I'm Sonya Shooshan and I work in the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications and this is my colleague 
Andrea Dempsey and she works in MEDLARS Management Section of Library Operations. We're here to talk to you today about 
the NLM Gateway. 

How many of you have ever used the gateway? Wonderful. So this will hopefully be a nice review session 
for you. 

Okay what is the NLM Gateway? It's a web based system in which the user can search simultaneously in multiple 
retrieval systems at NLM from one search interface. Currently we search twenty three separate collections. 

The latest 
collection we've added this past year is Profiles in Science which is an archival collection of leaders in biomedical 
research and public health. And we're going to show that site if you're not familiar with it during the system demonstration. 


What else have we've been up to this year? Well on our results summary page we've added a Clear Check Marks to the 
Select An Action pull down menu. Also I wanted to give you a little idea of some of the infrastucture and data changes
we've made behind the scene in the last year. For several years the gateway has been using XML or extensible markup language
for its data. And this past summer we had to change out our parser. Partly we had to do it to make a specific change for
a bug we're experiencing and partly just to keep up with technology. And that required several hours of programmer time
but months and months, weeks and weeks of testing time. You didn't see it but we had a big improvement to our system behind
the scenes. 

Another change was recently right before we came to MLA.  We upgraded to a new version of e-summary. We didn't 
upgrade, NCBI upgraded to a new version of e-summary and we use e-summary, which is one of the NCBI suites of e-utilities to 
connect to PubMed, NLM catalog, and OMM and we upgraded to use their latest version of their e-summary. 

Also as I'm sure you are aware last fall PubMed made a change to Corporate Author to make a interlead to Corporate Authors in with the 
regular authors and gateway made a change to incorporate that. 


Last and certainly not least, last fall the Toxnet site changed how Toxline Special was searched. Previously, Toxline Special was searched on their site and they made a parallel
search on PubMed for their toxicology citations and last fall they combined it into one search. But since gateway also 
searches PubMed we wanted to keep it separate so we had to modify our search strategies to keep it separate and not 
incorporate it as they had done and we did the same for DART. So those are just some of the things we've done over the 
last year that you didn't necessarily see but kept us in sync with all of our many systems that we search. 


In addition, here are some of the things that we do year to year that you hopefully are familiar with. Every year NLM goes through year end
processing which updates medical subject headings on MEDLINE as well as other databases and we needed to make changes in 
2006 as well as previous years. 


Also, I hope you're familiar with the UMLS or Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus. 
We use two components in the gateway, we use a mapping file for our search query box and we also use other data files for
our term finder function. And that has gone now from being updated every year to sometimes to three to four times a year and
we update the system every time those files are available. And also one of our files is kept locally on our system, HSR PROG
is one of our data collections health services research projects in progress. And we update that file several times a year. 
So hopefully with this little brief overview of what we've done last year we're gonna do a system up, system demonstration.
Okay, there we go. 


Cancer has been in the news lately, as it usually is, and I'm interested, and I'm gonna do a search on 
colon cancer specifically. And what I want to do with this first search is just show you some of the real diversity of  
collections that we offer via the gateway. So we've done the search and if we scroll down the page just a bit we'll see our
new collection Profiles in Science and we'll take a look at that. We have two items and I'm interested to see what the 
first item is biographical information. I can see that it's from the Francis Crick collection. So we're gonna take a look at
that. It opens in a separate window. And I'm curious to find out why we got Francis Crick's biographical information when we 
did a search on colon cancer so we're gonna search in the page and see why we got this page in our search. And we can see
that we got it because Francis Crick died of colon cancer on July 28, 2004 in La Jolla so that's why we got this particular
page. And as you can see the way this page is set up it's got some text this is his biographical page and then it's got a 
documents link and a visuals link. So let's go to the discovery of the double helix page. Again it's got some nice text it's 
got a documents link and a visuals link and I'm just gonna have Andrea go look at the visuals for a minute. And we can see 
that we have a picture of him lecturing at Cambridge University we have a picture of his lab. How many of you are familiar
with this site? Well I suggest it's a really rich authoritative site for those that are interested in history of 
medicine and so take a look at this Profiles in Science. Okay we're gonna use our sidebar here where we can navigate through
our different collections and we're gonna go to the bookshelf next brought to us from NCBI. And we can see that the items
are sorted from molecular cell biology. And let's take a look. There's an icon on number three and I think that means graphic
or illustration so I want to take a look at that. So here we can see there's a very nice illustration of the development 
and metastasis of human colorectal cancer. Another interesting item from our colon cancer search. And again we're gonna use
the sidebar and let's go to clinicalTrials.gov next. And I was just at a patient conference for our for cancer in general 
and they were talking about different chemotherapies so let's take a look at number ten combination chemotherapy. It's a 
recruiting clinical trial. I hope most of you are familiar with ClinicalTrials.gov. So you can see the very nice purpose
and it's got the a little description of the study eligibility, how to get in contact with people if you want to sign up. 


