Posts from — March 2010

I am a faculty member in the Department of Health Psychology, and use the database PsychInfo almost daily. I find the OvidSP platform to be very slow and cumbersome – and very much enjoyed using the trial for the EBSCO platform. Is there any chance MU might switch to that platform?

Thanks for your comment. Actually, the MERLIN consortium, which pays for PsycINFO, is soliciting bids right now that will determine whether we offer PsycINFO on Ebsco, Ovid or some other platform. We’re expecting an announcement sometime in April.

In the meantime, if you want to use Ovid to do a quick search, try clicking on the Basic Search tab. You can enter your complete topic the way you would into Google or Summon. Here’s a link you can use as a bookmark, which will be preset for you to do a basic search:

http://proxy.mul.missouri.edu:2048/login?url=http://ovidsp.ovid.com/ovidweb.cgi?T=JS&MODE=basic&NLP=y&NLPSPEED=nohypos&PAGE=main&D=psyh

So for example, you’d just put in your whole topic at once instead of search concept each individually, mapping, exploding and combining them.
To see how it works, type in: light therapy for bipolar disorder

If you copy and paste that link into your browser and bookmark it, it will open up to the Basic search automatically each time.

You can always switch back to the regular Ovid search in mid-search by clicking the Advanced Ovid Search tab when you want to take advantage of Ovid’s advanced search features to refine your search.

I just wanted to tell you about how impressed I was with one of your shelvers on 3 East. I think she was a part time student worker. When I passed her for the second time, she asked if she could help me find something, then took me to the spot on the shelf to help me locate my item. Wonderful customer service! I didn’t even have to ask for help.

Thanks for the comment. We aim to please! I have passed this along to the shelving department.