Anyone for tennis elbow?

Ah - Wimbledon. There's nothing like it. The crowds, the strawberries, the top players, the strapped knees, the ice packs, the players forced to withdraw due to injury. We're constantly reminded, it seems, of the dangers of exercise. So now seems a good time to have a look at resources for sports medicine and physiotherapy.

For literature searches of any kind around physiotherapy issues Cinahl is always useful. This is one of the databases you can access through the National Library for Health with your Athens password.

NLH has no dedicated library for sports medicine, but there is a section in the orthopaedics and trauma library dedicated to sports injuries.

Visit the Intute website and type "sports medicine" into the search box and you'll find links to various journals, clinics and institutes of sports medicine.

There is the Association of Chartered Physiotherapists in Sports Medicine - complete with a call for physios to work at the 2012 Olympics, and the British Association of Sport and Exercise Medicine.

Sports injury is a real problem, with guidelines being issued to American schools to ensure they enable their athletes to remain healthy and fit. NICE is currently working on guidance for promoting physical activity in children, although the scoping paper doesn't suggest that injury prevention will be a big part of the guidance.

The BBC has information for people wanting to do some sport without injuring themselves, including advice on warming up. NHS Direct has a sports injuries section.

Beware when Googling for sports injury information - a lot of results are private clinics advertising their services. While they may produce good quality information don't forget that they might have reasons to be biased toward suggesting treatment is necessary.

It's no surprise that a third of us prefer not to do any sport. Most of those blame poor health - perhaps sports injuries preventing them being active? Even sitting at home playing imaginary sport on computers can be bad for you. Best sit still on the sofa, crack open a punnet of strawberries and watch the rain fall on centre court.

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A brief history of books in libraries

Prehistory. Ugh?

Ancient and Classical world. Scrolls? Yes. Are you a member?

Mediaeval. Book? Yes - over there, chained to the wall. Wash you hands before you look at it.

1439. Books? Yes - piles, thanks to that Gutenberg chap. What's that? You can't read? Oh well, never mind. Mass literacy will be upon us one day.

1700 - 1900s. Books? Certainly sir. Why not take one home with you to read it there? This is a modern circulating library, after all.

21st Century. Books? Books? Bless you, no, madam, this is a LIBRARY! Computers that way, CDs and DVDs that way, children's entertainment upstairs, cafe in the basement. Have you had a look at the art exhibition? Knit your own community classes start in 5 minutes in the foyer.

2008. Click, tap, tap, tap, click. Aha!

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What are you looking for?

A reminder for those of you who use Dialog for searching that it is shortly to be withdrawn. We suggest you use the new NLH Search 2.0 instead.

Do I hear you say "PubMed"? Feel free, but don't forget that PubMed is just Medline - you'll be missing out on Cinahl, EMBASE and Psychinfo. What's that at the back? Oh - you use Google. Again - fine. I use it myself and we're here to offer useful suggestions, not to run a library dictatorship.... Try Google advanced searching, Google Scholar and the advanced scholar.

Any other options? Well, you could always try asking a librarian to search for you. It's a free service.

Oh - and a final word to the Google addicts. You are sitting in an aeroplane and you hear the following: "Ladies and Gentlemen, good afternoon. This is your captain speaking. We have an unexplained fault in our engines. However, the Chief Engineer is looking it up on Google and hopes to get it all fixed soon." How do you feel about that? Maybe a phone call to your lawyer. "What are your rights in case of mid Atlantic air failure? One moment - I'll just need to Google that before I can give you can answer..."

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Boxing clever

As previously promised I am going to give you a brief guide to searching the various bits of of the National Library for Health. If you've visited the site you'll know that there are an awful lot of search boxes scattered through out it. Which one should you use?

For those of you who are Essex Rivers staff, when at work you can search the National Library for Health box on the intranet home page under "quick search". This currently runs a search for you across the various specialist libraries.

