The Angle Orthodontist Turns 75! Here's a Free Gift for You

In 2005 The Angle Orthodontist will be 75 years old! Birthdays deserve gifts, and we have an early one for you. Remember when you received a gift that was completely unexpected and a real surprise? Something you may not have even realized you wanted? It gives you a really good feeling, doesn't it? Well, get ready because we have one for you today.

Lots of offices like to save their journals over the years and bind them into a handsome library. Such a library provides that office with a personal source of information and reference for unusual situations or continuing education. This ongoing task is laborious and not easy to sustain year after year.

Now The EH Angle Education and Research Foundation has the perfect gift for the orthodontist who has everything. Here is a complete and ongoing library of everything ever published in The Angle Orthodontist for your own personal use! That's right, everything! Now you may read, consult, and indeed even copy for your personal use any article ever published in The Angle Orthodontist free of any charges or annoying subscription solicitations. And the library is never closed—its open 24/7/365, including holidays! If you haven't opened your gift yet, it is available at www.angle.org, where we offer you a most unique gift.

If you haven't already discovered the advantages of an electronic library, let me tell you one advantage that I really like. Apart from the fact that it is always with me wherever my computer goes, the usage is immensely simplified. When I want to find something in a paper library, I need to have either an elephant-like memory or sufficient patience to find the article I know I remember, but I just can't remember where. With an electronic library I simply go to search and let the digital technology do the searching for me. Enter a subject, author, or whatever you want and the system points me to everything ever published about it in The Angle Orthodontist.

If you have acquired a reverence for literature and orthodontic publications, you will share with me the excitement of this event. This gift will go on giving to everyone today and will continue to give to generations yet to come.

Now, stretch your imagination a bit. While this gift is your personal library to use anytime you want, the wonder of digital information also puts a copy of it in the personal library of everyone on the globe! And if you think this is my imagination run amok, I want to remind you that we get more manuscripts submitted from overseas (in our electronic system, http://angle.allentrack.net) than we do from US orthodontists.

We regularly get calls and e-mails for past articles at the editorial office. Awhile ago a student at a new orthodontic program called me asking for a copy of a classic article published years ago in The Angle Orthodontist. He said his program was new and not in a medical center with a library where he could locate it. Now The EH Angle Education and Research Foundation has guaranteed for the indefinite future that this student and every other student need only have access to an Internet connection and any article is there and waiting to be recalled by author or subject or date, etc. When you see new patients who report in their history that they have an unusual syndrome or condition, you can simply run it through a search and you will find what we have published about it. Sure, you can do this now with PubMed today, but the difference is that PubMed can give you only an abstract and the reference. The EH Angle Foundation will give you the complete article at a click of your mouse!

This is truly one giant step for orthodontics and a major breakthrough in the accessing of information in this, the Information Age. The EH Angle Foundation deserves accolades for developing this professional service. If you agree that open access to scientific information is good for orthodontics and good for our patients, consider how you could contribute to this ongoing service. The Foundation needs your support to make these valuable professional services available to everyone in the world free of charge. Consider how you might help. A great many options are available. You can find out more by going to www.angle.org and clicking on Society Members and Angle Foundation. If you believe orthodontics has been a great career and served you well, here is the way you can very clearly return the favor and help make it better for patients and practitioners alike in the future.