs Ten Millionth Journal Citation
MEDLINE, the world's largest medical database, covers the medical
literature from 1966 to the present. When it began, MEDLINE covered
239 journals, and the NLM News bragged that it had "the capability
of supporting up to 25 simultaneous users."
On July 10th of this year, MEDLINE attained a major milestone
when the 10 millionth journal citation was added to the database.
Today, MEDLINE lists references from about 4,300 of the world's most
respected medical and scientific journals. Full text can be accessed
for recent editions of several hundred of those publications. And
the number of searches? More than half a million each day.
"The occasion of the ten millionth record in MEDLINE gives us an
opportunity to step back and reflect on what a staggering amount of
work this represents over the decades," commented NLM Director
Donald A.B. Lindberg, MD. "We owe thanks to a corps of dedicated NLM
staff who competently order and receive the journals, create the
Medical Subject Headings, index the articles, enter the data into
MEDLINE and maintain the database."
In the early days of MEDLINE, NLM staff worked with typewriters
and data forms to input citations into a punched card system. Today,
computers have streamlined operations dramatically. Input is now
mostly done by scanning articles, or by importing electronic data
directly from publishers.
And what was the ten millionth citation in MEDLINE? The article,
"Particulates from PTFE degradation in terrestrial and
microgravity," appearing in Aviation, Space and Environmental
Medicine, 1999 May;70(5):505-10. The article was indexed by an
indexer working on an NLM contract using the interactive online
indexing system from her home. (How things have changed since
MEDLINE began.) As a result of NLM's cooperation with NASA, another
recent development, this citation also appears in SPACELINE, another
of the Library's family of databases, since it provides information
on the possible breakdown of polytetrafluoroethylene-coated wires in
spacecraft.
Originally, MEDLINE citations were updated once a month. Today,
MEDLINE is updated weekly and the bibliographic information for
not-yet-indexed citations is entered daily into PubMed, NLM's
retrieval engine for searching MEDLINE.
With the launch of free MEDLINE on the World Wide Web in June of
1997, usage has skyrocketed. In the "MEDLINE for a fee" days, the
database reached a high point of 7 million searches annually. For
"free MEDLINE," the figure has already reached 16 million searches
per month, a number that continues to grow. Clearly, more MEDLINE
milestones lie ahead. And MEDLINE data, while growing in size, is
also growing in value.
"Now that so much more medical information is freely available to
the public via the Internet and the Web," noted NLM Director
Lindberg, "the MEDLINE core of highest quality, fully formatted and
indexed biomedical information takes on new importance and even
greater relevance to the health of the public than when the system
began with Record Number
One." |
