As previously mentioned, I’m currently at the yearly Medical Library Association conference in Boston. I’m a conference blogger, blogging about early morning activities. I’m cross-posting my blog posts here so you can see what I’m up to.
This morning I decided a Sunrise Seminar was the way to go. Being a hospital librarian with a limited budget, I figured anything NLM was offering was bound to be good since it’s free. So Offline with NLM was my seminar of choice this morning.
There was an excellent crowd, and despite being a little late due to long elevator waits and coffee lines, I found the session to be very informative. PubMed is how I search MEDLINE so hearing about the new filters and layout was helpful. I came away with two valuable pieces of evidence: one, if you change the filters on the left side, they only stay that way for 8 hours; and two, it’s possible to create a custom filter in MyNCBI. I had been experiencing some frustration with the mystery of disappearing filters so I was happy to get an explanation, even though I’m not 100% pleased that I have to reset the English language filter every day. I used the presenter’s example of creating a custom filter for “reviews with abstracts” and added it to my list of filters to choose from. I think this will be very helpful in my day-to-day searching.
Also interesting in the session was hearing (and seeing a wonderful animation!) about NLM’s plan of expanding their storage capactiy without increase the size of the building. It sounds like it’s been an extremely labor intensive process and looks to continue that way for at least another year. When all is said and done, NLM’s collection will include over 3 million items.
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