VNS Retriever: Querying MEDLINE over the Internet

Academic medical centers around the country are developing networking infrastructures and connecting to the Internet. Baylor College of Medicine is developing VNS Retriever, an architecture for comprehensive handling of our institution's database requests. The first implemented instance of this architecture is the MEDLINE Retriever, a tool to query the considerable citation database of medical literature at the National Library of Medicine. Response times that we have experienced with the MEDLINE Retriever have pleased us and impressed our user community. The system will work for small sites, but is extensible for use on large campuses as well. The MEDLINE Retriever uses the Corporation for National Research Initiatives' ABIDE gateway. The principal user interface employs Motif and the X Window System.