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The Nova Scotia Health Authority is the latest Andornot client to launch a library catalogue using the Andornot Discovery Interface, available at http://library.nshealth.ca

The site provides patients, the public and health care professionals with a modern, mobile-friendly way to search for health information resources across the province, in physical libraries and online.

The collection includes the holdings of hospital libraries throughout Nova Scotia, including e-books, e-journals, patient education pamphlets, books, and audio-visual materials.

Previously, the library holdings of the former Capital Health Authority in Halifax alone were searchable online. Now, the new tool allows for searching of province-wide library holdings throughout the newly established Nova Scotia Health Authority, as well as the IWK Health Centre, the regional pediatric and maternity hospital in Halifax.

The Andornot Discovery Interface provides the features users expect in a modern search engine, such as spelling corrections and search term suggestions, relevancy-ranked results, and facets such as Subject, Author, Date, Location, Language and more, to quickly narrow a search.

Behind the public face is a DB/TextWorks database of holdings from individual libraries, as well as a separate database containing patient pamphlets The catalogue is managed by a team of library staff who co-ordinate data arriving from other libraries.

Contact Andornot to discuss making your collections available online in a modern way.

The Interior Health library catalog search interface has been given a revamp to modernize the experience and improve the functionality.  The old interface using WebPublisher PRO (figures 1&3) expected users to figure out how to construct their searches in advance.  The new interface (figures 2&4) using the Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI) allows users to put in their keywords and then narrow down the hits from the results screen. 

IHA_OldCat
Figure 1

IHA-NewCat
Figure 2

IHA-OldCat2
Figure 3

IHA-NewCat2

Figure 4

This, plus the more forgiving search syntax with built in automatic typo and spelling correctionsNewCat3 with “Did you Mean?”  suggestions, will result in an improved search experience for IH staff. In addition the site is now responsive ensuring that it is just as readable on a cell phone or tablet as on a desktop PC.

As before, the new site includes canned search links for special topics and collections, and a more prominent listing of new titles through an embedded RSS feed.  Book covers from Open Library are included automatically  based on the ISBN field if they are available.

Contact Andornot to discuss similar upgrades to your search interfaces.

Interior Health contacted Andornot to discuss possible options for providing better access to their policy and procedure documents, guidelines and protocols.  These were available in several locations and were indexed in separate PDF’s depending on service area.  Maintenance of this system of indexes was becoming problematic and unsustainable. Interior Health needed an easy to use search interface for clinical staff to quickly find and link to the documents, whether they be on their SharePoint intranet, a vendor site or part of their subscription to Mosby’s Nursing Skills. 

Interior Health already owned a copy of Inmagic DB/TextWorksand the library staff were familiar with it, so we created a new database to catalog these documents.  The intranet search application pulls data from DB/TextWorks and is powered by our Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI) to provide a faceted, discovery style interface geared to be as simple and uncluttered as possible. AnDI features spell checking with Did you mean functionality to catch common misspellings and typos, and staff have added some common acronyms to the records to ensure that documents can be found using nursing jargon.

We were able to extract data from multiple PDF’s and SharePoint lists to build the ClinicalCareFindItinitial database and batch modified records to populate additional fields. As a result, searches can be refined by Interior Health site, practice area, agency responsible, format and keywords.   We also note which source document or manual a specific guideline is part of.  The relevance ranking of the search results was adjusted to ensure that Interior Health (IH) wide documents always appear first. This approach really helps IH staff quickly locate the policy or protocol they are seeking.

Behind the scenes, the database also tracks who developed a document, when it was endorsed, and review dates to allow library staff to better manage the administrative side.  The search interface is hosted by Andornot with access restricted by IP Address to Interior Health staff.

Since the launch the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. Comments from nursing staff included:

  • WOW oh WOW.  My brief interaction with the Clinical Care find-it has been an incredible experience so far.  Congratulations!!!!
  • A thing of beauty doesn’t describe this work well enough.  It is definitely the birth of an amazing solution.  I had a look at it yesterday, and it is a very intuitive piece of work.
  • OMG! It IS a thing of beauty.

And from the person responsible for administering the system:

  • As far as managing workload the drudgery of adding links to 5 separate indexes x 3 alternate titles/keywords (so sometimes 15 entries for one link/document!!!!) has been almost eliminated.  Now there is only “ONE” and it’s great!

This project is a good example of how library staff can assist other groups within an organization to better organize and improve access to their information and resources.  Prior to the start of this project Interior Health had looked to develop a new system internally, however library staff were able to convince them to utilize their existing software and Andornot’s expertise and hosting service to create an efficient and easy to use new system.

Contact us to discuss how we can help you provide improved search access to any collection.

In January, we wrote in this blog post about the increasing numbers of Andornot's special library clients who are choosing discovery interfaces for their library catalogues. The latest to adopt this popular style of search engine is the Northern Health Authority Library in Prince George, B.C. 

Northern Health Library Services is a long-time Inmagic DB/TextWorks user, and continues to manage their library collection with this software. The search interface used by patients, the public and health authority staff has been upgraded to the open-source VuFind discovery interface, one of Andornot’s recommended systems.

VuFind provides users with an intuitive and productive experience using features such as:

  • fast, relevancy-based keyword search results;
  • spelling corrections and did-you-mean suggestions of alternate terms;
  • links to related resources;
  • faceted browsing to easily narrow down results; and
  • tools for saving and sharing searches and records.

The VuFind system is hosted by Andornot at https://nhalibrary.andornot.com

It provides users with a choice of themes, through a drop-down in the top right corner. The default theme is a modern one built with the Twitter Bootstrap responsive web framework, designed for desktop browsers as well as tablets and phones. An older theme is also available for older browsers, such as Internet Explorer 7 and 8, still in use in some agencies.

Contact us for more information about DB/TextWorks and VuFind.

If you search the Halifax, Nova Scotia public library catalogue for “physiotherapy”, the first record to appear is for an educational pamphlet on “Physiotherapy services in Nova Scotia”  with a link to view it online as a PDF.  Subsequent records in the search results are also patient education pamphlets covering such topics as a guide to going home after surgery, ankle injuries and shoulder-strengthening exercises.

Halifax PL          CapitalHealth2

The Health Sciences Library of Capital Health has recently partnered with Halifax Public Libraries to add hundreds of these hospital-produced patient education pamphlet records to the public library’s catalogue. The goal is to make locally produced current information about health promotion, medical conditions, diagnostic tests, and surgical procedures more accessible to the public. These materials are also freely available and searchable from the website of the Health Sciences Library of Capital Health.

The hospital uses Inmagic DB/TextWorks to maintain the pamphlet database in a non-MARC format. Lara Killian from the Health Sciences Library spoke on the project at the recent CHLA conference in Montreal and described the project. Records are exported into MARC format from DB/TextWorks using a map created with the MARC Transformer available from Inmagic. These records are then massaged using the free MARCEdit software to create a file suitable for loading into the MARC-based AquaBrowser discovery software used by the Public Library.  There were some challenges with the MARC formatting, such as the display of French diacritical marks. At the Public Libraries, Dave MacNeil worked with AquaBrowser to tweak the formatting of the search result display to ensure that when these pamphlets show up, the direct link to the free PDF is easily identifiable.

This new initiative launched in June 2014, with the goal of increasing visibility and usage of the pamphlets by adding this new public access point.

If you need help with a similar project, please contact us for assistance.

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