A medical journal's beta site: experimentation at NEJM

When continuous development becomes the norm on the social web, finding a way to put forward new development ideas to your audience and get their feedback at an early stage is the natural result. This article discusses how one major medical journal created a ‘beta’ site to support new online development and gather user feedback, speeding development initiatives and creating intrinsic value in the experimental environment. The goals of the site, organization of the teams, and practical and brand benefits are discussed.     

MELVYL MEDLINE: a library services perspective

The MELVYL MEDLINE project resulted in the addition of a full five-year subset of MEDLINE to the University of California's (UC) MELVYL online union catalog. As one of the nation's largest MEDLINE end-user searching systems, MELVYL MEDLINE provides online bibliographic access to the biomedical journal literature for all UC personnel at over seventy library sites or by remote access. This paper summarizes the project's accomplishments, reports MELVYL MEDLINE use and its impact on library services, and provides insights for other end-user search systems. The project serves as a model for adding databases to the MELVYL catalog and demonstrates the potential for use by other disciplines of a specialized database when readily accessible. Evaluation results report high user satisfaction and high usage. However, many advanced searching features of the interface are little used by searchers. Effects on library services include marked increases in reference transactions and interlibrary loans, with significant declines in mediated search services. Future MELVYL MEDLINE enhancements include matching search retrievals to journal locations, linkage to an online document delivery system, and consideration of building a superset of databases by combining MELVYL MEDLINE with citations from another database in the MELVYL catalog.     

Journal acquisition—cost effectiveness of models

This paper attempts to compare some of the available models for journal acquisition and indicates their utility in library acquisitions.     

Roberto Francisco Prádez. Spain's first deaf teacher of the deaf.

This article examines developments surrounding the establishment of the school for the deaf in Madrid in the 19th century and the role played by Roberto Prádez, Spain's first deaf teacher of the deaf, during the school's first three decades of existence. Although he has been neglected historically, Prádez is a founding father of deaf education, a heroic figure who contributed crucially to the establishment and operation of Spain's first state-sponsored school. This study underscores the need to reexamine the historical record to recover Spanish deaf history.