London Health Libraries ‘Library Assistants’ Day’ 2013

Library Assistants’ Day is an event run yearly in the London Health Libraries network. I attended this event last year as a non NHS delegate and found it helpful and informative. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet new people and learn about key changes to the NHS. When I began my current post in an NHS library in April, I was already looking out for the 2013 event.

This year, Library Assistants’ Day was held at The Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. Delegates were welcomed by Richard Osborn, Strategic Library Services Development Manager, who introduced us to our first speaker, Jane Moore, NICE Implementation Consultant. Jane told us more about her role and the resources provided by NICE for healthcare professionals. She discussed the guidance and standards that NICE produce, including Clinical guidelines; Quality standards, Technology appraisals, Interventional procedures, Medical technologies, Diagnostics guidance and Public health guidance. Jane also discussed NICE Pathways, which consolidate information regarding evidence and recommendations in a accessible way. Each pathway contains an introduction, information for the public, and information about relevant updates. From each pathway, you can link straight through the the relevant guidance and quality standards information for the pathway you have selected. As well as the resources mentioned above, NICE have produced three smartphone and tablet apps, the NICE Guidance App, NICE BNF app and the NICE BNFC app. You can find out more information about these apps here. An NHS Athens account is required for access.

For more information about NICE resources, you can take a look at Jane's presentation.

The second session of the day was led by Daphne Grey and Ziba Nadimi who are part of CLIST (Clinical Librarians and Information Skills Trainers). Their session was on searching the Cochrane Library. Daphne explained that the Cochrane Library consists of seven databases;

• Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews
• Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials
• Cochrane Methodology Register
• Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects
• Health Technology Assessment Database
• NHS Economic Evaluation Database
• About The Cochrane Collaboration     

 These databases are useful for accessing systematic reviews and for gauging the effectiveness of clinical interventions. The databases use MESH subject headings and a 'search manager' facility to pull together the different elements of your search.You can register for an account, which will allow you to save your searches and allow you to sign up for alerts and information about particular areas of interest. I found this session particularly helpful as I had no previous experience searching Cochrane. I will certainly be using this resource regularly in my role going forward.

Daphne and Ziba's presentation can be viewed here.

The final session of the day, was led by John Nyman of Imperial College London, who presented on 'Searching Google and Google Scholar'. This session was really engaging and provided some really good suggestions on how to 'tame' Google and preform more efficient search tasks using the search engine. John firstly explained how Google works and the algorithms that enable its results, and explained that Google uses page ranking to determine the importance of a particular webpage, which influences the results we see. John gave us some handy tips on how to focus our search using Google, including searching by file type and date range. We also talked about Google's advanced search facility, which allows you to filter results by reading level and usage rights.

After providing us with some useful information on searching Google, John's presentation moved on to discussing Google Scholar. Google Scholar searches across disciplines and sources to retrieve articles, theses, books and abstracts from a wide range of academic and professional sources. What I found particularly interesting about Google Scholar, is that you can configure its settings to access your institution's full-text e-journals. Finally, John pointed us towards some other search engines which we might find useful, including;

• www.bing.com
• http://blekko.com
• https://duckduckgo.com
• http://www.zuula.com

For more information about John's session, I would recommend taking a look at his presentation.

You can access the resources and handouts for this workshop at http://www.londonlinks.nhs.uk/events, alongside information about other events that have been organised by the network.