ICML 9

9º World Congress on Health Information and Libraries

Salvador, Bahia - Brazil, September, 20 to 23 - 2005

BVS4

4th Regional Coordination Meeting of the VHL

September, 19 to 20 - 2005

P15 - PIRAMIDE: an Italian tool for retrieving PubMed journals

PIRAMIDE is a virtual journal directory of PubMed-indexed journals. It is searchable since September 2004 on a website (www.iss.it/sitp/pubm) developed by the Italian National Institute of Health.
End-users have often problems in retrieving the full-text of relevant articles found in Internet available databases: PIRAMIDE helps to locate the original documents, exploiting the opportunities offered by Italian catalogues, publishers’ websites and other Internet-available directories.
PIRAMIDE searching interface is user-friendly and the system can be easily accessed from any platform or browser. Moreover no identification or password is required.
The core of PIRAMIDE website is the homonymous journal database which, using as access keys the journal title, its MEDLINE abbreviation or the ISSN, provides links to:
a) the fully automated catalogue of the ISS Library;
b) italian libraries holdings, through the Italian Union Catalogue of Serials (ACNP)
c) publishers’ websites, if available.
Subject approach to journal titles is also allowed through an in-house developed classification scheme.
A well-developed help page gives visitors all necessary instructions for research options.
In case the requested item should not be available in Italian libraries, users can order it through the DOCLINE (US National Library of Medicine)  service, of which the ISS is the National Reference Centre.
PIRAMIDE counts at present over ten thousand journal titles, and has been accessed by 4300 visitors (September 2004- June 2005).