MLA 2006:
Meeting Remarks
- NLM Online Users' Meeting
Meeting Remarks - David Gillikin, Head, MEDLARS Management Section- PowerPoint® Presentations for Meeting Remarks, MedlinePlus®, DOCLINE® and MeSH®
- Questions and Answers
- NLM Theater PowerPoint® Presentations
- NLM Update PowerPoint® Presentations
[Editor's note: These are remarks made by David Gillikin, Head, MEDLARS Management Section, National Library of Medicine at the Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association in Phoenix, AZ on May 22, 2006. The accompanying PowerPoint® presentation is available.]
g ood Morning. I'm David Gillikin and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the NLM Online Users' Meeting. I will be talking about changes and new features to various NLM products and services such as MEDLINE®, PubMed®, PubMed Central®, NLM Catalog, and the NLM Gateway, as well as other areas such as indexing. We will begin with Dr. Stuart Nelson, Head of the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) Section, who will talk about the Subheading Reduction proposal [Editor's Note: See decision]. Joyce Backus, Head of Reference and Web Services, will talk about MedlinePlus®, and Maria Collins from the Collection Access Section will speak about DOCLINE®. I will follow with the NLM Online update. We'll take your questions after all of the presentations are finished.
NLM Online Update 2006
Milestones
In 2006, NLM is celebrating a series of milestones:
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170 years The Library of the Surgeon General established, 1836 50 years National Library of Medicine Act, Public Law 84-941, 1956 40 years Specialized Information Services Division (SIS), NLM, 1966 35 years MEDLINE, 1971 21 years DOCLINE, 1985 10 years PubMed, 1996 (available for free in 1997)
In addition to these historic milestones, there have been several other significant changes at NLM involving personnel. The following individuals have or are about to retire. In March, Eve-Marie Lacroix, Chief of the Public Services Division retired after 21 years of service. Of her many accomplishments, MedlinePlus stands out as a major achievement in providing extensive health care information to the public. After 15 years, Marj Cahn, Head of National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology (NICHSR) retired in April. She had been the driving force behind NICHSR and the services and information provided by it. And in June, Carolyn Tilley will retire after an amazing 41 years of service. Currently serving as the Library Operations UMLS Coordinator, Ms. Tilley led the MEDLARS Management Section (MMS) for many years. Her dedication, especially to customer service for MEDLINE, had been a significant part of MMS and NLM for many years.
Indexing
The Index Section continues to set its own milestones. FY2005 saw over 606,000 citations indexed, the highest ever indexing rate achieved. So far in FY2006, over 301,000 citations have been indexed in the first 6 months, a rate even greater than last year. The creation of gene indexing links also grew in FY2005 with over 45,000 links created, compared to 33,444 created in the previous year. And in FY2005, over 80% of the MEDLINE citations are supplied electronically by publishers.
Additional events for Index Section included:
- ClinicalTrials.gov numbers and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) numbers were added to MEDLINE
- New Web-based training program for MEDLINE indexing was introduced in the fall of 2005
- Electronic Journal Indexing advanced with:
- 107 online-only journals indexed for MEDLINE, an increase from 90 one year ago
- 140 additional journals, the online version is indexed instead of the print version, an increase from 95 one year ago
- Dual monitors, and revised workflow/journal distribution methods allow for this change in journal format
- NASA ended the Interagency Agreement with NLM for Space Life Sciences data; NLM is reviewing a list of NASA recommended journals to consider for indexing
NLM Gateway
The NLM Gateway added access to seven new collections this year:
- NCBI Bookshelf
- Household Products Database
- Developmental and Reproductive Toxicology Database (DART)
- Chemical Carcinogenesis Research Information System (CCRIS)
- Genetic Toxicology Data Bank (GENE-TOX)
- Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS)
- International Toxicity Estimates for Risk (ITER)
OLDMEDLINE
The focus of OLDMEDLINE work has been on mapping OLDMEDLINE keywords to current MeSH. With this project, 70% of the OLDMEDLINE citations have been mapped completely (over 1.2 million citations), while 22% of the citations are in process, with one or more keywords having been mapped. That leaves 8% of the OLDMEDLINE citations that have yet to have any keywords mapped to current MeSH. No new OLDMEDLINE citations are currently being added to the system due to budgetary constraints.
PubMed
The number of citations in PubMed has surpassed 16.4 million records. The number of MEDLINE records is over 13.8 million and expected to pass 14 million by July 2006. MEDLINE records compose 85% of the PubMed data. In-process records (citations not yet indexed) are 1.4% of the PubMed total, while OLDMEDLINE records are 10.8%. PubMed-only records (items that are not indexed with MeSH) are 2.8% of the PubMed total.
PubMed usage continues to grow. From March 2005 to March 2006, the number of searches by unique IP address rose from nearly seven million to nearly 9.8 million unique IPs. The total number of searches went from 68 million to over 82 million searches. And during this time period, the number of page views displayed went from 294 million to over 377 million.
There have been numerous enhancements to PubMed this year. Among them are:
- Shared My NCBI accounts allow a library to establish a URL that activates filters thought to be helpful to patrons.
- Search links have been added to MeSH terms, Journal Title abbreviations, Grant ID data, Secondary Source ID data, and Personal Name as Subject data. These links allow users to select different options such as adding the term to your current search, or initiating a PubMed or other database search for the selected term (e.g., for MeSH terms, initiating a MeSH database search is an option).
- The Clipboard Contents Indicator is an asterisk (*) displayed on the Clipboard tab, indicating that content has been saved to the Clipboard.
- The new status indicator "PubMed - author manuscript in PMC" identifies citations that are found in PubMed Central as part of the NIH Public Access/Manuscript Submission System. An icon link to the free manuscript is also displayed in the Abstract and Citation views for these citations.
