It’s been a busy week (last week, I mean). Article Linker works for the databases we’ve linked to it (so far, Ebsco, Ovid, Gale), and we’re jumping through all kinds of hoops working on linking it to PubMed. You have a choice–use a script to build a prepopulated ILL form on your server and access it as an Outside Tool, or use LinkOut–which would work (if we went that route), but would require us jumping through a rather different set of hoops. In either case, it’s time-consuming, and energy sapping. And we’re putting the next edition of the Grey Lit Report together next week, so we’ve a stack of pamphlets that nee to be cataloged as quickly as we can arrange–and when you’re busy catalogging, there’s a lot of energy that you don’t have to spend on other projects. Such as linking Article Linker to PubMed.
A cataloging note from this morning caught my attention: not only did NLM need four years (years!) to add "September 11 Terrorist Attacks" as a MeSH entry term, but "Adverse Effects" is not included among the qualifiers they list for use. You can choose "Classification", "Economics", "Ethnology", "Ethics", "History", "Legislation & Jurisprudence", "Prevention & Control", "Psychology", "Statistics & Numerical Data" or "Trends", but there’s no qualifier that deals specifically with the health problems that the attack generated. And I’ll tell you right now, we’ve cataloged several hundred items on that subject alone in the past four years. It makes no sense to me that "Adverse Effects" doesn’t fall under the same rubric as "Psychology" or any of the other choices. Was it an oversight? Did they consider it and deliberately discard it? If so, then why?
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