Expert: Scottgem - 2/8/2005

Question
I want to create a patient education database with Access. One part of it would identify and track material that is ordered and stored physically (usually stuff that's free from the State and not handy to print).
The other part would be topical records which contain hypertext links to:
A. documents saved on the shared server(they have one). This would eventually included docs scanned or created in-house
and/or
B. A web page such as http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/linking.html

My question is really about the latter I guess. Is it possible to create an Access interface that would incorporate the table of contents, search functions of MedlinePlus? If not, how close can I get to making my access database look like or be attached to MedlinePlus? I guess I don't get what linking would mean other than having the webpage link accessible from the intranet...

Next question - is it possible to recreate the functionality of a web page like that with out building it 1 table, 1 querry at a time?

Any enlightenment is welcome.
Thank you!
Mark


Answer
Medline and other search engines use a full text search of the data. To do something similar in Access would require establishing a keyword table that would allow you to return specified documents. It would be a rather large task and Access is really not the best tool for it.

Better tools would be Lotus Notes or the AskSam database.

HTH
Scott<>