The December 8, 2009 issue of the NLM Technical Bulletin is out and librarians will be interested to know that Webcasts is one of the two other terms (Research Support and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) will be added to the “Type of Article” menu in Advanced Search.
I love the idea that NLM is finally looking at indexing things that were/are webcasts. Now the only problem is making sure these webcasts are permanently available or archived somewhere. I guess if the webcast is associated with NLM or with a journal such as NEJM or JAMA then we librarians and the public have a better chance that the webcast is somewhere not lost on web or deleted. Now if the webcast is not associated with a publisher or an organization with a vested interest in archiving and keeping their content, then we have might have problems retrieving it in the future. It will be interesting to see how webcast items will be handled.
The Bulletin lists some other things you might want to know that are happening with the 2010 PubMed. Young Adult: 19-24 will be added to the Ages menu in Advanced Search and linking ISSN numbers will appear in the MEDLINE format in the ISSN field.
Those of you who use XML data (you know who you are) should check out “XML Changes for the NLM 2010 Production Year” and you can be kept up to date with changes by subscribing to the NLM’s anouncement mailing list.
As Nikki Detmar first stated on Twitter, PubMed Advanced Search is still a work in progress, so stay tuned to the Bulletin as NLM “re-works” Advanced Search to “improve search capabilities.”