If you visit the NLH site there is a search box at the top of the home page. If you put something in that box and hit "search" it will search the specialist libraries, guidance and evidence based reviews for items that have your search words in the title. You can also tick the boxes here to search images, books and journals and patient information. Note that (at least on my screen) the tick boxes are a little adrift from the text, so the box for "images" is on the preceding line.

You can also opt to search for your term in the title and abstract of items. This should give you a lot more hits.

Although you can search journals from here its a rough and ready search. Despite the big NLH 2.0 logo next to it, it is not NLH 2.0 and is not the best place to search journals.

For a proper search in the journals scroll down under the Resources section to "Books, Journals and Healthcare Databases". Click on that heading to get through to NLH 2.0. This is where you search for papers on specific topics. Type your search in the box and click on search. You can also (and I do recommend you try this) click on the advanced search link below the search box. This will give you more options. There's "mapping to the thesaurus", which basically means finding the words that articles have been indexed with. This is a nice fixed list and means you don't need to worry so much about UK and US spelling or about the horrible number of synonyms there are in health.

The advanced search also lets you click boxes to combine searches using AND (both the terms needed - say, diabetes and insulin) or OR (meaning either term would be useful - perhaps chronic or long term). You can select which dates you want to search and a few other bits.

For best results here you need to log in with you Athens password. You do this in the boxes on the top left where it says LOGIN.

Meanwhile, back on the home page, scroll down to that same heading of "Books, Journals and Healthcare Databases". This time, don't click the heading, click the "my journals" (NB - split over two lines - click on either bit). Again, you need to log in with Athens for this to work. Now, this is where you go when you already have the details of papers you want, but wonder where you can get them. You search for the journal you want and it will tell you if we hold a paper copy here or if you can get it online, with links through to the online text.

Search box at the bottom of the NLH homepage searches dictionaries for definitions.

If you click on evidence based reviews, specialist libraries or guidance under resources on the home page, each of those links will take you to a search box to search just that bit of the NLH.

In brief - go to the specific area you want (a specialist library, the guidance) to search just that area. Use the box at the top of the home page to search across various bits of the whole website. Use the link under "Books, Journals and Healthcare Databases" to do a literature search.

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Change is the only constant

Yesterday when I got home the sun was out, the sky was blue. I stood in the garden, admiring some saxifrages I had just planted. My husband was cooking dinner - which included the always cheerful sound of a cork being pulled - birds sang, and next door's cat came to say hello. I stood there and thought - why can't life always be like this?

The thing is that life goes on a bit - day in and day out for (hopefully) three score years and ten, and a little variety keeps us going. Which brings me neatly on to the various changes cropping up at the moment.

First up - Search 2.0. I've mentioned it before, it has now been released. If you recall it's the one stop shop for searching on the National Library for Health. It's new, it's an IT thing and it's the NHS, so can you guess what I'm going to say next? That's right - it has a few teething problems (most pressingly the nice red search 2.0 logo on the home page leads to a blank page...) But try it (you'll need to sign in with Athens first). Oh, and did I say Search 2.0? Because that's another change - it's now called NLH 2.0. The old Dialog Datastar search is still working for a couple of months, or you can go through PubMed, remembering to tell it you're with the NHS so you get your full text links.

Another NLH change is Hitting the Headlines. This was the handy service that looked at health stories in the news, identified the research behind them, and considered how well the news story had represented the facts. This service no longer exists, although the "archive" (library speak for "old stuff") is still available, hidden away under "News and RSS".

Hitting the Headlines has been replaced by Behind the Headlines, from NHS Choices. I've not had a good look at this service yet, but I note that it seems to cover more stories than Hitting the Headlines. I'm pleased to see it's available as RSS . I'll be adding the feed to my newsreader and posting useful items on the current awareness page.

I've also noticed that while I was away the BBC tweaked the look of their news pages, which is in addition to their rather nice home page, which can be customised.

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Save our searches

If you have been using library databases through Dialog Datastar you will have noticed the ominous red writing on the main page advising you that Dialog Datastar is being replaced with Search 2.0.

