New Version of the NLM Gateway

Technical Notes New Version of the NLM Gateway 2001 MeSH Browser Available NLM Leases MEDLINE and other Databases in XML Format at No Charge in 2001 Finding and Using Health Statistics: A Self-Study Course Public Working Draft Version of Human Sequence Available

December 21, 2000 [posted]

A new version of the NLM Gateway has been released with some notable changes.

• A new collection, "AIDS Meetings", has been added to the NLM Gateway in the Meeting Abstracts category. The AIDS Meetings collection has the meeting abstracts from the XIII International AIDS Conference held in Durban, South Africa, July 9-14, 2000. These are not MeSH indexed. Please note that the document collection formerly referred to as "AIDS Meetings" has been renamed "AIDS Meetings (with MeSH)."
• A change has been made in searching by field qualifiers. In the new release, all field qualifiers should be entered after the search term or terms, and must be entered after each term, for example: "macular degeneration" [mh]. This is consistent with the method used in PubMed. Previously, field qualifiers were entered before the search term or terms, and the field qualifier applied to the search terms that followed it until a new field qualifier was entered.
• The Login page and the Create New User ID page for the Locker and Preferences features have been redesigned.
• On the Limits screen, the default ending publication year (if not specified by the user) is the current year. Previously the default ending publication year was the beginning publication year.

In addition, some software bugs were fixed, and changes to the underlying system were made to improve Gateway functionality and efficiency. Comments and questions are always welcome, and may be sent to gateway@nlm.nih.gov.

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2001 MeSH Browser Available

The 2001 MeSH Browser is now available from the MeSH Home Page. The new browser encompasses useful features from the Annotated MeSH and the Tree Structures. It is designed to help quickly locate descriptors of possible interest and to show the hierarchy (trees) in which descriptors appear.

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NLM Leases MEDLINE and other Databases in XML Format at No Charge in 2001

MEDLINE will now be distributed to licensees in XML format using a Document Type Definition (DTD) to define the XML structure. (Please remember that MEDLINE is expanding its coverage in the area of life sciences and that unique journal citations from the former HealthSTAR, AIDSLINE, HISTLINE, SPACELINE, BIOETHICSLINE, and POPLINE databases will be phased into MEDLINE.) DTD's will be defined during 2001 for other NLM databases that will eventually be distributed in XML format such as MeSH and various TOXNET files.

There are no fees charged to lease NLM databases in 2001. See http://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/leased.html for additional information about leasing NLM databases. Use of the legacy ELHILL Unit Record Format for data distribution has been phased out as part of NLM's widespread reinvention activities.

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Finding and Using Health Statistics: A Self-Study Course

The National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology (NICHSR) of the National Library of Medicine has added this distance learning program to its Web site at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nichsr/outreach.html.

The course was developed by Dan Melnick, Ph.D., through a contract from NICHSR and was originally presented by Dr. Melnick at the 2000 Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association. It is based on Dr. Melnick's latest book, Portrait of Health in the United States (January 2001, Bernan Press).

Health statistics can be elusive and difficult to interpret. This course provides librarians, health services researchers, and public health professionals with some basic concepts for understanding health statistics, as well as pointing to some invaluable Internet portals.

We are looking for constructive feedback! Please send your comments on this program and/or suggestions for future related courses to nichsr@nlm.nih.gov.

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Public Working Draft Version of Human Sequence Available

In a letter published in the September 1, 2000 issue of Science and in a news brief published in the August 31, 2000 issue of Nature, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium described a number of electronic sites where the public working draft version of the human genome sequence can be found in its most useable forms.

The links below are to three different (but complementary), assembled views of the human genome, together with useful browsing tools that provide a wide variety of annotations of the sequence. These sites are updated frequently.

• University of California at Santa Cruz http://genome.ucsc.edu/
• National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/guide/ and click "Map Viewer"
• European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) http://www.ensembl.org/

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