- Last Author Search option has been added to Single Citation Matcher.
- Search results can now be sorted by first or last author name.
- My NCBI Collections allow users to create and save lists of citations within their My NCBI accounts. These Collections can be reviewed, augmented, and deleted.
- The Limits feature of PubMed has undergone an extensive redesign, replacing pull-down lists with check box functions. In addition to enhancing the number of items that can be selected, it is now possible to select more than one item within each Limit list.
- The order of authors in PubMed citations has been changed so that personal and corporate author names will reflect the same order used in the article.
- International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number (ISRCTN) and Wellcome Trust Grant Numbers have been added.
- When a search retrieval is only one citation, the default display for Entrez PubMed, Journals, MeSH and NLM Catalog is now a fuller view, such as the abstract view, instead of the summary view.
- Approximately 45,000 citations from 24 journals have been added to PubMed from the PubMed Central back issue scanning project.
- The MeSH database on Entrez now provides a PubMed - Major Topic selection within the Links feature.
- The Limits feature on the Journals database provides selections for searching only PubMed journals or journals currently indexed in MEDLINE.
LinkOut
The use of LinkOut has also increased, with 5,144 journals having LinkOut links. For PubMed citations, 35.1% have full text links and 7.9% have free full text links. These percentages are much higher for PubMed citations from 1999 on: 80.8% have full text links, and 16.3% have free full text links. The usage of LinkOut has increased over 20% from last year. There are now 24 million LinkOut hits per month, which is an astonishing one million LinkOut hits per work day.
The LinkOut for Libraries program has also seen an increase in participation. There are now:
- 1485 libraries participating as of May 15, 2006 - 246 more than at this time last year.
- 810 DOCLINE libraries show their serial holdings in LinkOut.
- 505 participating libraries are in countries outside of the U.S.
The LinkOut Submission Utility is undergoing a complete redesign to improve layout and add more functions. This work will combine the management of LinkOut, Outside Tool and Document Delivery Service.
PubMed Central
The use of full text articles in PubMed Central has increased. In April 2006, the number of unique IPs searching PMC for one month topped two million for the first time. As of the first of May, 246 journals are participating in PMC, up from 184 from last year. PMC now covers over 675,000 articles.
Training
Between January 2005 and April 2006, over 1211 users participated in NLM training courses throughout the country, covering PubMed, NLM Gateway, ClinicalTrials.gov, TOXNET®, and the UMLS®. Other training related activities include:
- The new instructional resource, Basics of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), is accessible from the PubMed Online Training page and the Distance Education page.
- The PubMed tutorial has been updated three times in the past year, the most recent version being released on May 17, 2006.
- 24 Quick Tours are now available on topics including PubMed, Gateway, LinkOut, and the NLM Catalog.
- Quick Tours received an NIH Plain Language Award in April 2006.
NLM Technical Bulletin
Several new features were added to the NLM Technical Bulletin in the past year:
- Search function allows searching of index text back to 1979 and the article text back to 1997.
- Print This Issue allows you to print an entire issue (closed issue).
- What Other Readers are Reading identifies the most read articles in the past month.
- E-mail Sign up - the e-mail notifies addressees of new articles and issue closure via NLM-Announces mailing list.
- RSS Feed allows users to receive notices about new articles.
- Skill Kit articles cover search hints, system features, and data and indexing topics for NLM databases.
NLM Technical Services
In January 2006, changes to Voyager allowed data to display in vernacular (non-Roman) characters. This functionality allows a user with the correct keyboard facilities to search records using vernacular characters. NLM's catalog includes over 4,000 records in the database in Japanese and Chinese vernacular characters.
The 2006 edition of the NLM Classification was made available online in April 2006. The classification incorporated changes from April 2005 to March 2006. An online tutorial for searching the NLM Classification was also made available to users.
A new Authority Index feature has been added to the NLM Catalog on Entrez. This new feature provides an index of full author names, organizations, and conference names, as well as series titles, associated with the bibliographic records. Three new Quick Tours for searching author names, corporate/conference names, and series title have also been made provided.
Data Distribution
The Data Distribution Program continues to grow with research areas in academics, biotechnology, and software development companies leading the way. There were over 350 MEDLINE licensees in FY2005, which is a 14% increase from the previous year. Of these licensees, 118 were non-USA licensees, a growth of 26% from the previous year.
Unified Medical Language System® (UMLS® )
There were three UMLS releases in 2005, and four releases are planned for 2006. The first 2006 release happened in February, and the second release occurred May 10, 2006. In addition to these releases, the MetamorphoSys software continues to be enhanced, improving functionality and usability.
DailyMed
DailyMed is a new Web site providing high quality information about marketed drugs. The available information includes the FDA approved labels (package inserts) provided by the drug manufacturers.
Health Sciences Libraries Information Rx Tool Kit
The Information Rx Tool Kit has been redesigned and reorganized for easier use. The site is now called the Health Sciences Libraries Information Rx Tool Kit, and provides a step-by-step guide to assist librarians with outreach activities.
Specialized Information Services (SIS)
Specialized Information Services (SIS) has also had a productive and busy year with a number of updates, changes, and new products:
- TOXMAP 2.4 was released.
- The 2004 Toxics Release Inventory was released on TOXNET.
- Tox Town added two additional scenes: "US-Mexico Border" and "Farm Scene."
- WebWiser was introduced, providing WISER functionality via Internet, without downloading software or data to desktop.
- Updates to Household Products Database and HazMap® were provided.
- The new database, LactMed, was launched, covering drugs and lactation.
MLA 2006: NLM® Online Users' Meeting 2006: Meeting Remarks. NLM Tech Bull. 2006 Jul-Aug;(351):e3a.
