In This Issue:

• Thank You
  
  
• Director's CorNER
  
  
• Future Leaders
  
  
• PubMed Particulars
  
  
• LinkOut
  
  
• New Library Groups
  
  
• Ill Advised
  
  
• Know Tech
  
  
• Tres Chic
  
  
• INside OUTreach
  
  
• Links
  
  

Did you know that you can enable your users to access full-text content of your online journal holdings through PubMed?

LinkOut is a feature of the National Library of Medicine's PubMed, a free interface to MEDLINE located at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed. The LinkOut home page at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/linkout/ explains how the feature works and the process by which a librarian can begin to establish online journal links in PubMed. A list of LinkOut providers is also included; as of January 16, 2002 there are 405 publishers and online journal providers participating.

To begin using LinkOut, a library must first submit a request for an account. Send an email message to linkout@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov and request an account for your library. Be sure to include contact information. You will be given a username and password, and a web address where you can log in to access your account.

Once you have logged into your LinkOut account, you can begin to add journal titles to your holdings. Just click on the "Edit Holdings" link on the left menu. There you can choose to browse by either Journal Name or Full-Text Provider. LinkOut can also display your holdings so that you can quickly see which journals you have added in previous sessions. Updates to your account normally take effect within one business day.

You can also submit a small image or logo so that your users can easily identify which articles they can access through LinkOut. In order for this image to appear you must direct your users to PubMed via the address http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?holding=[username] where [username] is the unique login name given to you when you request a LinkOut account.

The Lamar Soutter Library at UMass Medical School has participated in LinkOut since April 2001. As of this writing our LinkOut holdings include 833 journal titles. All links to PubMed from our web site are directed to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?holding=umasslib so that our users can better identify articles that are available full-text through LinkOut. By typing loprovumasslib [sb] in the PubMed search box we can then see that nearly 772,000 items in PubMed are linked to our library's online journals holdings.

The system is not perfect however. Many recent citations in PubMed are marked "PubMed - in process" and quite often the links to full-text are not quite correct. The result is that you are usually taken to the correct journal but you may then have to perform a search to get the desired article. PubMed's LinkOut feature is nonetheless an important step in getting from citation to full-text.

Robert Vander Hart is the Electronic Resources Librarian at the Lamar Soutter Library of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He can be contacted at Robert.VanderHart@umassmed.edu