A biomedical information source: the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol Information

The National Clearinghouse for Alcohol Information (NCALI) is an information resource developed by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. It provides numerous alcohol-related information services to professionals in a wide spectrum of biomedical and other disciplines, services that are designed to aid information users in the discrimination and selection of useful literature from the volumes of available information. One such service will provide the biomedical professional, working in an alcohol-related field, with announcements of recent information in categories that he selects from 110 possible fields of interest. Another information service is the quality evaluation of technical documents. The quality evaluation system, which is under continuing development and refinement, serves the literature user by providing a literature quality prescreening process designed to aid users in their literature review and monitoring activities. Additional information services provided by the clearinghouse include Grouped Interest Guides, Subject Area Bibliographies, a quarterly magazine and a periodic general interest information service, and a wide range of special publications. Reference services provide a suitable depth of response to information requests through services that range from assemblages of standard information materials, such as pamphlets and similar publications, to automated data base searches for more technically oriented information requests.