By Sue Welsh, OMNI Project Officer: sw@omni.ac.uk
Since the last ROADS newsletter OMNI, http://omni.ac.uk/ has improved access to the OMNI databases by launching a thesaurus feature and by improving the speed of the OMNI service. We are reaching a new audience with a regular column in a new publication, and are continuing to add more resources to the OMNI web site: new subject guides, MEDLINE reviews and mirrored documents.
OMNI's much-anticipated thesaurus feature is now available on the live OMNI service. Choosing the "Browse OMNI by MeSH heading" option from the welcome page takes the user to an alphabetical MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) entry point. Below this is a text entry box which can be used to retrieve suitable MeSH headings and perform searches. After a trial period the thesaurus feature will be integrated into the OMNI search screen. Please give it a whirl and let us know of any problems you encounter.
The OMNI service has not always been as quick as we would like it to be, so we are pleased to announce that a new server has been purchased to speed it up. The new server, a Digital Alpha server 533MHz with 512m of RAM is 3 times faster than the old server, and has 4 times as much memory. We believe it has made a huge difference to the speed of the OMNI service and that searching OMNI in particular is much improved.
OMNI staff are contributing to a new publication, "Health Information on the Internet" being published by the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society of Medicine. A regular column listing key new medical Internet resources will appear in HIOTI, which is published bimonthly. For more details see OMNI Newsletter 17 at http://omni.ac.uk/general-info/newsletter/nl17.html
The OMNI newsletter continues to publish regular reviews of Internet resources on specific topics. Recently, subjects covered have included palliative care, schizophrenia and nutrition.
