2007 LinkOut User Meeting Summary

The LinkOut User Meeting was held at MLA on May 22, 1:00 - 2:00 pm. There were approximately 70 participants.The theme of the meeting was "LinkOut Kernel: Keys to Linking Your Collections to PubMed." We welcome anyone who was unable to attend the meeting to read this summary and provide feedback.

LinkOut Update

Kathy Kwan, LinkOut Coordinator, presented an update on LinkOut. She explained the new location for a Library icon on AbstractPlus, and discussed plans for future development.

STATISTICS

• As of May 1, 2007, there are a total of 2227 LinkOut participants, including libraries, full-text providers, and non-bibliographic resource providers
• There are now 1728 libraries participating in LinkOut - a 16% growth since last year
• LinkOut Worldwide: LinkOut libraries can be found in 50+ countries
• LinkOut provides full text links to more than 8.2 million citations in over 5800 PubMed journals
• Nearly half (48%) of all PubMed citations link to full text. A remarkable gain as full text links presence amounted to 1/3 of all PubMed citations last year
• PubMed citations from 1999 to present - 65% of citations have links to full text and 18% have links to free full text citations
• Over the past year, LinkOut usage reached 26 million hits per month - that is 1.1 million hits per work day

NEW DEVELOPMENTS

• New Location in AbstractPlus for one library icon
• The library icon must be 100 pixels wide by 25 pixels high or smaller to be displayed above the Related Links list
• In the case a library has multiple icons, the priority to be displayed at top is: first, the full text icon; second, the print icon, and third, the Outside Tool icon
• Libraries with a LinkOut account need to use the following URL to see their library icon in the new position in AbstractPlus.
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?holding=LinkOutUserName
  Replace LinkOutUsername with your library's LinkOut Username

Libraries with an Outside Tool account need to use the following URL to see their library icon in the new position in AbstractPlus.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?otool=OtoolUserName
Replace OtoolUserName with your library's Outside Tool Username

• Customize the single citation display for your library


• Change the default display, AbstractPlus, to your choice of display. Select either Abstract, Citation, Medline or XML
• You can make this change in MyNCBI. In the user preference section, under PubMed single citation display, select a display type
• Or you can add dr= to your current special URL. For example:

  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?dr=DisplayFormat&holding=LinkOutUserName
  Replace Display Format with your choice of Display and LinkOutUserName with your library's LinkOut Username.

• Library-LinkOut announcement list available as an RSS feed


• To subscribe go to the LinkOut Homepage
• Go to the libraries tab and click on the RSS icon next to “Library-LinkOut Announcement List”
• Or you can go directly to the page:
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/feed/rss.cgi?ChanKey=LibraryLinkOut

FUTURE PLANS

• Development of the Submission Utility version 2 was delayed. We hope to have this new version available either late 2007 or early 2008

Ms. Kwan's PowerPoint presentation is available here.

Q&A

Participants had the following questions for the LinkOut Team:

• Question: Are there plans to combine the free full text filter and the library holdings filter?
• Answer: Currently, it is not possible to combine both data into one filter tab. We appreciate your feedback and will take it into consideration for future development efforts.

• Question: Could libraries have two icons in the AbstractPlus area? Library icons in two different locations confuse our users.

• Answer: Due to the constraint of the page layout, only one library icon is displayed above the Related Links.

LinkOut Kernel: Keys to linking your collections to PubMed

Lidia Hutcherson, LinkOut Liaison for Libraries, presented a brief overview of key LinkOut principles. View PowerPoint presentation.

Please send questions and comments about LinkOut for Libraries to lib-linkout@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.