MedlinePlus at 21: A Website Devoted to Consumer Health Information.

This report is about the consumer health website MedlinePlus.gov. The latter website was created by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and features content produced by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The report provides an overview, origin, content, and possible future evolution of the website. The report also spotlights the specific features of the MedlinePlus health topic on health literacy and discusses the PubMed Topic Specific Query on health literacy.

Serving our colleagues: reference and history of medicine services from the National Library of Medicine.

Most biomedical librarians are frequent users of the major online services provided by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. These services include MEDLINE/PubMed, MedlinePlus, ClinicalTrials.gov, PubMed Central, document delivery, and other key biomedical resources. This article highlights less well-known services from reference, to historical information, to training and other services which librarians may not be aware the NLM offers to them. NLM encourages librarians to consider that NLM's unique and unsurpassed collection can help when local resources may be too limited to serve the needs of their patrons. doi:10.1300/J115v26n01_07.

Implementation and evaluation of an virtual intelligent agent.

Reference librarians at the National Library of Medicine answer over 100,000 client questions annually. Although many answers are the NLM Web, clients may have difficulty finding them. Using intelligent virtual agent software, the NLM launched Cosmo, the Customer Service Owl (http://wwwns.nlm.nih.gov/). Cosmo uses natural language pattern matching to answer common questions. Early evaluation shows Cosmo can answer 25% of questions asked, but some users mistake the service for chat reference or a search engine.