Hopefully this will be good news. It means that the way the databases look wont change every time a tender with a particular provider changes. The new interface will hopefully be nice and easy to use. It will also mean that the National Library for Health really is a one stop shop for all your online information needs so you need only bookmark, or remember, the one website address.

So that was the good news. The bad news is that if you have saved searches in Dialog they cannot be automatically transferred to Search 2.0. This may be a good opportunity to have a chuck out, rid your life of unwanted saved searches, and perhaps start afresh with some better quality searches. Heck - you could even ask a librarian for help on devising top notch searches to save.

The folks at NLH have drawn up some instructions. Sadly, I can't work out a way of attaching an ordinary Word file to this blog. Perhaps the instructions will be posted on NLH, in the meantime, please contact us (or your nearest NHS library) if you would like a copy.

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Pick and mix

The world of health librarians is buzzing this afternoon with the question of EMBASE and whether it's worth forking out hard cash for it. Those of us in the NHS are lucky enough to have access to it through our NHS Athens password. But is it worth it? And what is it anyway?

Medline is synonymous some circles with literature searching. Rather like Google it has become everyone's first - and last - port of call for everything. And if you don't find what you are looking for there...well, surely it's not out there to find?

Medline is big, but it is not the be all and end all. There is important, useful information out there that isn't indexed in Medline, and a whole collection of other databases that do index some of that material.

Cinahl is for nursing and allied health - but please don't let that turn you off if you are a doctor. It has good coverage of physiotherapy journals which can be useful for rheumatologists. Cinahl is also good for covering those journals where articles ask how the patient feels, rather than focussing on what the clinician does to the patient. And if you are wondering if a nurse-led unit would be a god send or a disaster than Cinahl will find papers to help.

Psycinfo is the mental health database. It goes back in to the mists of time (well - the 1880s, anyway) and indexes books as well as journals. It covers psychology and neurology as well as psychiatry.

And so to EMBASE. It's big - almost as big as Medline. It has a European bias, where Medline is North American. It indexes more non-English language publications. Its particular strengths are pharmacology, genetics and biomedical sciences.

All of the databases have some overlap. The overlap between Medline and Embase, depending what you are looking for, varies between 10% and 87%. Sometimes it's reassuring to get the same results from two or more databases - you can feel more certain that you aren't missing anything. Sometimes turning to another database transforms a search disaster into information heaven.

Medline is the only one of these databases to be available for free, in the guise of Pubmed. The others have to be bought - which is where your Athens password comes in. The joy of bringing them all together (currently under Dialog Datastar, soon to be under NLH Search 2.0) is that they look the same, are searched in the same way and you can flip between one database and another or search across more than one database at once.

So Medline is quick, its easy, it's familiar - but why stick to the Big Purple One when there is a whole quality selection to chose from?

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What's the magic word?

It's a pain, isn't it? You sit down of an evening, or a Sunday afternoon, thinking you'll do a literature search to find some papers to keep you up to date, support patient care, help with writing that essay or guideline. You're all settled, cup of tea by your side, maybe a chocolate biscuit or two. You go to the website and you think OH NO!!! I've forgotten my Athens password! Who you gonna call? Well, the library staff aren't there...so that means you just have to do something else, wait until the library opens, call, get a new password...and by then you've probably gone off the whole idea.

Fret not - there is another way. You can now go to My Athens, click on the "login help" link below where you would enter your username and password, click on "reset your Athens Password" under "forgotten passwords" then enter your username and email address.

Your username is the one that starts nhs, includes your initial and surname, and ends with some numbers. If you've forgotten that then you will need to contact us for a reminder.