And another source we're gonna take a look at. How many of you, you use our nice wonderful navigation system. We're gonna use
it to go to Genetics Home Reference next. By the Way clinicalTrials and Genetics Home Reference are both web sites sponsored 
and brought to you by my division, Lister Hill Center. So I want to advertise my own. Okay we're gonna take a look at 
hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer; I'm familiar with that it's called Lynch Syndrome; they think my family has it. 
How many of you are familiar with this web site? It's a, take a look this, this is a really nice consumer friendly genetics
information site. And it's got hundreds of conditions now, it's got genes, it's got chromosomes and you can see on this
particular page it's got a lot of very authoratative data it connects out to other sites. And last but not least we're 
gonna all go to HSR PROG or health services research projects in progress. And I'm interested in screening type studies. 
Okay we can see we have some nice results here but all I see are the titles and authors or researchers so I'm 
interested to see who sponsored the research and who's doing the research so I'm gonna use our limits and settings function
because we can customize our brief display. So I'm gonna use our select fields, go to HSR PROG and I'm gonna customize
the fields that I see on our brief display. Gonna scroll down and we're gonna add performing organization and we're gonna
scroll down and supporting agency. So now when I bring up the results I'm gonna see those two extra pieces of information. 
I'm gonna apply that and redo the search. And take a look at HSR PROG results again. And I'm interested in color cancer
screening so I'd like to take a look at number three. And this looks very interesting. I think I'd like to email this to 
myself so I can look at it more closely later. So I'm gonna use my select an action pulldown menu. Send via email. I'd 
like to you have the complete record. The unformatted is fine. My email address is sonya@nlm.nih.gov. And my collegue is
gonna add a quick message to the email so that I'll remember why it's in my email when I get back from the conference. 
And for those of you that do searches for other people this is a nice little feature to be able to add that message so  
if you're sending it to somebody else they know why their getting it. It's being sent to me from a great librarian. Gonna 
click the send button and you can see that it verifies that the e-mail got sent to me. And then we're done. As you can see
from this search we saw quite a diverse number of collections available through the gateway. 


Now we're gonna do another 
search. As you can see we don't have to go back to our homepage our search box is available from every screen. So we're gonna
use our clear button. Clear the search. And now we're gonna use our term finder function. Unfortunately several weeks ago 
I had to go travel up to see my mother because she had a heart attack. And so one of the first things that I did after going 
to the hospital was do some research. And she had a defibrillator implanted so I wanted to use our term finder. I typed in 
defibrillator wanted to make sure I got the correct term. Used our term finder. And it turns out the term is defibrillators 
and we can add it to the search, we can add subheadings, we can look at the MeSH tree. All I did was I just made it the main  
point and I added it to the search. Then I kept hearing the doctor talk about rhythms and this and that and he used the 
term VF. So I typed that into find terms to see if that would come up with anything. And it turns out that's ventricular
fibrillation so I added that to my search made that the main point. And because I'm not a doctor I ran the search and I  
started out with MedlinePlus. I hope you're all familiar with MedlinePlus it's a really wonderful resource. I started with 
the medical encyclopedia. I took a look at the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator page that's what she had implanted. 
And it's just a very nice page of illustrations and information. And after I read that then I looked at, there's an image
of a difibrillator so I was curious to see the image so I looked at that. And I said yeah that, that looks very interesting. 
They sort of actually had the same thing on the bulletin board at the hospital. And my mother you can actually see it, my 
mother's lost too much weight you can actually see it sort of sticking out of her chest so I thought that was very 
interesting. Then I took a quick a gander at the ventricular fibrillation because that's why she needed to have it 
implanted so I wanted to learn more about that. And again saw illustrations and text and good information from the 
medical encyclopedia. And then last but not least I wanted to go to health topics. And for those of you that aren't 
aware, have you all been in health topics recently? They've done a really nice redesign of their site. I looked at the 
pacemakers and implantable defibrillators page. And they'll have a theater presentation on it if you have time to see it. 
But they've done a really nice redesign just recently. So there's a summary, there's a picture, there's a nice table of 
contents area here and then the very familiar overviews and news and links out to different authoritative sites. Okay. 
That's it right. [background from Andrea] 


And my collegue reminded me that I don't have time to show you here but because 
I had used the MeSH terms I also then looked at PubMed results I looked at NLM catalog results but I hope you're all familiar 
with those really authoritative resources. 


You have a question? I'm gonna have you talk to somebody after this presentation 
about that okay. I don't know that's not my area of expertise. Okay. Okay. 

Okay so this is the end of our system 
demonstration. 

What are we gonna hopefully provide to you next? Hopefully we're gonna connect to images from history of 
medicine. Last year we promised you this, but the images people are upgrading their systems behind the scene and we didn't
wanna connect to their old system just to have to go back to connect to their new system so hopefully over the next year 
we'll be able to connect to their new infrastructure. 


Also we've been working with a usability team at the library. As 
some of you may be aware we had a survey up earlier in the year, that's been completed. It was a very brief survey just
to let us know who our users were and how they found out about us and now we're working with them to try to come up with 
some scenarios to try to see if we can get some usability testing done so that we can continually improve the gateway for
our users. And with that thought are there questions, comments? Yes. [question from audience] Right. My NCBI is brought to 
you from a different part of the library than gateway and no we haven't talked about that, but. You'd like to see it, you'd
like to see more customization in your My NCBI account? Yeah. [talking in audience] Okay. Okay. We'll take that under 
advisement. Any other questions or comments. Well if you don't have any questions or comments now you can always calls us 
or you can always email us at gateway@nlm.nih.gov. And now many of you weren't here at the beginning, Janet...[end]