Outreach News

NLM Gateway

The National Library of Medicine [NLM] is the world's largest biomedical research library. The collection covers all areas of biomedicine and health care, and includes materials in physical and life sciences, social sciences and humanities. The unrivaled physical collection contains over 5.8 million items including books, journals, manuscripts, photographs, and more. NLM is also responsible for the production of the MEDLINE database and numerous other factual and bibliographic databases.

Over the years, NLM has utilized various methods for providing access to its resources. Grateful Med software, now retired, enabled health professionals across the country to search MEDLINE and the other databases with just a phone line. The explosion of the Internet has added yet another avenue with web-based search systems. PubMed, a search system from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, under NLM, is a free Internet resource allowing anyone with an Internet connection access to databases at NLM. LOCATORplus is NLM's online catalog providing information on items in the Library's physical collections while MEDLINEplus is NLM's consumer health web site.

Originally each of these resources had to be searched independently. With so many different routes available to access information at NLM, a centralized site was needed. The NLM Gateway, http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/ allows users to search in multiple systems including MEDLINE on PubMed, LOCATORplus and MEDLINEplus from one centralized location. The Gateway is available to anyone with an Internet connection and it is particularly friendly to those who are unfamiliar with NLM and its resources. For example, a search on "multiple sclerosis" retrieves the following screen:

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The Details of Search button in each category outlines the results from each resource. For example, the journal citations were pulled from PubMed and the OLDMEDLINE databases. The consumer health items came from MEDLINEplus Health Topics, MEDLINEplus Drug Information and the DIRLINE database providing directory-type information on health organizations. For those who prefer to search each separate system to prevent retrieval of unwanted items, the PubMed, MEDLINEplus and LOCATORplus systems will remain searchable individually.