Adam Tocock
Specialist Librarian, Barts Health NHS Trust
After the long Easter weekend and just in time to leave lockdown for a beer garden, our working group made the 2nd edition of the London Kent Surrey Sussex Regional Searching Guidance freely available on the KSS wiki.
This document is intended to help librarians perform mediated searches for NHS staff, and it has been improved by the generous feedback we received on the 1st edition (published in January 2020) and designed with the news that NICE’s Healthcare Database Advanced Search tool (HDAS) will be decommissioned in March 2022 in mind.
Colleagues kindly fed back to us that the time we suggested to allow for searches in the 1st edition were unrealistically small, and so we have expanded on these to try and help searchers plan their time a little better. We are anticipating that many searchers more familiar with HDAS will take a little longer over searches in less familiar native interfaces, at least initially, and we hope to reflect that in the timeframes we give.
Further relating to HDAS’ decommissioning, we have kept the organisation of the guidance the same – with entries based on the purpose of the search that is being undertaken, which will be familiar to Knowledgeshare users – but we have shifted the focus of the step-by-step instructions (and the examples given in the supplement) away from HDAS and toward using native interfaces. Similarly we have expanded the resources section of the guidance so it includes links to both “official” and third-party help for the native interfaces, and the reference management software that will be used in conjunction, in text and video form.
The impact of the pandemic has been felt in every aspect of our lives since we published the 1st edition, and it reaches the guidance too; with the popularisation of preprint databases warranting their inclusion now in our entries, and COVID-specific resources now in our resources section.
Please feel free to use the guidance, share it with colleagues, and give us your feedback so we can improve it further when we next review it in April 2022. Contact adam.tocock@nhs.net with your thoughts, thank you.
HLG Newsletter
Spring 2021
Health Libraries Group 