Roundtable Participant: Doug Joubert, National Institutes of Health Library

MR. JOUBERT: Good afternoon. Like my colleagues, I think I bring a user end perspective. I actually connect people with information. I like to believe that I connect my users with information. I'm an informationist with the NIH staff library.

Strangely enough, in my current position I deal with non-bibliographic data mostly, which are sequence and genetic information, and we don't have structured abstracts for that. But I have been doing this for a while, and I hope to bring the perspective of the user. And sort of mechanism that will actually facilitate the connection of my users or the users, NIH researchers, to clinical research is important.

I think controlled vocabulary and index terms are equally important, have everybody talking about the same term within context for a particular article. So, perhaps I will bring a clinical perspective to it. We have been doing this since as mentioned before, the ad hoc working committee for the Annals of Medicine made their proposition in 1987, and it was about six months after that. So, I'm kind of going to frame my comments within that context.