2008 LinkOut User Meeting Summary

The LinkOut User Meeting was held at the annual MLA meeting on May 19, 3:30 - 4:30 pm. There were approximately 55 participants.The theme of the meeting was "Submission Utility (SU2)" 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 and talked briefly about the main focus of the year: the Library Submission Utility, second version.

Statistics

• As of May 1, 2008, there are a total of 2485 LinkOut participants, including libraries, full-text providers, and non-bibliographic resource providers. An overall growth of 12% for the project
• There are now 1934 libraries participating in LinkOut - a 12% growth since last year
• The number of libraries participating in Outside Tool reached 500
• LinkOut provides full text links to more than 8.4 million citations in over 6100 PubMed journals
• Nearly half (47%) of all PubMed citations link to full text. The number of free full text links in PubMed grew from 11% to 13% in the last year
• PubMed citations from 1999 to present - 83% of citations have links to full text and 20% have links to free full text citations. A remarkable gain in free full text links since the LinkOut project started in 1999
• Over the past year, LinkOut usage reached 29 million hits per month - 1.2 million hits per work day

New Developments

• Change of internal architecture and workflows. The database and workflow design has been changed to improve functionality and flexibility, which will allow linking to more resources and Entrez databases
• Library Submission Utility (SU2). The new Utility offers an improved navigation within and between functions and introduces a faster way to find journal titles/providers, state different subscription types and select a preferred provider. Libraries that have implemented Outside Tool or the Document Delivery service are now able to use the Library Submission Utility to manage their accounts

Ms. Kwan's PowerPoint presentation is available here.

Library Submission Utility (SU2): Mini Tutorial

Lidia Hutcherson, LinkOut Liaison for Libraries, presented a mini tutorial on the new release of the Library Submission Utility. The mini tutorial highlighted enhancements in the functionality of the new release as well as the new features available to LinkOut, Outside Tool and Document Delivery Service users. View PowerPoint presentation.

Q&A

Participants had the following questions for the LinkOut Team:

• Question: How can we expand the number of links in PubMed?
• Answer: For more links to appear in PubMed, LinkOut needs more providers supplying links data. Please contact your subscription providers and request that they submit linking information to LinkOut.

• Question: Could libraries set up an Outside Tool account using the Submission Utility?

• Answer: Libraries will still need to meet all the requirements for Outside Tool and request that NCBI sets up an Outside Tool in PubMed. After the tool is created, libraries will be able to manage their Outside Tool information through the Library Submission Utility.

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