The exhibits cover each scientist's life and career in depth, providing rich context for the documents. For many of us, the real meat of the Profiles in Science site is in the online collections. Along the side of the page are links to technical information about viewing the collections, to the exhibit, to alphabetical and chronological listings, and to the search engine. The chronological listing also brings up an alphabetical listing of document types first, but within document types, the items are listed chronologically. The digital documents are also accessible through a sophisticated search function.
Readers have the option of searching just one collection or all five.
One can do a simple search, a fielded search, or an expert search. Clicking on a square next to the title brings up the metadata record, which includes technical data about the document, cataloging information, and, in some cases, annotations that provide further context. The History of Medicine Division of NLM has included finding guides to the Anfinsen, Avery, Axelrod, and Rodbell collections in its recently unveiled Web site of EAD finding guides . On a technical note, web browsers will need several plug-in applications in order to display the variety of items in Profiles in Science. Since all of the paper documents were digitized as pdf files, users need to equip their web browsers with Adobe Acrobat Reader.