Surf's Up Volume 11 (1)
Right. Your starter for ten: which web sites are most like a library?
No, not those ones with dazzlingly beautiful starlets and superheroes,
providing up-to-the minute nuggets of biomedical 'information' to interested
passers-by (although the resemblance is striking ...); shame on you.
The answer is, of course, the guides to other web sites and the meta search
engines! Armed with this idea, I went in search of the best guides
to other web sites.
Of the search engines which search other search engines, the two I like
best are Mamma and Dogpile;
both automatically search various other search engines (unlike some other
meta-engines which require you to do the clicking to set each one off -
such as All-in-One and All4one).
Mamma, the self-styled 'Mother of all Search Engines' is clear and easy
to use. Speaking as one who abhors unnecessary graphics, Mamma's
interface is pristine. It's also pretty useful: a quick and dirty
search on 'clinical governance' brought me back 73 mostly useful pages.
Mamma merges all the results it retrieves together, indicating which search
engine brought forth which web site by the side: very handy if you want
to get to something quickly. Dogpile, on the other hand, searches
26 search engines at once and then presents the results according to originating
engine: handier if you need an information audit trail in your internet
searching. Less so if you need to prove exhaustive searching however:
it found only 19 web sites about clinical governance in my test.
Newstrawler is a meta-search
engine which targets the individual search engines of newspapers on the
web. Although slow at times, this allows you to search across countries,
subject categories and in selected web news sources. The UK sources
include The Scotsman, The Electronic Telegraph, The Financial Times, The
Guardian, BBC News and the Times Educational Supplement. Quirkily,
it also gives you the opportunity to search several provincial newspapers
from the North West of England.
Examples of other media gatherers, relating specifically to health,
are Health-News and and Webmedlit.
Health-News allows the registered user to browse and search (and view in
full text) selected news and features within many healthcare publications
(such as Doctor, Hospital Doctor, Nursing Standard and Practice Nurse).
Registration is free, if controversial: it seems from a recent discussion
on lis-medical that many on this mailbase list (which includes yours truly)
suspect that they have been registered en masse and without consultation.
Webmedlit is both more clinical and more academic than Health-News and
really acts as a reactive alerting service for the contents of several
peer-reviewed medical journals (such as BMJ, JAMA, Archives of Surgery
and New England Journal of Medicine).
Health-related signposting sites are many and varied. They range
from Healtheconomics.Com,
cunningly linking the web surfer to other international health economics
sites (most of which are academic and professional) to PharmWeb,
a UK site which co-ordinates links to several pharmaceutical resources
of interest both to the patient and the professional.
If your desire for health information is vast and your favourite colour
is blue, go for Martindale's Health Science Guide, otherwise known as The
'Virtual' Medical Centre and a sister to the more general and even
vaster Martindale's 'The
Reference Desk'. The 'Virtual' Medical Centre contains links
to hundreds of health sites, ranging from disaster management guidelines
to information on poisonous snakes (although, thinking about it, that's
not much of a range as the one could well be reliant on the other).
It comes in the form of one very long page, through which the weary web
traveller must scroll; despite this, it can often contain pearls of information.
A similar, smaller - and yet seemingly more clearly organised - web site
is The Virtual Library: Medicine
and Health. Although this site looks easier to use, anyone with
RSI will find the average of four clicks needed to get to the site of choice
potentially painful.
Many of the sites cited above are American; however, there are some
superb health-related web signposting resources emanating from the UK and
several of these seem to originate from the University of Sheffield.
On the one hand, there is the excellent Nursing
& Health Care Resources on the Net to link you to geographically
and topically categorised resources; and on the other, there are the ScHARR
guides which I defy anyone interested in web-based healthcare information
not to have used at some point. These are, of course, Netting
the Evidence, the guide to Evidence Based Practice on the Internet
and Trawling the
Net, the ScHARR introduction to free web databases of interest to NHS
Staff. There is one more UK web page which I feel I could mention
here (but one whose quality I must, in all fairness, leave others to evaluate ...)
and that is the King's
Fund's Links page.
To return to my original theme of libraries on the web, I'd also like
to highlight a few web directory services - which might be seen as having
a more 'traditional' library internet presence (pah!). I use two
excellent graphical directories regularly: Local
Government Websites and the University of Wolverhampton's UK
Sensitive Map, which links folk to academic institutions, including
those in higher and further education as well as research units.
Both of these sites are essentially images of the UK with geographical
hot links and both are very user-friendly. Links to Libraries themselves
are provided by NISS, which shows the way to library OPACs
in Higher Education and by Sheila and Robert Harden, who provide pointers
to UK
Public Libraries' pages.
And finally, as they say on the news, a word of warning: if you use
the US Medical Information site (at what was http://www.sick.com)
to find US healthcare information and patient groups, do not panic when
you now encounter a web site devoted to e-cards containing twisted and
bizarre humour. The original URL has been taken over by another site
altogether. Never fear, however: the Medical Information site still
exists and has moved to http://www.encyberpedia.com/medical.htm/.
And, absolutely finally (I promise!), if it's a bit of fun you want after
all that, you could do worse than visit one of the many Joke Libraries
which now exist on the web. Ever wondered where your erstwhile colleagues
found those much-travelled internet 'funnies'? Have a look at Jokes.Com
and all will be revealed ...
Last updated November 2000.
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Inform 11 (1)
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