Implementing PubMed's LinkOut to Full-Text E-Journals: Challenges and Solutions

Providing library patrons with seamless linking from database citations to full-text electronic journals (e-journals) is a goal of librarians, database vendors, and patrons. A number of products have been developed with this goal in mind. One important resource that provides such links to full-text publications from PubMed is LinkOut, freely available from the National Library of Medicine. Libraries face three practical issues when trying to implement PubMed's LinkOut: managing e-journals in general, determining which vendors, aggregators, and/or e-journals can work with LinkOut, and guiding patrons to access all of the full text that the library offers. This paper discusses each of these challenges from one library's perspective.