LinkOut at the US Naval Hospital, Guam

By Alice E. Hadley

This article represents the opinions of the author and not the opinions of the Department of the Navy or the Department of Defense.

I manage a one person library at the US Naval Hospital on the western Pacific US territory of Guam. This is a 59 bed, level 1 trauma, JCAHO accredited hospital 3,800 miles west of Honolulu, Hawaii, just north of the equator, with a staff of about 600. We have 135 paper subscriptions, about 900 textbooks, several Internet/WWWeb resources including MD Consult and Ovid, a WWWeb page and a Clinical Digital Library. We are in the GMT +10 time zone, on the other side of the Date Line from most of the US, so it is probably tomorrow here as you read this.

My primary clients are the 54 physicians and 10 physician extenders on our staff, but I also provide limited services to the civilian health caregivers in Micronesia, backup services for the nursing school at the University of Guam, and miscellaneous services for naval ships doctors in the Western Pacific. In addition I provide library services to the rest of the hospital's staff, serve as the consumer health information librarian for our patients and their families, and mentor the medical library managers at the US Naval Hospitals in Yokosuka and Okinawa, Japan. My library is a member of the Guam Library Network, the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, a full DOCLINE participant, and a FreeShare library. I have informal working relations with a number of federal libraries, especially those of the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration.

Because of the diverse and dispersed communities I serve, I am always looking for ways to provide service to the desktop. As soon as I saw the demonstration of LinkOut at the Medical Library Association meeting in Orlando, I knew I wanted to participate. It looked like the perfect answer to my problem of how to make our e-journals more easily accessible to authorized staff.

Implementing LinkOut turned to be easy. It took me about 6 (much interrupted) hours over 3 days to implement LinkOut. If you have already registered all of your e-journals, it will take less that 2 hours. I had a few snags, but they were easily resolved. I highly recommend that you consider becoming a LinkOut provider.

I had been slow to signup for all our WWWeb versions of our paper subscriptions. It was just one more item on my endless To Do List when I saw the LinkOut demonstration. The demonstration looked like exactly what I needed to make our e-journals easier to access. When I actually started going through the LinkOut registration, it turned out that of our 135 paper subscriptions I only needed to register 18 to begin (these covered 26 subscriptions, since we have 9 AMA titles that only collectively require one registration). Because we also have MD Consult, my users have 102 titles available through LinkOut as of 6 August. Potentially more will be available every week as more providers register with NCBI.

If you are interested in trying LinkOut I suggest you:

Read "LinkOut for Libraries" and the "Frequently Asked Questions: Library LinkOut Submission Utility" twice.
Email NCBI at linkout@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, stating that your library would like to have electronic journal holdings represented in LinkOut. Provide the email address and phone number for a contact person from your library. They will send your contact a User Name and Password the same day.
Get a GIF for the link (100 by 25 pixels). Your IT or PR department may have one or you can create one by printing your hospital's name in a word processing document and scanning that and turning it into a GIF.
Get a copy of the list of your e-journals (or if you have not registered all of them, gather the address labels for them, decide on a Username and Password, and get a list of all of your IP addresses from your IT department).
Go to LinkOut Files Submission Utility and activate your journals. I found it easier to look up the titles in the Journal Title list as I do not have my subscriptions identified by provider. I did use the provider list for the MD Consult titles as I could choose them all in one step.

You will save time if you understand HighWire Press and know if you have any e-journals through them. I was confused to discover that some journals in LinkOut are available through them rather than directly from the journal, and I still have to figure out what exactly is available through them.

I also discovered half way through my registrations that my computer department had forgotten to tell me about an IP address range. Luckily I was rejected for registration at one site because I was registering from a computer outside the range of IPs I was registering. I then went to what has become one of my favorite sites http://www.simflex.com/ip.htm and discovered a new IP range. This added about an hour to my registration as I had to locate all of the titles that require IP registration and then had to go back and update all of them.

It was interesting to learn about the convoluted world of e-journal subscriptions. This is an area that will continue to evolve and be confusing for years to come. I now also have a notebook with the mailing address labels of all my paper journals annotated with information on their e-subscriptions including which are in LinkOut. This will make several other projects easier and make updating LinkOut easier. I also have an additional Performance Improvement project to add to my list.

It is too early to know what the impact of becoming a LinkOut library will be on my users. They are all impressed and enthusiastic when they hear about it; however, based on past experience, I do not think they will actually use it. Unfortunately, the service does not work in the Summary view and the user must change to another view (Abstract or Citation). It seems like nothing, but asking the user to change view, and to one that is less compact than the Summary view, is just enough to stop the user from bothering to use the service.

I just read an excellent article by Sheila Hayes in the National Network 2001 July v.26(1):26 "Inspiring Patrons to Use Loansome Doc". I am going to try her method on getting users to try LinkOut. This might increase the number of people who use LinkOut.

To summarize my LinkOut experience: it is easier than I thought and helpful for accessing my e-journal subscriptions. Best of luck to you if you decide to try it!

(Editor's Note: NLM is aware of concerns regarding library icons and the display formats and is considering how best to make this information available to the user.)

Next Article>>

Print
version

September/October 2001 volume 10, issue 5

LinkOut at the US Naval Hospital, Guam

By Alice E. Hadley

September/October 2001
volume 10, issue 5