MeSH URIs Added to NLM Catalog Records in July 2017

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) will be adding Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to the MeSH subject fields in its catalog records from July 1-4, 2017. LocatorPlus will be unavailable during this period (beginning late afternoon June 30, 2017) and the contents of the NLM Catalog will be static from June 30, 2017 until sometime during the week of July 17, 2017.

For more information about this project see the April 26, 2017 article, Adding MeSH URIs to NLM Catalog Records.

The weekly and monthly change files for Catfile, CatfilePlus and Serfile will be extremely large, as all the bibliographic records will be distributed. They will be the same size as the base files that are normally sent out in December (ca. 1.7 million records). The Catfile MARC release will take place on July 6, 2017 and CatfilePlus and Serfile releases will occur on August 1, 2017. Subscribers to the XML data need to be aware that one minor update has been made to the NLM Catalog DTD to accommodate the URIs. The revised DTD is available from the Document Type Definitions (DTDs) for NLM Databases Web page.

Subscribers to Catfile who are not interested in having URIs for all the MeSH in their bibliographic records and/or those concerned about the size of the file do not have to load the file that will be released on July 6, 2017. The July 13, 2017 release will contain all records created/changed for other reasons between June 29-July 12, 2017.

Subscribers to the monthly files must load the large August 2017 files to get the monthly changes.

Note that all files distributed by NLM after July 6, 2017 will contain URIs in the 65X fields.