MEDLINE access
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I am the Head of Public Services in the McMaster University Health
Sciences Library and a searcher of Medline for more years than I care
to remember (since about 1975, anyway).
The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), as you may know, is cur-
rently concentrating its efforts with respect to Medline on two prod-
ucts:
1) PubMed and
2) Internet Grateful Med
There are also a great many other free routes of access to versions
of the Medline database mounted by a variety of organisations and
available over the Internet (or via the WWW, as you may choose to ex-
press it). I offer access to these sources and services in a section
of my web resources which can be found at the following address:
http://www-hsl.mcmaster.ca/tomflem/all.html
This is the section for: "Evidence based health care practitioners";
near the bottom of the list on that page you will find links to "Pub-
Med", "Internet Grateful Med", and to a list of "Medline Access"
sources from a web service called "Medical Matrix".
This last resource is one you should look at; I believe you will have
to register to view the list (simply follow on-screen instructions),
but there is no cost to use the service. You should find it interest-
ing, as my recollection is that it offers a compilation of currently
available Internet sources of Medline data and compares each with the
others under a whole variety of useful headings. It will tell you
which sources offer Boolean searching, for instance, and which are
totally free, or require passwords.
During the summer, NLM announced that both the PubMed and the Inter-
net Grateful Med routes of access will be free, and many people have
turned to these routes of Medline access for this reason. They are
both very flexible and robust approaches to the data, but each is so
different that it is necessary to spend a great deal of time with
them in order to learn how they can be exploited successfully. One of
the biggest complaints from many quarters is that the documentation
available for PubMed is totally inadequate.
I have spent some time with it and can testify to the inadequacy of
the documentation, but by asking questions of the HelpDesk staff, I
have found answers to my questions -- in some cases -- which have
convinced me that PubMed is a very useful tool and is likely to be
developed in the future along very promising lines (it allows one to
locate articles "like" one that you deem useful. None of the other
Medline search interfaces that I know offer such a helpful innova-
tion).
Satisfaction with Internet routes of access to Medline will, ulti-
mately, depend very largely on your satisfaction with your Internet
connection. If you can always access the resources you want quickly
and without delay, then Medline over the Internet will be reasonably
speedy, too. If you often encounter delays accessing web pages and
are frustrated with the slow response from busy sites, you will not
find Internet versions of the Medline database acceptable. The speed
of the retrieval and the frustration attendant upon other similar
features of the interaction both depend on the kind of Internet con-
nection you have, and often on the time of day (and the traffic on
the server where the resource you are using is mounted) when you are
searching.
My own belief is that Internet routes of access to Medline are fine for the casual user, the non-professional searcher and the uninitiated who want to search without cost, but are not the librarian's choice. Here in Canada, our Internet access is not good enough to make searching Medline via the Internet a satisfactory experience for the professional searcher.
A direct connection via modem, or access to a networked version of
the database on CD, in my experience, are the only satisfactory means
of access to the data for those who do high-volume searching, or me-
diated searches for others. It is only these presentations of the da-
tabase which, at the moment, allow the total flexibility (in search
formats, access to all fields and the full citation record, and down-
load options) needed by the experienced searcher, or the serious
learner. Only these formats allow a reliable connection and documen-
tation which is adequate to permit full exploitation of the database
and the various software packages (search engines) used to present
it.
Obviously, these are my opinions, not facts, but many of these opin-
ions are shared by other experienced searchers and I have no diffi-
culty presenting them to you because they are not unusual in the li-
brary community in North America.
--
Tom Flemming
Health Sciences Library
McMaster University
1200 Main Street West
Hamilton, ON L8N 3Z5, Canada
Ariel: 130.113.181.186
Voice: +1-905-525-9140 x22321
Fax: +1-905-528-3733
mailto:tomflem@fhs.csu.McMaster.ca
http://www-hsl.mcmaster.ca/tomflem/top.html
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