In article <l3866pINNkoi at charon.usc.edu>, jkwan at charon.usc.edu (Julie Kwan) writes:
>> In article <9206090025.AA26947 at violet.berkeley.edu> bosborne at VIOLET.BERKELEY.EDU writes:
> >I've heard that Medline articles/references have been released by
> >the National Library of Medicine on CD-ROM. This release was
> >supposed to be accompanied by Macintosh software for searching the
> >disk. Has anyone heard if this is true and what the source would
> >be?
The company is SilverPlatter International. I do not have their address or phone
number, but I am sure you can find them.
The product is great. The catch in here seems to be that the company can not
(will not?) deliver the goods. I ordered (via a local representative) a seven
year package last February and still haven't received the disks! I can only
hope they offer a better service to customers at your side of the Atlantic.
(The local representative has some extra disks covering the last three years
which we can use, so the situation is not as grim as it might be.)
> Why are you interested in MEDLINE on CD-ROM when you can get access
> to MEDLINE through MELVYL (I noticed that you have a Berkeley
> account)?
We estimated the costs of using on-line Medline from Karolinska Institute, Sweden
(access though Internet which is free to users) versus one set CD-ROMs when
there are five university departments with about 30 active users and 200
potential users. (Most of the potential users were intimidated by the archaic
user interface.) The costs of one Mac with four CD-ROM players and the disks is
less than half what these departments and individual researchers together were
paying for the on-line alternative in a year. Next year we only have to
update the disks which is again cheaper. That's a good enough reason for me.
