Happy 21st Birthday DOCLINE

Posted by Maryanne Blake on March 15th, 2006 Posted in: News from NLM, Resource Sharing & Document Delivery

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A message from the National Library of Medicine:

The National Library of Medicine and the DOCLINE Team proudly acknowledge that today marks 21 years of service to the health library community for DOCLINE.

DOCLINE was initially implemented in March 1985 as a command line, character based system for placing and routing interlibrary loan requests among the National Network of Libraries of Medicine. In fiscal year 1987, borrowers entered 788,105 interlibrary loan requests into DOCLINE and there were 1,435 participating libraries.

Today, DOCLINE serves more than 3,200 libraries in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. DOCLINE libraries currently report more than 1.4 million serial holdings. DOCLINE also provides select international medical libraries the ability to serve users in their regions via Loansome Doc.
International libraries can also request ILL material via DOCLINE, primarily from NLM.

In fiscal year 2005, over 2.4 million interlibrary loan requests were entered into DOCLINE. The fill rate for requests was 91.2% and the average number of libraries a request must route to before completion was just 1.2.

To celebrate DOCLINE’s birthday, libraries will find a festive Tugger on the Login page (http://docline.gov) today. We also created a new DOCLINE 21st Birthday desktop wallpaper and updated the classic blue & gold wallpaper version. Download and enjoy your favorite DOCLINE wallpaper at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/docline/docline_wallpaper.html

We thank our DOCLINE users for their dedicated service to health professionals and the public in need of biomedical literature and health information. And thanks for years of support of the DOCLINE system and your many ideas for improving DOCLINE.

Happy Birthday DOCLINE!

– The DOCLINE Team (Barbara, Brent, Cheri, Deena, Karen, Maria, Sulane,
and Tugger)