The email is the one you put on the form when you registered. This is the address to which an email will be sent with instructions for changing your password. It will not work, therefore, if you registered with an email address that you have since abandoned. Nor will it work if you were sloppy in your typing of the email address, or if you typed in the wrong address. I've seen various versions of Essex Rivers email addresses - essexrivers.co.uk, essexhospital.nhs.uk, essex.nhs.uk, essa.essexrivers...and that's without the typing errors, the last name before the first name, first name appearing as an initial only... If you work for Essex Rivers your email looks like this - firstname.lastname@essexrivers.nhs.uk

If your email address is correct you will be emailed a link and be able to submit a new password. If you think your email address may be wrong then go to My Athens , click on My Account and fill in the boxes to change your email address. Go on - do it now, before you forget your password!

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Tea for two

Two is the number of the moment. It started with web 2.0. Roughly this is the idea that moved us from programmes and functions that were bought (expensively) and installed on a particular physical PC to things that can be obtained freely, shared and accessed at whichever PC you are sitting at. The buzzwords are "social" and "personal" - social because you can share your bookmarks, pictures or thoughts, personal because you can personalise everything to suit you.

After web 2.0 came library 2.0. Despite the bun, tweeds and pearls image that librarians angst about so much there is a sizeable part of the library community that is really rather techie. Libraries were early on the bandwagon of websites, intranets, blogs and wikis. The point f library 2.0 is meeting those we serve (that's you!) in the spaces where you like to hang out - it's about being customer-centred.

Now we're awaiting the coming of search 2.0. This will be the new way to search from the National Library for Health. It will mean all your Athens resources in one handy place.

So the first question is WHY? You've probably spent ages growing used to Dialog Datastar (the current "front end" for Medline, Cinahl et al) so why are we asking you to use something new?

The idea is that the suppliers of databases and search technology change from time to time as contracts expire. Future contracts will be with firms who will work with search 2.0. So search 2.0 will change, evolve, improve, make use of new technology as it comes along, but will remain fairly stable in the way it looks because it wont have to present the corporate face of Ovid or Dialog or whichever other supplier is used. Books and journals will be included in the search, and local resources as well as national ones.

The other big benefit should be that because it is partly "in house" plenty of notice should be taken of what librarians want from the search - and that means us passing on what you, the user, wants. So if you have a bright idea or a gripe or a niggle, let us know. After all, search 2.0 is all about you.

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The proof of the pudding

The Lancet today reports that a "collaborative reanalysis" of epidemiological studies "shows beyond doubt that ovarian cancer can be prevented by the long term use of different generations of oral contraceptives." (Full text free with your Athens password!) In simple terms this means that if you take an oral contraceptive pill you are less likely to get ovarian cancer.

The point that interests me here is the way in which this conclusion was reached - not by doing any trials or studies, but by reading existing studies. The authors looked at epidemiological studies that included over 100 women. They defined what was meant by "ovarian cancer" and "oral contraceptive use". They looked at the figures they had and used them to come to wider conclusions than could be reached from any one study alone. Their findings are expressed using confidence intervals and there is an awful lot of statistics in the paper.

In health research there are levels of evidence. These range from (at the bottom) "expert opinion" to "systematic reviews". A systematic review is the gold standard of evidence. Like the Lancet paper it gathers together a number of studies - Randomised Controlled Trials - selects those that fall within defined limits, and using a "meta analysis" of the data attempts to draw wider conclusions than can be drawn from one trial alone.

If this is confusing, don't despair. There is plenty of help available, starting with a veritable mountain of books. One of the best for a straightforward accessible read, covering all the types of evidence and how to look for them and assess them, is Trisha Greenhalgh's How to Read a Paper, now in its third edition.

There are very specific books: Chalmer's Systematic Reviews, Systematic Reviews in Healthcare by Glasziou, and Systematic Reviews to Support Evidence-Based Medicine from the Royal Society of Medicine Press.

There are general books on understanding research: Studying a Study and Testing a Test, Reading Research, Bandolier's Little Book of Making Sense of the Medical Evidence.

There are endless titles on reading and understanding statistics, and evidence-based practice. Your local NHS library is, of course, the best place to start looking.

Online, CASP has tools to help you appraise a systematic review and randomised controlled trials. The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine has tools to help you understand the maths and the jargon.

