Health Library News

The Medpedia Project has launched a beta version of what it hopes will become the world’s largest online medical encyclopedia. Although the project has been driven by American Universities, many other authoritative organisation have signed up to the project including NHS Choices. The project aims to create a new model of how to assemble, maintain, critique and assess medical knowledge. Only physicians and people with doctorates in a biomedical or health field will be able to edit the Medipedia knowledge base and use the network tools, but members of the public will be able to suggest articles and edits and join the communities of interest. Read original E-Health insider article here.

The National Library for Health has now launched its latest innovations. Amongst the improvements is the new restructuring of Patient Resources area, for easier searching by topic, providing immediate access to patient information leaflets. Additional information is also now available to patients through the NHS Direct Online Health Encyclopaedia. For health professionals there is a new online medical dictionary, which accesses Black’s Medical Dictionary and The Royal Society of Medicine: Medicines. The tool section also provides a downloadable NLH toolbar to improve your searching and provide instruction on how to keep up to date with the latest research through RSS feeds. Looking for pictures and diagrams to include in you presentations; then why not check out the new Images section. This incorporates the Images.MD database, but now you can browse or run an integrated search on many more resources including Gray’s Anatomy and the ECG Library. This will provide you with a series of th...