MLA 2009:
NLM® Online Users' Meeting: Questions and Answers
NLM Online Users' Meeting: Questions and AnswersNLM Online Users' Meeting: PowerPoint Presentations for Remarks, MedlinePlus, DOCLINE
NLM Theater PowerPoint Presentations, Voice Recordings, and Transcripts
NLM Update PowerPoint Presentations
[Editor's note: These are the questions and answers from the Online Users' Meeting at the Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association in Honolulu, HI on May 18, 2009. The answers may have been modified to provide more complete information.]
Question:
As you redesign PubMed® please consider leaving three quarters of the results screen visible so that we won't have to scroll too much to see if our search was successful.
Answer:
The new version is optimized based on modern screen sizes to present more results than the current version.
Question:
Does the Product Identification System only identify pills that are already in DailyMed®? Are there going to be drop-down menus available rather than filling in the blank? I think drop-down menus would be easier to use.
Answer:
Yes, the Product Identification System identifies pills in DailyMed. Currently, there are about 4,500 solid dose form products in DailyMed and that number is growing. There are drop down menus available when filling in the description blanks in the Product Identification System. Once you start typing, give a little pause and an auto-complete menu will drop down. [Editor's Note: For additional information see the article, DailyMed® Product Identification System.]
Question:
Will the PubMed Single Citation Matcher be available in the redesign?
Answer:
Yes, it will.
Question:
Is there any consideration about adding new nursing journals to indexing and possibly add more nursing terminology?
Answer:
We welcome your Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) vocabulary suggestions. You can make suggestions from the MeSH homepage or from the MeSH Browser. Journal selection is done by the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee (LSTRC) and journals must apply and be approved in order to be indexed. If you know of journals you would like to see included in MEDLINE®, please contact the publishers and editors and encourage them to apply to the committee.
Question:
I have a question about the Medical Words tutorial in MedlinePlus®. I've received very good feedback from everyone who has used it. The one recurrent comment I hear is that everyone wishes there were accompanying audio. Are there any plans to add audio? Also, the search cloud on MedlinePlus is great and I know that there is redesign happening, but where are they? We don't know how to find them and they are not obvious from the homepage. And the same is true with the Medical Words tutorial. I happened upon the tutorial because I went to the dictionary and found a link there.
Answer:
We agree that audio would be a helpful feature in the Medical Words tutorial. I will take that suggestion back to the Library. We have been looking into adding audio to topic pages as well as having our summaries read. We did a little research into that, how much it was being used on our companion site, NIH Senior Health, and the audio wasn't being highly used, but clearly for this product at least, it obviously would be very useful.
One of our goals with the MedlinePlus redesign is to make all of our great resources easier to find. Currently, the Medical Words Tutorial is available from some of our topics that are related to "talking with your doctor." We also added it to the dictionary page. Those were the most obvious places we could think to put it. In the current design we didn't want to put one more thing on the homepage, but that is where people go to look for things. There is a small icon for the Search Cloud on the homepage, in the lower right-hand corner with the podcast and the magazine links; so it is there, but again if you didn't find it, it's not obvious. [Editor's Note: For additional information see the articles, Understanding Medical Words: A Tutorial from the National Library of Medicine® and Search Clouds on MedlinePlus®.]
Question:
Can you give us an update on DOCLINE® rush requests and explain how they are routed?
Answer:
Routing by time zone is one of the features we are looking at in the request redesign. It is a challenge for us to add one more thing to the routing algorithm and we're concerned about performance. We have been suggesting to users who do a lot of rush requests that they set up routing table cells for east and west coast libraries for however much flexibility they need when they are doing rush requests. For example, you can indicate that cell 1 should go to the East Coast and cell 2 could be Hawaii time and Pacific coast. So there is a work-around although we know it's not ideal. We are looking at the time-zone issue, but it does present a lot of challenges in terms of the routing and having the software accurately predict where libraries would want the request to go.
Question:
Regarding the PubMed redesign display, on the right hand side, at the top where you have the box for LinkOut icons: Is that going to expand if there are more icons?
Answer:
Yes, it would because some My NCBI users have more than two.
Question:
In the PubMed redesign, who is your audience?
Answer:
Everyone, and that may sound strange, but that's the answer. It's not being redesigned specifically for librarians or healthcare providers. A lot of librarians will find some of the features easier and some will want more specificity and that's what the Advanced Search page is for. After this redesign, NCBI will be looking at the Advanced Search page and how they can make that better and easier to use. But because PubMed is on the Web, it's accessed by everyone. That's a factor in all our products that we take into consideration because as a Web-based product — everyone can use it and everyone is using it.
