Experiences with ExtraMED, an electronic full‐text biomedical journal collection on CDROM Available to Purchase

ExtraMED is an electronic full‐text library distributed on CDROM, incorporating over 200 biomedical and health‐related journals. Unlike Adonis, for example, ExtraMED does not specialise in high‐impact journals, but focuses on local or regional biomedical journals from developing countries, most of which are not indexed by the major indexing services. Especially for specialties such as tropical or traditional medicine, this constitutes a valuable source of additional information. Also, as a bibliographic database ExtraMED is a worthwhile supplement to MEDLINE, but obviously not an equivalent alternative. The annual subscription fee is £2000 and includes 12 monthly CDROMs. Each disc contains about 8000 pages, so ExtraMED provides an estimated 100 000 pages a year. The practical advantages of this type of electronic document delivery are discussed, as well as the actual coverage and relevance. Though ExtraMED is certainly a laudable initiative, there are ample indications that the producers may have underestimated the problems of its practical realisation. The project suffers considerable delay, and as only six CDROMs were published in over 20 months, the contents still present a somewhat chaotic picture with lots of gaps. Fortunately things are getting gradually better. The retrieval software is generally adequate and includes a few remarkable features such as powerful truncation, proximity searching and automatic synonym look‐up. Display and printing capabilities are good though somewhat cumbersome in the latter case.