It is a sad post to share that Go Local Nebraska will be coming to a close. The National Library of Medicine has lost its funding to continue to maintain the necessary software. They said it best in their recent email sent out on February 18.
We thank all of you who attended today’s teleconference, and want to share this with those of you not on the call. As Sheldon Kotzin, Associate Director for Library Operations, emphasized, we are grateful for all the work you and your colleagues have contributed to making Go Local a quality product. Whether you were an early Go Local pioneer or have just begun your work, we know you bring high quality standards to your Go Local contributions. As we reviewed in the teleconference, however, today there are many comparable resources to an internet health services directory such as Go Local and NLM has decided to end its support for the MedlinePlus Go Local program.
Internet search engines that people use daily, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, bring health services listings to users. These sites list provider-level directory information and can collect user reviews that Go Local can’t. Today’s health insurance sites give insured users local practice details, such as hours, languages, parking and quality ratings based on provider or facility performance measures that would require too much labor-intensive manual collection for Go Local to provide, but that our Go Local users have said they want in a health services site. Lastly, those who do visit Go Local choose not to return, share with a friend, or bookmark Go Local as a resource. Resources are tight throughout our profession and as the internet has moved forward, it no longer makes sense to use your scarce resources to duplicate the work of machine-based indexing used by the search engines.
As we said in the teleconference, we will be working with each of you as you make decisions as to the direction your project will take, whether to cease the project, move your data to a new platform, or continue other health services information partnerships you have found effective. NLM will continue to support the Go Local input system and web sites for the time necessary for this transition.
We have certainly enjoyed working with you, recognize and commend your commitment to your communities, and remain committed to providing you with the services and information you need during this transition.
Discussions will take place in the near future on what we can do with all the data that currently makes up Go Local Nebraska. NLM has shared that the data will be there for us to capture and use in any manner we choose.
Thank you goes out to those members who worked hard on this project and to thank the members of our Advisory Committee who helped with the initial launch of Go Local Nebraska program.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
2010 Annual Assessment
A special thank you goes out to Kari Stavneak for her help in pulling together the annual Go Local Nebraska 2010 annual assessment. The annual report along with the recent quarterly report are all posted on the Go Local Libguide linked from http://unmc.libguides.com/golocal Simply click on the "Reports" tab to view all the reports.
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