NLMplus: Both Showcase and Useful Tool

Barbara Quint | Information Today | December 8, 2011

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has played an historic role in the development of online technology and services. In a sense, it might almost be called the parent of online. It has performed this service using a wide array of resources—research budgets for innovative projects, lowered cost and high availability for world-class, high-use databases, operational budgets for new databases, and even publicity efforts like the Show Off Your Apps Challenge awards given in early November to innovative apps built around its services. One of the winners was WebLib for its semantic, metasearch offering, NLMplus. Intended to showcase the application of WebLib’s software to NLM content, the product also offers real value to working searchers and end users. Tamas Doszkocs, president of WebLib and recent retiree from a 30-plus year career at NLM, confirmed that WebLib plans to maintain and enrich the product indefinitely.

Smart but small companies need promotion, which they usually cannot afford; smart and generous open access/source innovators need promotion even more. The five winners of the NLM challenge included got a chance to present and demonstrate their applications at an award ceremony held at NLM on Nov. 2. An archived videocast of the ceremony is available at http://videocast.nih.gov/. Besides WebLib’s NLMplus, other winners were GLAD4U (Gene List Automatically Derived for You); iAnatomy, a digital anatomy atlas for the iPhone and iPod touch; KNALU, a PubMed visualization tool; and Quertle, a metasearch tool that simultaneously searches multiple sources of life science literature....