About a month ago I had the opportunity to try out a new Ovid product called Nursing@Ovid (N@O). N@O's primary users are the nurses on the floor, who need answers to everyday (and maybe not so everyday) clinical questions. N@O is designed so that it can search three or more portals (additional databases) and Ovid's Nursing Collection (books and journals) at one time, similar to a universal search engine. These portals (databases) do not have to be Ovid owned databases. Therefore, libraries can add CINAHL, PubMed, Proquest’s Nursing & Allied Health Source, etc. as portals to N@O. The ability to search three portals at one time is standard, the option to add additional portals beyond the three costs extra. You can even add Amazon.com as a portal but since it is a nursing resource it would probably behoove you to stick with nursing and medically related databases.

N@O is on the OvidSP platform, meaning users have the ability to search using OvidSP's Basic or Advanced Search. The Basic search uses OvidSP's natural language processing. As a librarian I find Basic Search a little too basic, but doing a simple keyword search on wound care brought up several very relevant articles which would be helpful to a nurse who needs one or two quick articles for the moment while on the floor.

The Advanced Search is the same advanced search that many librarians prefer. Librarians normally would find Advanced Search more to their liking, but they need to be aware if they are searching multiple databases in the Advanced Search the indexing and field searching can vary according to what portals (databases) are being searched. Searchers should be aware of the other portal's indexing, tree structures (if it has one) and searchable fields because N@O will try and search using that information. But if the portal doesn't have the relevant searchable field then N@O will do a keyword search.
For example: Amazon.com doesn't have medical subject headings as a searchable field in their database. If you are doing MeSH field search and Amazon.com is one of your portals, it will do something similar to a keyword search. Ovid's N@O does deal with external indexes (the portal database's indexes), however if a portal database has a very dissimilar thesaurus, it may difficult do a good subject search. The closer the portal database's thesaurus structure is to N@O's thesaurus the better the subject searching results. Another reason to try and stay with nursing and medical databases as portals.

The results are displayed similar to the way many other OvidSP databases display results. The left hand side offers other methods for nurses to narrow results down to needed information. Nurses can narrow search results down to patient education, care plans, guidelines, etc. Ovid's N@O has some actual care plans as well as material about care plans, and users clicking on the term "care plan" will get both types of information. Currently, there is more material about care plans rather than the actual care plans, however Ovid is aware of this issue and is working to address it for their next release. Because the actual care plans and patient education information are listed in the results together with articles/chapters about care plans and patient education, I think it would be helpful for there to be a distinction between the actual care plans, patient education information, etc and articles/chapters about those things. Such a distinction whether it is an icon or wording, would allow busy nurses on the floor to easily select the appropriate results with less confusion.

If an institution subscribes to Clini-eguide, the N@O display also features a tab at the top of search area enabling the user to search Clini-eguide. However, when the user clicks on the tab the transition between N@O and Clini-eguide is a little awkward. The ability to search a product like Clini-guide, could be quite helpful and a powerful addition to N@O. Recently Wolters Kluwer just acquired UpToDate, it is unclear as to how this will impact or work with Clini-eguide. I remember sitting in on a presentation by the UpToDate reps who noted that almost 50% of the database usage was coming from nurses. Wolters Kluwer's acquisition of UpToDate, its impact on Clini-eguide and subsequent impact on N@O makes for an interesting evolution should Ovid still keep this feature available in N@O. If this feature is kept, my only suggestion would be to make the transition between Clini-eguide (or whatever it might morph into) and N@O more seamless. In an ideal world it would be nice for the results to displayed within the N@O platform.

It is helpful to know that Ovid is planning on a second update to N@O. It is my sincere hope they begin to add more unique content such as actual guidelines, care plans, and patient education information. I also would like to see them provide a quick and easy way for busy nurses to distinguish between these important aids and the articles/chapters about care plans or patient education. These two key improvements will make N@O even more of a needed resource on the floor rather than a universal search engine with nursing resources.

