Friday, January 16, 2009

What's New @ PubMed?

On January 12, Lauri Fennell from NN/LM conducted a information/training session at BHS. There were about 10 folks in attendance. Fran Becker and Karen Dorval provided a very nice coffee klatch opportunity before the session. We all got to meet Ray Marcotte of the Elms who has taken Mary Courtney's spot as the the Elms representative to WMHIC.
Seems there have been a number of cosmetic and functional changes to the PubMed site and more are coming.
Lauri strongly recommended that we begin using the Advanced Search all the time. The single citation match will disappear - if it has not already. Those little icons in the result list are mostly history.
Also, Lauri noted that the whole structure and design of the cite is moving towards the Amazon/Google model and it is the National Technology Information Center that is controlling the functionality of the cite. In her discussion, she emphasized the utility of MyNCBI and regularly consulting the NLM Technical Bulletin. She also made note of the Special Queries page and the "Drug Sensor" and "Gene Sensor", commenting that more of these features are forthcoming.
It would be impossible to detail all of which she made note. For the training packet she distributed go to: http://nnlm.gov/training/resources/pubmedpacket.doc