NLH News

[eli.h...@minervation.com]

Dear library users,

We have received news from the central NLH team of four items which we
think you will be interested in:

1. JAMA & Archives collection
The AMA titles are now available full-text via TDNet or the AMA
journals' sites themselves. They are also linked to Dialog, but
require users to re-authenticate when landing on the journal's site
(look for the Athens log-in link). This issue has been logged with
Athens.

2. REFER update
ReFeR is now defunct. The DH have stopped paying Update Software to
maintain this database and have been pointing enquirers to their
previous (Lotus Notes based) version of the database.

In the meantime, for those of you who may not have come across it, the
National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) has recommended the UK
Clinical Research Networks (UKCRN) Portfolio Database as a way of
seeing what DH funded research is currently taking place - it may help
with horizon scanning activities. To find out more about UKCRN go to:
http://www.ukcrn.org.uk/index.html. To search/browse the database, go
to: http://pfsearch.ukcrn.org.uk/. However, this site will not provide
pre-publication findings like ReFeR did.

3. Release of v3.3 of NLH website
A further update to the NLH website took place on 14 January 2008. The
News & RSS page and the RSS Directory page have been consolidated into
a single page. You can now search for stories within a feed, rather
than just for a feed title. You can easily add feeds to My Update in
My Library, and you can also use the "subscribe to search results"
feature, which effectively provides a keyword filter for all the feeds
in the RSS Directory and makes the results available as an RSS alert.

There are also some new features released on our BETA pages where
Search 2.0 is being developed. Release 3.3 added some output
functionality to search results, so that they can be exported in HTML,
XML and Word formats. Citation manager, PDF and email options are to
follow in the next release. Search2.0 has also been connected to the
link resolver, but only using a test collection - not the actual core
content journals.

Release 3.4 is scheduled for 28 February 2008.

4. Extension to the current Dialog contract
As you're all aware, NLH Search 2.0 will be fully in place and live by
the end of March 2008, and will be the only interface for searching
the clinical databases procured by Core Content.

But we have listened to the concerns of some librarians around
preparing for this and training end users, with such a tight
timescale. So NLH has negotiated an extension of two months to the
current contract with Dialog, to provide access to Medline, Embase,
British Nursing Index, PsycInfo, Amed, Kings Fund and DH-Data for two
months (April and May 2008). (This extension does not apply to
CINAHL, as that is on exclusive contract via EBSCO from April: but it
will be available via Search 2.0, as will all the other databases.)

Finally, please note that Kings Fund and DH-Data will be provided via
OVID's Health Management and Policy Database, from HMIC within Search
2.0 from April 2008.


Yours,

Eli Harriss (MHSL, LLSL and LDSL librarian)