I look forward to the second update and if I am able to try it out I will write an update to Nursing@Ovid.

I am curious to those who have N@O, what do you like about it or don't like about it. How are your nurses using it? What kind of portals are you searching? Feel free to comment so that others can benefit from your insights.

Labels: CINAHL, Databases, Ovid

Earlier this year I mentioned that Wolters Kluwer had reached an agreement to acquire UpToDate. Well according to this press release it is official. Wolters Kluwer has officially bought UpToDate, the terms were not disclosed. According to representatives of Berkery Noyes (who acted as UTD's exclusive financial adivsor in negotiations with WK), "With this acquisition, Wolters Kluwer is acquiring the dominant clinical solutions company with the leading market share among clinical users and a presence in 88% of teaching hospitals in the United States."

I think a lot of librarians will be watching how things shake out. I have to say that I am cautiously optomistic about this acquisition. Just a brief search on the MEDLIB-L Archive on UpToDate and you get an idea of the problems librarians have had with them.

My UpToDate/Wolters Kluwer wish list:

• Better relations with medical librarians
• Easier to understand pricing structure
• Reasonable pricing
• Off campus access included in the price
• Normal licensing
• Easy renewal (No counting of doctors, their specialties and whether or not their primary office address is the hospital's address.)

Funny my initial wish list doesn't even include any enhancements to the actual product. That just goes to show you how their customer service (or lack of) overshadowed the product in my mind.

Labels: Ovid, UpToDate, WoltersKluwer

Marie Fitzsimmons and Valerie Gross recently published an interesting article in Medical Reference Services Quarterly, A Review of the OvidSP Platform. (2008. v.27 (4) 394-405 DOI: 10.1080/02763860802368142)



Abstract:
As part of its mission to advance the technological capabilities of its products, Ovid introduced a redesign of its database platform in fall 2007. The platform redesign brought new features and enhancements to an already robust system. The transition between Ovid Gateway and the OvidSP platform was orchestrated seamlessly. With the OvidSP platform came innovative changes such as the incorporation of Natural Language Processing associated with the new Basic Search mode. Discussed are OvidSP features, advantages and disadvantages of the new platform, customizable settings, and future direction.

The article discusses OvidSP Advanced, OvidSP Basic (Natural Language Processing), and the advantages and disadvantages of the new platform. The article was received June 13, 2008, a pretty good publishing turn around time for an article in Haworth Press, however it is important to note that Ovid has done at least one update since the article was written.

Ovid has made some serious investment in the SP platform so I think we will see some interesting features and improvements to the platform in the future. One thing I hope they will consider doing sooner rather than later is to allow people to email citations in HTML. That is a crucial feature when dealing with research, full text articles and links. You cannot provide one stop shopping research services if you patrons have to open up two windows (your A-Z list of online journals and their email with Ovid citations) to find and download the full text of an article.

Labels: Medline Database, Ovid

As it gets closer to the end of the year and libraries with CINAHL Ovid are forced to switch to CINAHL EBSCO, we are seeing more frustration from librarians regarding the differences in searching the two different search platforms.

I admit I am a die hard Ovid user. But I have been playing around with CINAHL on EBSCO ever since they released EBSCO 2.0. There are some things I really like about EBSCO's platform, but there are some things I really hate and find clunky when I am searching CINAHL. I am not the only one who feels this way, just browse through some recent MEDLIB-L threads and you can see plenty of others comparing searching on the two systems. David Dillard wrote very extensively about the differences between the two systems and how they handle multi database searching, nesting terms, field searching, and truncation.


