Oxford handbook of clinical medicine. So far we have confined links from the catalogue to the electronic versions of traditional books and journals. The difficulty of updating and maintaining hypertext links has made us cautious about including other Internet resources in the catalogue. As well as being able to link from within individual catalogue records, the WebCat home page has an 'Information gateway' option, which we have called 'Links to other sites'. We have confined ourselves to listing only a small number of sites, all of them library catalogues or collections of bibliographic information, which seems to us a logical use of this facility.
More extensive links are available through our web pages.
We have not yet made use of the facility to configure Z39.50 links to remote databases through WebCat, but this is something we are investigating. This is often because of the sheer volume of people wanting to use the catalogue and the need to keep sessions short. Although this is not a problem at the RPMS, we have nevertheless chosen to keep the GUI client on two library computers, which are in a prominent position at the front of the library. This is because the GUI client enables us to password protect the Exit button and to limit the links to external services. We have only been using WebCat for two months and are still learning about its capabilities.