Monday, February 27, 2012

PubMed or Medline?

As librarians we are asked the question pretty frequently.

In essence it really comes down to a few things




  • Contains all articles from all of the 5400 journals in indexed by PubMed whether biomedical or not (approx. 1 million citations)
  • Contains all non-indexed articles and OLDMEDLINE
  • It is the free search interface for the various databases associated with the National Center for Biotechnology Institute
  • Site specific tools, i.e. MyNCBI, etc.



    • Is the major database component in PubMed (approx. 21 million citations) 
    • Only contains fully indexed biomedical journal citations
    • Is usually leased out to other database providers, i.e. OVID, EBSCO and isn't updated nearly as often as when it is used through PubMed

    There is a great article about this from the National Library of Medicine located here http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/dif_med_pub.html.

    Open Access?

    Open Access, Open Source, Open Data – What’s with all this “Open”!
    Open Access, Open Source and Open Data are simply promoting the principle of “Openness” or:

    · Open to contributions and participation
    · Open and free to access
    · Open to use & reuse w/few or no restrictions
    · Open to indexing and machine readable
    · From OPENNESS: CONTRIBUTE, ACCESS, USE By ACRL Workshop: Scholarly Communication 101 at http://www.scholcomm.acrl.ala.org/node/12

    Open access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. - Peter Suber, Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College. Why do you think there is such a push for “Openness”? What do you think about this principle? Agree or disagree…let us hear from all sides!

    Wednesday, February 8, 2012

    New Library Exhibits

    The two new exhibits featured at the Pumerantz Library are "Black History Month" and "Chocolate: Food of the Gods". Both exhibits occupy the walls and display cases located on the first floor of the library.

    The Pumerantz Library continually updates its exhibits throughout the year, please stop by and take a look.