Here are some of the things I noticed that have been giving me minor headaches:


There is a big difference for saving, print, emailing, and downloading. While I am not a big fan of Ovid's Citation Manager box and I tend to like EBSCO's folder system for selecting citations to print, email, save, etc. EBSCO's has not built into its system a method for saving all results in the set. EBSCO's system is set up for the individual searcher who can easily go through the results on their own and select relevant ones while conducting the search. It is not set up for librarians who conduct a search and then want to send the results to a patron. I just went to the eye doctor yesterday and my prescription changed, so perhaps I am just not seeing it, but there is no icon or link to select all search results. Therefore the librarian must click on every single citation to save to the folder. A slightly faster method to this would be to display 50 citations and then click on the link to add 1-50 to the folder. Then you click on the folder to send the citations via email. This is annoying and time consuming.


PDFs email out separately. If you are emailing a search that contains citations with full text articles in PDF form, those PDF articles and their citation are sent as individual emails. This method of emailing results is the default. Again this great for the individual searcher who will expect to see multiple emails in their account, but it is a poor method for a librarian sending a search results email to a patron. It is best for librarians conducting searches for patrons to uncheck the send PDF and send HTML as separate emails boxes. Leave the box, "current search history" checked. This will send all of the citations in one email and provided a persistent URL to each citation that the patron can click on and view their full text options.


While I take issue with EBSCO's method for emailing PDFs and HTMLs, please note that citations emailed from OVID are STILL lacking persistent URLs. This improvement is WAY OVERDUE from Ovid.


A few people have mentioned that thesaurus searching or searching using the subject heading is very clunky (at best) in CINAHL. I completely agree. This is one area that Ovid by far outshines EBSCO. We have the "Suggest Subject Terms" box checked as our default setting so when you type in a term like heart attack you are taken to the subject mapping screen where you can either check the box to search it as a keyword or check the box for Myocardial Infarction. Once you check a box (or boxes) you must click the search database button at the top of the screen. This is a little confusing because people tend to want to click on the browse button instead. The search box next to the browse button for searching the thesaurus not for specifically for searching or adding terms to your search. It is a poor location and poor design for this tool because it is easily mistaken as an add to search button.

If you want to add more terms to your original search then you must hit the Clear button at the top of the search button and type in a new term. This is extremely confusing! Everybody's first inclination is to type your new term in the box that says, "Add the following to your search: Term(s)." If you do this you will not be sent to the thesaurus and you will be doing a keyword search!

Some libraries have tried to prevent this confusion by using Advanced Search as their default screen. Advanced search gives the user multiple search boxes. This really doesn't help the problem, it just adds more search boxes to the confusion. EBSCO still defaults to searching terms as keywords when there is already a term in the first box. So if you want it to search your term as a subject heading then you must ALWAYS delete whatever is in the first/top search box and put the new term in.

Since you are doing a lot of single term searching (to ensure that you are searching using subject terms), you will have to click on the Search History/Alerts to combine your individual subject searches together. For example if you did three separate subject searches on cholesterol, myocardial infarction, and congestive heart failure, you must click on the Search History/Alerts link, delete everything in the search box and then check the boxes representing each subject search and combine them appropriately. If you do not delete everything in the search box prior to checking the boxes and clicking the "Add" button you will get whatever term is in the search box (usually the one leftover from your most recent search) combined with the items you checked. This is frustrating.

I am really going to miss Ovid's easy subject mapping and combining of terms.

Every database company creates their own platform and user interface. The methods you would use to search PubMed may not always be appropriate for Ovid Medline and vice versa. In the past librarians had the option to search CINAHL through different companies, Ovid, EBSCO, Proquest, and they usually picked the interface that was the right price and met their searching needs. Soon people will only be able to use EBSCO and they must adjust their methods and style of searching to best accommodate the interface. Not every difference is a shortfall, some things are better and some things are just different. EBSCO has a lot of nice features that Ovid and other platforms do not have such as the hover abstract and persistent URLs in emailed results. Only by experimenting with the systems will we learn the best methods for ourselves and our users.