If you want to find systematic reviews the place to look is the Cochrane Library.

As to whether the lowered risk of ovarian cancer outweighs the increased risk of breast, cervical or thyroid cancer...in this post, at least, I'm not even going there.

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Brought to book

I realised recently that I've not really blogged about books. Good as web stuff is, the age of books is not yet over.

There are electronic and online books (your Athens password gives you access to a collection of mental health and WHO titles), but a lots of people still prefer to read the old fashioned sort. Over the last ten years this library has loaned out more and more books year on year. Perhaps that shows that more people are interested in keeping up to date or life long learning. Perhaps its because medical publishing has improved, producing attractive paperbacks with good illustrations, and responding to hot topics faster than before.

We used to have an online catalogue on the intranet, but it broke, and I couldn't fix it. We currently share an internet catalogue with our partner libraries across the region. It's not updated that often, and wont tell you if something is out on loan, but is gives you a taste of the kind of books you'll find in your local NHS library.

If you like books you'll love Amazon. If you sign in each time you use it then it will eventually start to form an opinion of what you like and recommend more of the same. Sometimes this works better than others, but it's a useful way of finding out about books new and old that you might not otherwise stumble upon. The reviews are useful as they are written by readers who have bought the books, rather than the publishers who are trying to sell them. One of my favourite aspects of the service is "search inside" which shows you the first and last few pages of some books. It can be useful way of deciding whether or not you want to buy.

Don't let Amazon make you feel obliged to spend all your pennies. Do what I do - get Amazon to recommend something and then borrow it from your library!

If you do succumb to temptation and buy books, how do you keep a track of them all? Some of us stick them on shelves, or in piles by the bed and the loo, and hope for the best. Does anyone keep a card catalogue system for their personal collection? The technically minded head for LibraryThing where you can list everything you own. Like Amazon it offers reviews, recommendations for further reading and chat about each book. I have to say this works better with books that lots of people have listed and that's more likely to be the latest Nigella Lawson than the latest anatomy book.

The other way to find useful books is to visit the websites of major publishers. Blackwell produces the ABC and Lecture Notes series, Radcliffe is very good on primary care and education, Oxford University Press does the Oxford Handbooks and Core Texts, Whurr is good for nursing, psychology and therapies, Pastest for Royal College Exam books, RCPsych (formerly Gaskell) for mental health, Jessica Kingsley for learning disabilities, and the giant Elsevier group for nursing.

Of course, there are those who feel they can get by in life without ever reading a book. Sir William Osler once remarked "It is astonishing with how little reading a doctor can practice medicine, but it is not astonishing how badly he may do it." Some doctors are prescribing books for their patients, perhaps thinking of Charles de Secondat who wrote that "I never knew any trouble that an hour's reading didn't not assuage." Or, in the less elevated words of Groucho Marx - "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."

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Open the darned box!

I suppose some of you were too shy, or too busy, or wary of clicking strange links on the internet and so never found out what was in the box.

But the box is still there - so go on - take a look! See! It's full to the brim with online journals, brought to you by library elves. The BMJ is back, free, full text, online, for you. We're giving you the Lancet, Journal of Advanced Nursing, AMA Archives and the New England Journal of Medicine and much, much more.

All you need to do to gain access to this box of delights is sign up (if you haven't already done so) for an NHS Athens password.

Go on - treat yourself!

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The library elves

Using a library is a bit like being a kid at home. There are always biscuits in the biscuit tin, clean clothes in your wardrobe and dinner on the table. It all happens as if by magic and you don't have to lift a finger or pay a penny for it. Marvellous!

It's not until you grow up that you realise that there isn't a dinner elf or a clean clothes fairy - it's all done by you poor hardworking mum. Later in life the same jobs are performed, perhaps, by your spouse, partner or flat mate, but the point remains the same. Dinner on the table doesn't just happen. Someone has to decide what to cook. trek down to the supermarket, prepare food, cook it, dish it up, wash up...

