Editors of this issue:

Gail Hendler, Ehrman Medical Library, New York University Medical School, 550 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016, S-10, E-mail: hendlerg@yahoo.com,

and

William Self, The Medical Library Center of New York, 5 East 102nd St., 7th Floor, New York, NY 10029 S-1, Phone: 212-427-1630, Fax: 212-860-3496, E-mail: wself@mlcny.org.

There must be countless discussion lists available nowadays, and most of us are way oversusbscribed. However, I would like to recommend that you sign on to the following National Library of Medicine (NLM) lists if you haven't already done so.

First, of course, is the Regional Medical Library's (RML) very own MARL, a read-only, low-traffic list for NLM and RML postings. Recently, notices about funding opportunities; the availability of MEDLINEplus "en español;" the promotion of DOCLINE 1.4, and a new PubMed Central project revolving around access to back issues were among the postings that appeared. Information on how to sign on to MARL can be found at http://nnlm.gov/mar/listserv.html.

It is highly recommended that at least one person in every DOCLINE institution subscribe to DOCLINE-L. This discussion group provides NLM with a means of broadcasting messages to DOCLINE users, and also provides a forum for DOCLINE users to communicate with each other and with NLM about issues related to DOCLINE, SERHOLD, or document delivery. Traffic flow on DOCLINE-L depends heavily on the number of messages subscribers post on a given topic. There are days when there are no messages, and there are others when it seems as though many subscribers flood the list with postings and the traffic becomes almost as heavy as MEDLIB-L. If that is a problem for you, use the "Digest" function. To join DOCLINE-L, go to http://www.nlm.nih.gov/docline/newdocline_l.html for subscription details.

MEDLINEplus offers a weekly announcement-only email list at MEDLINEplus-NEW of new resources, health topics, and announcements. NLM-Announces is another weekly read-only list of new and updated files on the NLM Web site. Information about these and other NLM email lists can be found at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/listserv/emaillists.html.

While there are currently about 400+ libraries nationwide listed as LinkOut participants (with the numbers growing daily), those of you who are current participants or thinking of participating might find it prudent to sign up with one or both of the LinkOut announcement-only lists, LinkOut-news, which covers general announcements about LinkOut at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/listinfo/linkout-news, or Library-linkout, which covers the development of LinkOut related to libraries at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/listinfo/library-linkout.

Finally, EFTS has begun EFTS-L as a forum for discussion about the system and as a means for the EFTS office to distribute information. As EFTS spreads further across the continent, signing up more participants, the list may be the fastest and easiest way of keeping abreast of the most current developments. Instructions for signing on can be found at http://efts.uchc.edu/efts/listserv.html.

A nice feature of almost all of these lists is that they can be set to digest format, lessening the impact of large number of messages in your inbox, and most have searchable archives.

These are just a few lists that impact directly on the NLM and the NN/LM. For a broader listing of library-oriented lists and electronic serials, the best starting point is, as always, e document currently compiled by Wei Wu and available at http://liblists.wrlc.org/liblists/.