New OvidSP

This morning, before my morning caffeine infusion, I was asked to do a search for a doctor.  I hopped on to my trusty Ovid MEDLINE database and conducted the search.  It was a pretty straight forward search so I was kind of focused on getting in and out so I could get my morning Coke and wake up to the world. 

It wasn’t until I was done with search did I notice a blue stripe banner up at the top of my screen advertising to try the new OvidSP.  It was actually the gold button “Try It Now” that caught my morning (still caffeine free) brain.  I have yet to really kick the tires and play with the new OvidSP but according to the Ovid Resource Center the following are now live within the new OvidSP:

  • New search filters
  • “Widget” approach to results management
  • More citation management options
  • “My Workspace” allows you to create work projects, organize research materials like articles, search strategies, and images into a dedicated area. (My thoughts, this appears to be similar to My NCBI in nature) 
  • Downloadable Ovid Toolbar which lets yo save research to My Workspace while working outside of OvidSP
  • Main search page design changes for more effective searching, browsing and navigating. 

 

Once I get my jolt of caffeine I am going to have to take this baby for a test drive see how it handles the slow driving of an easy search and also whether it can hug the curves of a twisty turny ugly search.  Of course I am going to load it up to see its cargo capacity for those long extended drives one sometimes has to take for a meta analysis and while I am at it I am going to see how efficient it is when dealing with stop and go traffic of picking through citation results to build a complicated search or find a specific article.   (Can you tell that lately I have been shopping for the next Krafty mobile?) Once I have taken it for a spin I will compile my thoughts for you all to read, I will also link to or include any thoughts from others testing the system.

2 thoughts on “New OvidSP”

  1. When I test drove the new OVID interface, I did try out the “my workspace” area, and discovered (too late) that none of the sorting options worked. It was very embarrassing to send a randomly shuffled set of results (over 50) to my patron. Ooops.

  2. Some of my first impressions:

    Not really much new or improved here. The improvements I would most like to see from Ovid are totally absent. These include:

    RSS feeds that actually work with an institution’s EZProxy. Right now, Ovid’s RSS feeds by default embed the proxy string in the feed link, which causes an error message when you try to subscribe to the feed. Ebsco has figured out how to make their feeds work with proxy servers; Ovid and other vendors need to catch up.

    No social tools — this is so disappointing! Is it too much to ask to be able to send my users a link that runs my search, so they can go in and examine the results themselves? They’re almost there – you can e-mail a jumpstart to a saved search, but then it requires a login, so it’s basically only good for e-mailing to yourself. Instead of a My Workspace, how about an Our Workspace, so people working on the same projects can all work together?

    No improvement in speed; it’s very slow from my end.

    They got rid of the option to click and view the abstract as a dropdown on the original screen; they’ve gone back to going to a new screen to view it; this is very irritating.

    I’m having trouble getting certain things to work, such as annotating records or adding a journal to favorites – maybe because I’m working in Firefox? On the plus side, they appear to have fixed the annoying glitch of greying out the Search button if you click back in Firefox.

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