Having a library is somewhat similar. Admittedly we don't do your ironing for you or keep your larder stocked, but we do provide a lot of stuff that appears to you to miraculously materialise all on its own, for free, especially the bits you get online. However, most of that "free" stuff is bought and paid for either nationally, regionally or locally. There is a fair amount of admin work in the background to make sure you can access the bits you are entitled to, and not the rest. We check that Athens passwords are still valid, and issue new ones when you've lost yours. We compile and update spreadsheets of journals. We let you know what's new and what you can no longer access.

As with any domestic situation we can't please all the people all the time. In any family of four there will be at least four different favourite biscuits and the chances of finding them all in the biscuit tin at once are limited, because the biscuit budget doesn't stretch that far. The NHS family is HUGE and its tastes very varied, so we have to have metaphorical biscuits (journals) for doctors and nurses and physios and OTs and radiographers and managers and GPs and....

So next time you are looking in the biscuit tin please be aware that we couldn't afford all of your favourites because we had to think of the rest of the family. However, if you have a hankering for a particular journal article we will get it for you. Just fill in the form and ask. Easy peasy. It will materialise, apparently from nowhere, apparently for free. Marvellous! And while you're at it - spare a thought for the library elves.

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Best of both worlds

I understand that some of you prefer PubMed to Dialog via Athens. Fair enough. However, why not have the best of both worlds? If you sign yourself up for a “MyNCBI” account you can ensure that when you search anything you have full text access to via the NHS is flagged up.

Here’s how. Go to PubMed and set up a MyNCBI account – just register a username and password, a memorable fact and copy some letters into a box. It takes a couple of minutes.

Once registered you need to set up a filter. So, log into your MyNCBI account, select "Filters (including LinkOut)" from the left hand menu. Click on the “PubMed” link. Select the “Browse” tab. Click on “libraries”. Now scroll down, down, down until you find “NHS Core Content”. (It’s in the middle of the N section, not at the start as you might expect for an abbreviation….) Found it? Click on it!

Now select "Add a result tab for all items that match this category". Now when you search you’ll get a separate tab to show the results where your Athens password will get you free full text access.

The other ways of getting this same service is to go to PubMed via the link on the National Library for Health.

Of course, this system wont show you which journals we hold in the library. Don't forget that any paper can be requested from us - use the "request a paper" link on the quick links page of the library website.

Search tips

A while ago I wrote about Scirus and Google Scholar - two ways to search the web in a relatively simple way while reducing the amount of junk that your search turns up.

Today I'd like to mention a couple more ways to do this - INTUTE and the National Library for Health.

INTUTE (formerly known as OMNI - and no - I don't know why they changed from one meaningless name to another nor what it cost them) is a gateway created by a network of universities. Sources are checked out for quality and relevance before being added. So you have just good quality information, and fewer results than from general googling (just 119358 record in the INTUTE database as I type). Your search might turn up websites, journals, patients information or statistics from the UK and beyond. I find that the search function often fails to find anything, so normally use the browse function instead. INTUTE has a whole area specific to health and life sciences. Also helpful is the Virtual Training Suite where you'll find guidance on searching the web that is aimed specifically at different health professions.

The National Library for Health is an NHS product. Technically the library is more than just the website - it includes all the physical NHS libraries in the country, their resources, and the networks between them. The website can be used with or without your ATHENS password. If you log in with your password you'll be told more about local resources.

There are various ways to use the site. You can use the search box on the home page to search across the whole site. You can use the site to reach Medline and the other databases for literature searching. You can also visit the "specialist libraries". These bring together patient information, news, guidance, National Service Frameworks and useful links by speciality. The specialist libraries cover everything from cancer to trauma and from child health to later life.

Also on the National Library for Health a facility to search medical dictionaries (search box at the bottom of the home page) or to set yourself up with RSS news feeds.

