Athens resources – changes to access

From 1 April there will be changes to the way you are able to access and use Athens resources.

Search 2.0, a new way to search all electronic content has been purchased nationally for the NHS. It is currently being tested by NHS librarians. It will be the main discovery tool to locate articles from the following primary databases:

• PubMed/Medline
• Cinahl
• Embase
• Alternative and Complementary Medicine Database
• British Nursing Index
• PsycINFO
• Health Management Information Consortium (HMIC)

It is designed to simplify searching by ending reliance on different supplier systems to access resources. The planned national launch date is 1 April 2008 and there will be a two month overlap between the Dialog databases and Search 2.0 during this transitional period.

Please note that your saved searches and alerts will not be transferred over from Dialog, and it is therefore your responsibility to record these now so that you can re-create them in the new system.

NLH Search 2.0 will be accessible from the National Library for Health (NLH) website at www.library.nhs.uk and also by clicking the National Library for Health link in the Resources list within MyAthens.

This new searching experience will be structured around a series of collections within the National Library for Health, including:

• Evidence
• Guidance
• Specialist Libraries
• Book, Journals and Bibliographic databases
• Images
• For Patients

NLH Search 2.0 Resource Guides are available at www.library.nhs.uk/forlibrarians/toolkits.

MyJournals, the A-Z list of NHS journals, will remain as the one-stop-shop for locating NHS electronic journal content. From the 1 April the site should reflect changes to journal content so as to include:

• 10 AMA titles - JAMA and Archive Journals titles
• 590 healthcare titles via Cinahl Full Text (Provided by EbscoHOST Database)
• 26 BMJ titles

In time links will appear to articles in these collections from citations in your search results in the Search 2.0 interface. Please also note that the MyJournals service contains links to paper holdings held by your local healthcare library.

Additional journal content may be available from April onwards and negotiations are currently taking place.

Feedback on your experiences with Search 2.0. This will help refine and develop it.

If you have any queries or require help/training as a result of these changes, please do not hesitate to contact us.