Health Information - National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Some librarians are questioning why this was made on top of MedlinePlus at the National Library of Medicine (which is part of The National Institutes of Health. I figure someone decided the more ways you can get the information out there, the more likely somebody will stumble over it. But the new site describes MedlinePlus as a health database (which it does contain, but it really is a lot more), and doesn't mention that it is specifically geared towards consumers.
Granted, NIH did roll out PubMed after realising that the Entrez system that another department had come up with for searching for genetic research had better end-user capabilities than the old Grateful Med for searching MEDLINE, and the rest was history.
PS According to subsequent discussion, the mission of each page is different. The NIH page exists to show the public the results of public funding for research, on a site clearly within the NIH, whereas MedlinePlus is for broader health information.
I think we as librarians are sometimes a little super-sensitive to anything where the library--a wonderful reference--might be looked over in favour of other depositories of information, especially given that we know the efforts put into our cataloguing, indexing, etc., and sometimes we assume that we do it best. In truth, we probably do it better than most, and certainly the web's chaos would be easier to navigate with more librarians to whip it into shape, but we don't have a corner on the market. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment