New search platform for NLM

The National Library of Medicine's (NLM) new enterprise search platform will improve access to information for the public, as well as for the healthcare professionals, researchers, librarians and publishers who use the site.

The NLM, located on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., is the largest biomedical library in the world. The deployment will enhance search functionality on the NLM's linked Web pages and will enable search on its consumer-oriented health MedlinePlus Web sites, and MedlinePlus en espanol, which aggregate medical data from national organizations and government agencies.

With the new solution, Velocity from Vivisimo, visitors can search for health topics like "arthritis" or "back pain," and easily access data from the respective site's pages, Vivisimo reports. Users can also find answers quickly to specific questions like "What causes chicken pox?" or "What are the symptoms of Lupus?"

Joyce Backus, head of the NLM's reference and Web services section, says the library rated proposals based on prototypes, not paper. "Based on our scoring criteria for the prototypes," she says, "Vivisimo offered the best search results, based on the content and metadata of the NLM Web documents." Backus added that the solution provides search results that most closely match user expectations.