New! Improved! (again)

In the olden days when the Internet was a fresh faced newcomer you would often find websites with little messages along the lines of "site under construction". This meant one of two things. The first meaning was "I know this is a pretty poor attempt at a website but frankly this whole web thing wasn't as easy as I thought and I've lost interest/gone on holiday/retired to a small cave in the Alps to avoid technology".

The second, and more exciting meaning of "under construction" was "I know this is just an OK website but in my heart I know it could be GREAT and I just need to spend more time and do more tweaking".

The thing with technology is that it is constantly changing. There's a little fear about jumping in first (for those of you who are old enough I need only mention the Betamax/VHS debate). For those who are younger hands up if you bought a splendid plasma screen TV just before digital arrived or High Definition. Did you kick yourself? Did you rush out to upgrade? Or are you still looking at a black and white portable waiting for technology to "settle down" so that you can invest in something that will remain cutting edge for the next 30 years?

The challenge of technology is that it is always changing. Good websites tend to change a lot too, because a good web developer will want to try out all the new gizmos and gadgets available.

The hot new gizmo on the web at the moment is personalisation. Don't like the boring Google home page? Personalise it! Pick a background, add a clock, a calender, a thought for the day...make it yours.

Other websites are following suit. Which is why, from the middle of next month, your My Athens home page will change - again. It will offer you the option to move round the information on your home page, just by dragging boxes around and closing those you don't want. You'll be able to select your favourite resources and keep them in a separate handy box. If you can't wait to see the new site then take a sneak preview - opt for "beta My Athens" when you log on.

New Look

Dialog Datastar has been tweaking the service it offers. From this Saturday (14th April) you'll see a number of changes when you log into Medline with your Athens password.

The main change will be the wording on the tick boxes below the search box. These will be simplified so that "documents relating to humans", for example, will now just say "humans".

The second big change will be the addition of so-called "Haynes Filters" or Clinical Queries. These are pre-set searches that allow you to search quickly for therapy, diagnosis, aetiology or prognosis.

Don't forget the help function (top of the search page on the dark background) and the search tips (over the search box). The other source of help, advice and guidance is, as ever, your library.

Bye Bye, BMJ, goodbye

Bad news - the subscription that NHS libraries in Essex had to the BMJ journals online has now expired. That means that your Athens password no longer gives you access to the BMJ and related titles.

The BMJ was trailblazer on the internet and was initially all free to view. In recent times libraries have paid for you - the user - to have free access. Budget cuts in 06/07 meant something had to give and the BMJ went out with the bathwater. Many libraries (this one included) still take the paper version, so all is not lost.

Personally I get the table of contents emailed to me weekly. I have to say that although the fillers are often amusing, and the news snippets may be interesting if you haven't already caught them on the BBC or Reuters websites, the actual clinical content seems very thin. This week's issue has just three reviews.

This raises two issues. The first is that free to you doesn't necessarily mean free to all. the resources you have through Athens have been bought and paid for by the NHS so you pay nothing at the point of use. It's amazing how many people seem to think that the world’s knowledge is all on the internet and all free. Next time you download something "free" think of the budgets that have paid for that for you.

The second issue is the way that libraries fall into the habit of stocking "must have” titles. How can you be a real medical/healthcare library and not stock the BMJ, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA? The truth is that none of these is indispensable, and many NHS libraries no longer take them. Good quality evidence turns up in all sorts of places - just relying on a few best sellers is no longer the way forward.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Those of you who use ATHENS passwords (all of you - surely?!) will spot a few tweaks on the list of Resources available through My Athens. Some of the resources have been renamed. We (NHS librarians) have complained that some of the names mean less than nothing to the uninitiated. Our complaints have been heard and changes have been made.

This means that the mysterious "Datastar" (which refers to the company who sell access to databases to us) is now called "Clinical databases (Datastar)". Myilibrary - the online collection of full text (mostly mental health) titles is now called "ebooks" and TDNet (a new service which I will post something about soon) is "My journals."

If this still fails to make sense then please read the blurb attached to each mystery title or pop into the library for some enlightenment.