News from BIOME

The Wellcome Trust and BIOME are pleased to announce the launch of psci-comlit, a new bibliographic database that can be found on the psci-com gateway. The database has been developed to provide a searchable source of journal, newspaper and book references on science communication, public engagement with science and the wider issues of science in society. Accessing psci-comlit is free of charge.

The database was created and is being continually expanded by the Wellcome Library in collaboration with the BIOME team. Librarians at the Wellcome Library scan a broad range of journals, newspapers and new book acquisitions to create the descriptive records that populate the database. In addition, the records are used to produce a monthly current awareness bibliography, also accessible from the psci-comlit page. Topics covered include public attitudes towards science, science communication, science and the media, science centres and science education.

If you have any comments or suggestions about the new database, please contact Louise Simon.

New OMNI Resource Booklet

Our booklet Internet Resources for Health and Medicine is due to be updated. The sixteen-page booklet provides examples of some of the quality Internet sites in health and medicine to give a flavour of the millions of resources that are available. Subject experts have selected all the sites included in the booklets. The booklets are excellent introductions to key resources in their subject areas, and should be useful for students, staff and researchers at universities and colleges. To order copies of this booklet, (UK only), see details on the BIOME Publications page of the BIOME Web site. The Wellcome Trust has kindly agreed to sponsor this booklet.

BIOME has a suite of promotional materials that can be sent out to you free if you are running training events or workshops, or would like to display materials at your institution. We have fliers (A5 size) and posters (A3 size) for BIOME and the gateways, as well as pens and fliers for the Virtual Training Suite tutorials.

Please contact us at leaflets@biome.ac.uk with any requests for materials, or the posters and fliers can be downloaded in PDF (requiring Adobe Acrobat Reader) from the BIOME Publications page of the BIOME Web site.

NMAP Celebrates its Second Birthday

In April, NMAP - The UK’s free gateway to high quality Internet resources for Nurses, Midwives and Allied Professions celebrated its second birthday.

The NMAP service was launched in April 2001 and since then has served over 3 million pages of information to its users.

NMAP is a core part of the BIOME service and provides specialised information for the nursing and allied health communities, focusing on information of relevance to nurses, midwives, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, dieticians, health visitors, podiatrists, chiropodists, speech therapists, theatre practitioners and radiographers.

NMAP aims to help students, researchers, academics and practitioners find the information they need from the Internet without endless hours of searching. Each of the 2800 Internet sites in the database is hand selected for inclusion within NMAP, and is evaluated according to the BIOME Evaluation Guidelines.

NMAP also provides a core database for the professional portals within the National electronic Library for health (NeLH).

An evaluation of NMAP was completed by 671 users.

Findings indicate: -

• 88% of respondents were able to find the information they wanted easily.
• 84% rated the relevance of the resources they found as being ‘Good’ or ‘Excellent’.

Further evaluation work is underway looking at ease of use, and in conjunction with this we will be enhancing the pages to make key information even easier to find.

Last year the NMAP team authored two freely available online tutorials as part of the Virtual Training Suite (VTS) programme - the ‘Internet for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting’ and ‘Internet for Allied Health’ tutorials. The tutorials can be accessed from the RDN Virtual Training Suite

NMAP is produced by a team of information specialists and subject experts from the BIOME service at the University of Nottingham, the University of Sheffield and the Royal College of Nursing, assisted by other key organisations throughout the UK.

Members of the NMAP team are currently participating in the NeLH Digital Libraries Network (DLnet) “master classes” for digital library trainers which are being held at eight venues across England this summer.

Changes at BIOME

Following his appointment as an Assistant Director within Nottingham University Information Services, Stephen Pinfield has taken over the role of BIOME Service Director. Donald Mackay joined us in March 2003 as Service Manager, having previously worked for the University of Oxford as Enquiry Service Manager at the Cairns Library.

After many years of valued service for the OMNI and BIOME services, Lisa Gray will be leaving us in July 2003. Lisa will be relocating to Bristol for personal reasons and although we are very sad to see her leave us, we would like to wish her all best wishes for the future.

Author Details

Article Title: “News from BIOME” Author: Donald Mackay
Publication Date: 30-July-2003 Publication: Ariadne Issue 36
Originating URL: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/biome/