There has been a lot of chatter recently regarding some of the changes in PubMed. While I have been kicking the tires and testing out CINAHL in EBSCO 2.0, others have been detailing some of the changes happening within PubMed. Now the National Library of Medicine will be conducting a 30 minute online search clinic on July 17, 2008 at 2:00 eastern regarding the PubMed changes. The presentation will cover how PubMed handles your search with the Automatic Term Mapping (ATM), Citation Sensor, and Advance Search beta.

For more information and access to the meeting, go to: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/clinics/pmupdate08.html.
Due to technical limitations, there is a maximum capacity of 300 participants.
The clinic will be recorded and available for viewing at this address. Comments and suggestions regarding the search clinic are welcome.

Personally I think this is a must see for medical librarians, but is especially important for medical librarians who rely primarily on PubMed for MEDLINE searching.

If you are interested in reading what others are saying about the changes Laika, Keith Nockels, and Eagle Dawg all have fairly recent posts on the new PubMed features. It might be a nice way to quickly familiarize yourself with the issues before NLM's presentation. Perhaps their insights might cause you to generate some interesting and thought provoking questions, comments, and suggestions that you would like to submit to NLM prior to the clinic on July, 17th.

In Laika's MedLibLog post, PubMed: Past, Present And Future, PART II she describes some of the changes and enhancements that NLM has implemented in the PubMed interface. She has a very in depth description and analysis of PubMed's "most recent, most radical, and yet most poorly announce change," Automatic Term Mapping (ATM). She illustrates her thoughts using several search examples and how PubMed handles them using ATM. She investigates new features such as the Citation Sensor, Advanced Search Beta, and some other minor changes.

She discusses the majority of changes in Part II of the series. Part I discusses past features and tools within PubMed and the need to make them easier. Part III discusses the possible future of PubMed and what she would like to see occur.

Keith Nockels over at Browsing posted, Changes to PubMed where he lists what changes he will discuss with the departments to which he is a liaison. He briefly discusses the missing sidebar, Advanced Search, ATM, Citation Sensor, Title Sort, and a new spellchecker.

Eagle Dawg's Blog post, New ATM & PubMed: Straight to the source is an update from her brief PubMed Review shoutout (MLA 08) which has a direct link to the 25-minute PubMed Review slides & audio presentation. She lists the three "must see" sections of the video as the Advanced Search Beta, ATM, and Using Advanced Search to focus subjects due to ATM. Eagle Dawg also provides al ink to NN/LM PNR's blog entry which is a brief tutorial on the changes.

Labels: ContinuingEducation, Medline Database, PubMed