Effective Dec. 16, Lister Hill Library no longer will be making the Medline database available through Ovid, says Scott Plutchak, director of the Lister Hill Library.

“For many years now, Medline, which is produced by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), has been freely available as part of the PubMed system,” Plutchak said. “Initially, we continued to pay for the Ovid version since it provided better search functionality. That is no longer the case. Use of Ovid’s version has declined significantly during the past few years, and with the enhancements that NLM has continued to provide we can no longer justify paying for Ovid Medline when we have many other needs that we have not yet been able to fund,” he explained.

The library will schedule orientation sessions upon request. If you need assistance with a specific issue, such as setting up an SDI or auto-alert, contact Lee Vucovich, assistant director for reference services, at lvucovi@uab.edu.

Plutchak said while switching from Ovid searching to PubMed searching may require a bit of a learning curve, there is no loss of functionality or data.

“PubMed is more current, provides access to additional resources beyond those indexed in Medline and has all of the extra search features that Ovid users will expect,” he said. “We believe that those who will have to switch will be pleased once they’ve made the transition, and we will be happy to do everything we can to make it as easy as possible for them.”