Labels: CINAHL, Databases, EBSCO, Ovid

I am sure some you loyal Ovid users have already noticed the most recent update that went live yesterday (August 14, 2008). Ovid's enhancements will be delivered in two phases, workflow improvement (first) and new features (second). This most recent update was to fix a lot of the workflow and interface issues that many have been bugging Ovid about.

So here are the updates:

• Search Tab Additions and Enhancements - New Multi Field Search Tab which according to Ovid it will "allow for a more targeted and specific search experience." Basically this tab reminds of searching in EBSCO, it allows you to easily search for multiple things within multiple fields all at one time.
• Seach Aid Box is collapsible
• Results Manager Box is collapsible and is available above and below the search results.
• Search History Box can be moved either above or below the green Search Box.
• Limits can be customized to display on the main search page.
• Ability to create, edit, and add multiple annotations to a citation. (You must be logged into your personal account section for this to work.)
• Browse Books and Browse Journals links are now on the Select a Database page
• Font size is now adjustable from your browser
• Users logged into their personal account area will now see their name and institution.
  

Coming Soon:

• My Projects - a workspace area for saving and managing files
• Ovid Universal Search - a cross platform search solution
  

I am happy with the new release. Heck I am just happy that the jumping screen was fixed. But the improvements on this new release are nice. However I have got to wonder why Ovid still clings to that Results Manager Box. Many other databases have a much nicer method for saving results. I especially like EBSCO's method. The reason I like it is that is clear and simple. It resembles how many Internet commerce sites allow you to shop and easily add things to the basket. In my opinion the Ovid Results Manager is confusing to regular patrons and it takes up space, they should go to the add to basket approach.

Enhancements I would like to see:

• Cited References - MUST have the ability to add the cited references from a citation to your search results. I don't know why this ability was in place when searchers were given the ability to look at cited references. I would think this is an important feature. I know a lot of researchers who routinely look at the cited references for article.
• HTML Email – This is another MUST HAVE improvement that is long overdue. Currently librarians or regular users are only able to email the search as a text file. That means all of the full text links to the articles are gone. People no longer want the citations just emailed to them, they want to view the full text of the article to the citation they like. Therefore you need to have the ability to send the email in HTML and preserve the full text links. PubMed already does this and frankly I don’t know why Ovid doesn’t.
• Search Box For Journal Browser – How time consuming is it click J then click Next a bunch of times to finally get to the listing for the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of London. A search box would speed up and make the Browse Journal process so much better.
• Sharing Notes – I think it would be neat if two researchers working on the same topic could view each other’s retrieved searches and have the ability to include their personal account notes they made on the citations. I am not sure how that would work and whether Ovid’s My Workspace enhancement would do this, but I think it would be a cool enhancement.

Labels: Medline Database, Ovid

On July 31, 2008 Ovid users might notice a few new changes. According to Ovid "this release moves beyond traditional searching, delivering enhancements and exciting new functionality that improve search flexibility, personalization, and sharing capabilities, so that users can work the way they want to work."

These new features will be:

• The main search screen will be streamlined with a sleeker and more intuitive design.
• Search Tab Addition and Enhancements - A new Multi - Field Search tab will allow for a more targeted and specific search by providing multiple search boxes for assigning specific fields. (I have no idea what that means but will see how that works)
• User Workflow Tools - The Search Aids box will be collapsible. Results Manager and Search History will be moveable. Font size will be adjustable via the Internet browser, and annotations will be enhanced. Email capabilities will be expanded (they dont' say how).
• My Project Workspace Area - This is a new feature and is a direct result from customer feedback. The My Projects will provide a workspace for assemblind and organizing research findings for easier management and it is linkable from every page in the application.
• Universal Search - This is a new "premium search offering" and is available as an add-on. It will deliver cross platform content searching within the OvidSP interface.

Ovid recomends the OvidSP Resource Center to find information on the upcoming release. In the next few weeks Ovid will add new training schedules, tutorials, and screen shots.

Labels: Databases, Medline Database, Ovid