I ran accross this press release from the National Library of Medicine. The Wellcome Trust, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) are working together to provide digitized backfiles of a number of important and historically significant medical journals. These digitized backfiles will be available free on the Internet through PubMed Central.

So far the journals that are participating in this are: Annals of Surgery, Biochemical Journal, British Journal of General Practice, Journal of Physiology, and Medical History. A PDF of each article, editorial, letter, etc. will be in the archive. Additionally, each piece of information will be scanned in using an optical character recognition program so that each piece of information (article, letter, editorial, etc.) will be key word searchable. VERY COOL!

These journals have also made a commitment to include all new issues of their articles to be available once the article has outlived its embargo period.

So what does this mean for libraries?

Well for one these oldie but goodie things will be searchable online. I can't tell you how many times I have encountered researchers and physicians who have turned their nose up at perfectly relevant journal articles simply because they weren't available online. It is as if their legs were broken and they couldn't go back to the shelf and copy the darn thing, or their hands were broken and they couldn't write an ILL request. Lazy and sloppy researchers, I am not advocating it, but it happens. Hopefully this will slowly bring an end to that.

Second, these articles are now going to be available online FOREVER to anyone. Ok that is a strong word. Since I don't know the future, maybe I should say that they will be available online for a really really long long time. This is a permanent archive of an important collection of research. Libraries no longer have to worry about trying to find another library to ILL the old article.

Third, researchers, librarians, and doctors no longer have to go to the moldy old print Index Medicus to look up these gems. Like most typical print indices access points to articles are usually limited by the author, journal, and main subject terms. So if you weren't sure about the author (or the spelling) and you thought the main topic of the article was on ASTHMA but it was actually on and indexed under ANTI-ASTHMATIC AGENTS, you would have a harder time of finding the article. There was no such thing as full text searching in the print index world. As these articles are put online, you can do full text searching, and most likely use wildcard searches to help find the author's article.


(Evil Laugh) Whaa haa haaa. Like it or not but we are moving into the digital age and the written word as once knew it will change. Know what is out there, know how to find it, because knowledge is power.