Serials Solutions Work With PubMed!

Oh happy day, happy day, happy day!
I received and email from my rep at Serials Solutions asking me to call her about linking within PubMed. So I called her and I am so glad I did.

Starting December 15th of this year. Libraries who have Serials Solutions Article Linker will be able to have Article Linker work on PubMed! This is HUGE!!!! Currently, if you want to link to the full text of an article within PubMed you must get select each an every journal that your institution has online access. While this has been a nice step towards offering one stop shopping to the full text of an article while doing medical research, it is not truly all encompassing.

For example, there are many journals that are available online that are indexed in PubMed but are not yet in their list of LinkOut journals. Therefore when you search PubMed you can not one stop full text access to those journals through PubMed.

So a librarian had to maintain their complete online journal list through Serials Solutions and then periodically update and maintain a separate list for PubMed. It was cumbersome but if you had PubMed searchers it was essential.

However, starting December 15th (as I was told) those people who have Article Linker with Serials Solutions will now be able to tell PubMed that they are using Serials Solutions link resolver. So when your user clicks on the icon to access the full text of a journal, PubMed sends them to your Article Linker list and directly connects you with the full text of that article.

Now there are some strict rules that PubMed has instituted and not every library will be able to participate. Any library who wishes to use Article Linker with PubMed must have their online catalog and their online ILL form available and accessible through their Serials Solutions Article Linker portal. Apparently PubMed will not budge on this issue and will not set up Article Linker if you do not have those two things on your portal.

All of this information was just told to me over the phone by my Serials Solutions rep. I will let you know when I get actual documentation on this. I realize that this might not be the most thorough description of this product/service, part of that is because I don't have any written information and I can't test it.

For me this means that I no longer have to maintain multiple lists of what is online through what. I only have to maintain one electronic journal list which will be my Serials Solutions list. This allows me to have some sort of control as to how my users are accessing the full text of articles and it provides one less place to go "fix" a problem. For me this is wonderful. I almost broke down and told my rep that I loved her, but thought better of it.

posted by The Krafty Librarian @ 1:45 PM   0 comments