The National Geographic Society has just made available a database index to their collection of publications, including the main magazine, various children editions, books and tv/video offerings.  The search interface offers basic and advanced search options, limiting to date ranges, and several sorting options.  The database covers the complete publication output of the society back to 1888.  This kind of extensive coverage, to my knowledge, is not available through any other aggregating service, let alone FREE!

This index contains records describing each NGS magazine article, book, map, video, and more. For full-text you can visit your local library or purchase available products and publications at 1-800-NGS-LINE.

National Geographic Society Publications Database

Enjoy!

National Library of Medicine | National Institutes of Health

PubMed® Redesign 2009

This week it was announced at the 2009 annual meeting of the Medical Library Association in Honolulu, Hawaii that PubMed will undergo a redesign of the interface. The goals of PubMed Redesign 2009 are to make PubMed easier to use, simplify the interface, refresh the look, better organize the text on the screen, and promote scientific discovery. We anticipate the redesign to be ready in late summer 2009. More specifics about the release date and tips for transitioning will be published here when that information is available.

Advanced Search and My NCBI will also undergo changes in the coming months although those changes will be released independently of the PubMed redesign.

It was also mentioned at the meeting that although there had been discussion about removal of the Single Citation Matcher, that will not happen; the link to Single Citation Matcher will remain on the PubMed homepage.

By Annette M. Nahin
MEDLARS Management Section

This recently redesigned site is an information hub helping advocates push for improved access to government held information on the environment, health, and safety.  It provides links to news items, databases and issues on pollution, health, policies, science, ets.  The databases provide free public access to environmental information managed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  Much of the information is provided as data.

Through RTK Net, you can access databases dealing with: Toxic pollution (TRI) Generation and transport of hazardous wastes (BRS) Handlers of hazardous wastes (RCRIS) Spills of hazardous materials (ERNS) Plans for dealing with emergencies (RMP).

Explore this site for current issues, policies and environmental data.

http://rtknet.ombwatch.org/

PBS has launched a new web portal of their video presentations.  This slick new site makes finding videos on topics a whole lot easier.  I did a search on “turtles” and found this video on invasive species, “Silent Invasion“, which I found to be very interesting.  Topic searches will lead you to the “chapter” or “segment” within the video where the topic is treated.  Wonderful fine tuning of searching within a video.  If you are hunting for videos to support course work, seek out this resource.  It is pretty fantastic.