OvidSP and the contents of its RSS
The Search Platform OvidSP, which focuses on doing searches in scholarly and health-related databases, has arrived. OvidSP is the sum total of the acquisition of SilverPlatter by Wolters Kluwer Health and its subsequent merger withOvid Tecnologies. And since then there has been an interest in what type of search platform it would come up with.
Barbara Quint mentioned this in her post, OvidSP: A Long-Promised Search Platform Arrives , at Information Today.
Since the acquisition of SilverPlatter Information by Wolters Kluwer Health (www.wkhealth.com) in 2001 and the subsequent merging with Ovid Technologies (www.ovid.com), customers and industry observers have awaited a new search platform that would merge the best of both systems along with new features. OvidSP has now arrived. The new service will replace Ovid Web Gateway, scheduled for discontinuance in early February 2008, and then SilverPlatter WEBSPIRS sometime in 1Q 2009. Designed to serve the needs of end-user and librarian searchers, OvidSP supports a simplified basic search and tags to reach fielded searches, as well as bridges to “Ovid Classic” and “SilverPlatter Classic” command line syntaxes. First reactions to the new interface by clients have been positive with some reservations, but questions remain as to whether the new platform has enough appeal to counter market challenges by competitors. [Source]
According to Quint’s post one of the features of OvidSP is that it can deliver daily RSS feeds as electronic tables of contents (eTOCS) or AutoAlerts.
Interesting
And then there is this post on OvidSP at omg tuna is kewl blog of a Medical Librarian and female blogger who is currently using the OvidSP and has this to say:
I subscribed to a search feed (not a table of contents feed) from Current Contents. The RSS feed shows up with the article title as the title, but at least in the feed I am seeing in Google Reader, the only other information you get is the abstract and perhaps some keywords–i.e., no source information comes in the RSS feed. Here’s what I really *do* like, though–when you click on the title, if your institution subscribes to the full text of the article via Ovid, you get jumped to the HTML version of the full text. Otherwise, you get jumped to an abstract. In my abstract, my institution’s link resolver shows up, but I’m not sure if that’s because I’m on the network, or if it identifies the RSS feed with my personal account. I guess I’ll have to do some more research.[Source]
This is important and interesting because the collection or data OvidSP is sitting on is referreed information ie premium data. Anyone else tried OvidSP and its RSS feeds?
3 opinions for OvidSP and the contents of its RSS
mjt
Nov 8, 2007 at 6:36 pm
We find OvidSP to be frustrating. We followed the Ovid instructions for setting up a search and getting results via RSS. In the promo material we had, it didn’t state that you had to be signed in as an individual user. So we merrily set up our RSS searches and added them to our Google Reader - wondering why we had no results. It wasn’t unil we read OMG Tuna is kewl that we found out you had to be signed in as a personal subscriber. As we only have an institutional subscription the RSS function for search results is useless to us. This is going to be very frustrating for our end users - I anticipate that many of them will try and set up RSS searches as the functionality appears to be there. We will continue to use PubMed to run our RSS searches. We had intended to run the same searches on both OvidSP and PubMed and compare the results to see which worked better for our users but we can’t do that now. I personally don’t see the value in using the Ovid TOC alerts over RSS feeds direct from the publishers websites. I guess it may be different in larger academic libraries where you have link resolvers and full text within Ovid but for us the direct websites are more timely in their delivery and have a nicer presentation. For journals that don’t use RSS we have been using PubMed and that’s been working just fine. There seems to have been a lot of hype at recent conferences over OvidSP but it doesn’t seem to have come to much consequence. There has also been a lot of talk about inconsistancy of search results in the new interface. We haven’t had time to do our own investigations yet but it doesn’t sound good.
Juned
Nov 8, 2007 at 7:56 pm
@mjt, Useful insights. OMG Tuna is Kewl has been very helpful. Let us hope that OvidSP people take notice.
OvidSP RSS feeds « MHSLA Blog
Jan 19, 2008 at 1:51 pm
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