Using Netvibes to create a current awareness service in healthcare Jason Curtis Electronic Resources Librarian Shrewsbury and Telford Health Libraries

The dilemma How to provide current awareness to a diverse range of departments and professions? How to avoid duplicating work already being done elsewhere in the NHS? The solution? Netvibes!

Why Netvibes? Easy to add RSS feeds from any source Easy to create public pages (Universes) with multiple ‘tabs’ No need for our users to register or login to view the site

The site… We called it Team Knowledge Update to reflect our support for Team Knowledge Officers Contains multiple ‘tabs’ for a range of subjects

Team Knowledge Update contains… Contents of the latest journals, automatically updated Those available in full-text with NHS Athens accounts are marked in green

Team Knowledge Update contains… Latest news from National Library for Health Specialist Libraries and other sources

Team Knowledge Update contains… Recent books added to our libraries (currently via Shelfari Widgets)

RSS feeds come from… National Library for Health (Specialist Libraries and other feeds from the RSS directory) National electronic Library for Medicine BMJ and AMA Journals (full-text for NHS Athens) BioMed Central journals (free full-text) MedWorm (pre-configured and search query results

More RSS feeds… EBSCOHost databases (CINAHL full-text and Health Business elite) This provides RSS feeds for journals available in full-text for NHS Athens and for most print journals held in our libraries

Advantages of the site Shows a selection of journals and RSS feeds available in a given subject Access to full-text at article level (where available via NHS Athens or open access) Assists users who don’t want to set up an RSS reader or search for feeds

Promoting local resources Provides contents for journals purchased in print for our libraries Displays details of our new books by subject Somewhere to display our local RSS feeds (such as our blog and local staff publications on Connotea)

The idea of browsing… Recreating the current journals display (but in this case, more usefully ‘shelved’ by subject) Finding interesting articles by serendipity See new books on a topic (rather than just a list of all books for the previous month)

alerts from the site Feedback has shown that users still like alerts We’re using Yahoo! Pipes and Feedburner to create subscription services for each subject tab Users will receive an each day something new appears on their chosen subject

Creating further feeds We’re trying out Feed43 to create feeds from: Subject categories of Behind the Headlines (e.g. cancer) New books by subject from our Library Management System (OLIB 7.6)

The ‘social’ aspect Our users and other health libraries can: Add feeds from our pages to their own Netvibes or iGoogle pages Clone our Yahoo! Pipes to create their own combined feeds

The future… New feeds from the proposed NHS England alerting service can be added when available More subject tabs will be added in response to feedback We’ll do an evaluation of the site after six months