Question:
In PubMed, have you made any changes that would facilitate uploading your results to bibliographic management tools like EndNote® or RefWorks® ?
Answer:
That function is not changing, but we hope that this redesign will make it a little easier to upload your results. A lot of the functionality is based on the bibliographic management software that you're using; some software may be more difficult to work with than others. Our goal is to provide a way to export data in one format that can be used by myriad products. How you import it to other systems is out of our control.
Question:
Are all or some of the MedlinePlus changes discussed going to be available in the MedlinePlus Spanish language version?
Answer:
It is always our plan to keep the two sites as much in tandem as possible. As far as the medical words terminology tutorial, right now we are not working on a Spanish version because that will be a real challenge for us. Getting the English version one completed was an enormous effort and a learning process because it was new technology for us. But a Spanish version is something we'll keep on the list.
Question:
After DOCLINE 4.0 are there any plans in the works to facilitate the batch upload of holdings for the larger libraries?
Answer:
It is something we're still looking at and it's a huge project. There's not a standard on exchanging holdings data, although an industry standard is in the works. There is no licensing information in that standard, however; it is strictly holdings data. It will be at least six months to a year for development to just have the holdings information and not the licensing data which wouldn't give us complete information. We know that the larger libraries want this feature, so it's something that we're looking at but I can't promise that we're going to do it at this point.
Question:
I'm also delighted in all the changes that are in PubMed. It's been great all along and it looks like it's going to be even better in particular with Single Citation Matcher remaining. We had stopped using it when we were told to go to the Advanced Search but our interlibrary loan staff use Single Citation Matcher to verify citations that are invariably wrong, so, thank you. The other thing I want to ask about is the filter tabs in PubMed. There is a lot of text there and it isn't very clear. When we teach a class the tabs are useful in helping people notice the reviews and full text, etc. So, are the filter tabs at the top going away at the top of the Abstract display?
Answer:
The filters are valuable and will be more visible in the redesign.
Question:
The algorithm in MedlinePlus that pulls up different things, is there a way to have it pull up the MedlinePlus Health Topic page? For example, if you have a topic and you put in a search, sometimes the MedlinePlus Health Topic page is the 20th down and that's the one I want to point to.
Answer:
We've tried to match as many terms as possible so that your specific term would be first but sometimes we've missed some ways that people might be searching. If you look in the left-hand column, you will see the Health Topics collection. If you don't see the topic as the first result, click on the Health Topics collection and you will see only the topics and hopefully you'll see what you want right there. [Editor's Note: For additional information see the article, NLM® Launches New Web Search Engine: NLM Web Site, MedlinePlus®, MedlinePlus en Español.]
Question:
I was so happy to see Tugger and I'd love for him to switch platforms and show up in a tutorial on MedlinePlus! Whenever we teach our classes we talk about PubMed and MedlinePlus. We teach our staff and faculty that things are changing and that databases change all the time, and the strategy to approach the databases when one day it may look one way and another day it may look different. Would you consider giving us more of a heads up when you actually release new updates? I applaud all the efforts and we do understand that when you make the changes it's really user-focused and user-centered and we do make that point to our users.
Answer:
We try to give notice about future plans for PubMed in the NLM Technical Bulletin (TB) or, as we have done here at MLA. Unfortunately, often the final details about how a new feature will work are not available to us until the feature is implemented at which time we provide information in the TB and in the PubMed New/Noteworthy. Please subscribe to NLM-Announces e-mail list to be notified of all TB articles announcing changes to PubMed. RSS feeds are available for both PubMed New/Noteworthy and the TB. We understand your situation and appreciate your ability to support our dynamic products.
This may also be a good time to clarify the ever-changing ads on the right side of the PubMed screen. Ads are not part of the retrieval. They are "bonus" items meant to offer additional sources of information. The ads that display on the search results page are, for the most part, based on the search query. Ads that display with individual records in the fuller formats (e.g., AbstractPlus) are based on that record, e.g., a word from the title or abstract. Ads can be modified or retired if they are not effective, or they may be tried out with a percentage of users (i.e., not all users). For these reasons, please note that ads may evolve and recognize that they can change even with the same search.
MLA 2009: NLM® Online Users' Meeting: Questions and Answers. NLM® Tech Bull. 2009 May-Jun;(368):e18b.
