A research division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine

The NLM Gateway was designed to provide simultaneous access to results from a number of NLM’s resources. Users make a single query at the Gateway Web interface. The intended audience consists of interested persons who are not quite sure what they will find among NLM’s considerable array of databases and Web interfaces, or where to look. One of the goals is to bring before the users potentially useful results from databases such as DIRLINE that are far less well known than MEDLINE. The original NLM Gateway was released to the public in October 2000. We present in this manuscript a comprehensively redesigned NLM Gateway that went live in parallel with the old system April 4, 2005. The original Gateway will be retired May 2, 2005. Navigation in the new NLM Gateway is quick and clean. One-click access to results from each of 15 NLM information resources is available. Formerly complex functions have been made simpler and more accessible. The look and feel are more straightforward and understandable than in the predecessor system. Where possible, important functions of the target databases (for instance, the Related Articles function in MEDLINE/PubMed) are made available directly from the Gateway interface