TML News and Notes

VCU Libraries is participating in trials of three online products from Springer. These trials are an opportunity to test and evaluate resources under consideration for addition to our online collections. Members of the VCU community are invited to explore these resources and help inform future decisions about purchases. Trial products are only available from computers on the campus network. Trials end on October 30, 2009. Please send comments and feedback to Lynne Turman.

• Springer Protocols contains more than 18,000 molecular biology and biomedical protocols, many from the classic series Methods in Molecular Biology.


• Springer Images includes more than 1.5 million photos, tables, graphs, and histograms from Springer publications and images.MD. Images can be saved and downloaded as PDFs or Powerpoint.


• Springer Ebooks includes access to all English/International language book content from 2005-2009, as well as book series dating back to 1997. This constitutes close to 19,000 titles.

Posted by Lynne Turman at 1:58 PM | Permalink

PubMed is one of the most heavily used search tools in the health sciences fields, and if you're anything like me, you stumble across articles all the time that you want to send to your friends and colleagues. But PubMed doesn't make it that easy for you to create a link that's easy to share. Depending on how you got to an article's result page, your web browser's location bar can show you either a massive, unwieldy link, or one that won't even lead to your article.

A URL shortening service called pmid.us can make quick work of linking to articles you find, with just one tiny piece of information: the article's PMID, a unique number assigned to every citation. You'll find the PMID of an article somewhere in every view of a search result. It's at the bottom of the abstract in the default AbstractPlus view, shown here:

Just copy the PMID to your clipboard, and paste it after http://pmid.us/ to form a link that will lead immediately to the PubMed abstract for the article. No muss, no fuss, and it'll fit easily in an e-mail or tweet.

pmid.us has some a few other tricks up its sleeve in addition to linking to a single abstract. You can also link to:

* multiple abstracts, by putting a plus sign between the PMIDs.
ex: http://pmid.us/2676911+6189501+10221304

* a full-text article, by adding full: before the PMID.
ex: http://pmid.us/full:10221304

* a list of related articles, by adding rel: before the PMID.
ex: http://pmid.us/rel:10221304

NCBI's Help Manual lists a native method of linking in to results which has a few more features up its sleeve, but is also more complicated to work with. The native method is clearly more powerful for linking to searches, but for a simple abstract or related article list, pmid.us will do the job very nicely.

Have you tried out pmid.us to make better URLs? Know a better way to link in to abstracts? Drop it in the comments and let us know.

- Andrew Bain

Posted by Shannon D. Jones at 11:21 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Most of our current journal subscriptions are delivered electronically, making quick work of downloading a PDF for later reference. But there's still a massive amount of information stored away in the heavy bound issues filling the Journal Stacks, with no electronic copy available. Previously, to make a quick PDF of an article, you'd have to pay 10 cents a page to photocopy it, and then scan in all the pages with some hostile piece of software.

No more.

The HP Digital Sender, a new arrival at Tompkins-McCaw Library, allows anyone with a VCU eID to quickly make digital copies of any print material to send via e-mail. The machine, located by the copiers and printers on the first floor, can produce color and grayscale images up to 300dpi in resolution in JPEG, TIFF, and PDF formats. When you've scanned all you wanted -- a job that's pretty quick on this zippy box -- just hit "Send" and you'll find your files waiting in your e-mail. Easy!

This new tool will save you time, energy, money, and make all your articles from print far easier to find and share than a manila folder full of scattered photocopies. It's available now, and free to use.

Have you tried the new Digital Sender? What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by Shannon D. Jones at 11:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The July issue of NIH News in Health is available. Featured stories cover medical imaging and carpal tunnel syndrome. View the full-text of the July 2008 issue online.

Posted by Shannon D. Jones at 11:46 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)