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GCN Home > September 4, 2000 issue

Medical library posts its texts

National library’s Web site holds 300 books that are available at a click

By Patricia Daukantas
GCN Staff

As part of a long-term research project on information retrieval, the National Library of Medicine has amassed a Web collection of more than 300 books for medical practitioners and caregivers.

Despite the high technical level of most books available through the Health Services/Technology Assessment Text project, the document databases attract plenty of lay people seeking health information, said HSTAT project leader Maureen Prettyman, a computer specialist at the Bethesda, Md., library.


The HSTAT search engine finds e-books and documents in National Institutes of Health databases.


The HSTAT Web site, at text.nlm.nih.gov, isn’t easy to find from the library’s home page. It’s considered a research effort instead of a regular service.

The library began experimenting with full-text document retrieval in the late 1980s and adopted Standard Generalized Markup Language early on, Prettyman said. The research picked up steam when another Health and Human Services Department unit, the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, now the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, or AHRQ, received a mandate to publish clinical practice guidelines online as well as in print.

Tomes are us

Books available through HSTAT range from pamphlets to highly structured, full-text reference works of 400 to 600 printed pages.

“These are not small documents,” Prettyman said.

Besides AHRQ’s clinical practice guidelines and technology reviews, the library has collections of AIDS-related materials, substance abuse prevention and treatment protocols, health technology reports produced by the state of Minnesota, and consumer guides in English and Spanish.

At first, Prettyman’s team of four contractor programmers tried to convert the documents to SGML in-house, but that turned out to be too cumbersome.

About five years ago, the library put one document conversion out to bid, and the chosen contractor, Data Conversion Laboratory of Fresh Meadows, N.Y., has continued to work for NLM while the library programmers concentrate on developing the Web site.

Data Conversion president Mark Gross said his company scans and captures the original text by optical character recognition and codes the electronic text for reading in a browser.

Few differences

The company uses its own proprietary software to complete the conversion to SGML, Gross said.

Although the Extensible Markup Language has received lots of attention in recent months, “it doesn’t make sense to switch to XML” if an organization is already using SGML, Gross said. XML is a subset of the older SGML, and the differences are virtually indistinguishable to users.



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