by: Terri Ottosen, Consumer Health Outreach Coordinator, NN/LM SE/A

In a recent teleconference for the Regional Medical Libraries, Naomi Miller, Manager of Consumer Health Information at the National Library of Medicine, provided some interesting facts about MedlinePlus. Here are some highlights:

• Page views FY 2007: 906 million total (English and Spanish) 238 million (Spanish only)
• Unique visitors FY 2007: 120 million total (English and Spanish) 36 million (Spanish only)
• Number of email announcement list subscribers: over 97,700
• Number of health topics: 746 in English with 19,775 links and 712 in Spanish with 5,860 links
• Go Local sites: 22

Visitors to MedlinePlus come from a variety of countries, as illustrated below:

United States: 59%
Australia: 2-3 %( skewed by Uruguay)
Uruguay – anomaly (Spanish site usage)
All other countries – and there is a very long tail (200 total Liberia, Greenland, Mauritania) are less then 2% usage

New Search Engine: Vivisimo

MedlinePlus now has a new search engine. Recommendations from surveys and user feedback resulted in the implementation. The new search engine allows keyword highlighting, shows best results first and incorporates new features. Vivisimo features include: default display of all returned results, ranked by relevance, search by collection, phrase searching, Boolean operators, highlight words you searched in summary, rank ordering of results, spellchecker that suggests alternative search terms, and a health topic spotlight box. In addition, a new Go Local search will be implemented.

What’s Next?

A few topics in the works are: health literacy, Corticosteroids, Arteriovenous Malformation and more. An interactive tutorial on Post-traumatic stress disorder is coming and a Spanish language issue of the NIH MedlinePlus magazine. A few major releases are also in development, including a foreign language enhancement and a redesign of the homepage, colors, logos, etc.
To sign-up for MedlinePlus news feeds via RSS, just visit the “what’s new” section at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/whatsnew.html

Of course, questions and suggestions are always welcome; just click on the “Contact Us” on the homepage of MedlinePlus.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 10:42 am and is filed under Consumer Health, Outreach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.