new technology in the human services

This review was published in NTHS Volume 10:2 pp 19-20


Carolyn Roberts is a Senior Information Officer, Liverpool John Moores University. Contact her at:

Aldham Robarts Centre,
Liverpool John Moores University,
Liverpool, L3 5UZ
UK

email: leacrobe@livjm.ac.uk

Peter Sharkey is Principal Lecturer in Social Work, Liverpool John Moores University.

Contact him at:
School of Law, Social Work and Social Policy,
Liverpool John Moores University,
1 Myrtle Street,
Liverpool, L7 4DN
UK
email: p.sharkey @ livjm. ac. uk

caredata CD

Reviewed by Carolyn Roberts and Peter Sharkey

National Institute for Social Work Information Service, (1994), caredata CD.. the social and community care database, January 1997 edition, Windows version  National Institute for Social Work.

The National Institute for Social Work (NISW) has been at the forefront of developments linking information technology to social work. It hosts the email discussion group uksocwork in the UK. It was amongst the first social work organisations to set up pages of information on the World Wide Web. This is a site that is recommended to our social work students for its useful content.

NISW is involved with a project to increase the use of the Internet and the World Wide Web amongst voluntary organisations. It also produces caredata.

The caredata Compact Disc service was launched in March, 1994. It is currently in use in over 120 locations throughout the United Kingdom. It was first made available as a DOS version but from 1997 it is available in both DOS and Windows. This review is of the Windows version. The CD is updated quarterly, and comes with a manual, a list of keywords and a hard copy monthly listing of caredata abstracts which have been recently added to the database. To purchase the CD to run on a standalone personal computer will cost an academic institution £600 plus VAT per annum. There are supplementary costs to this for a network licence going up to an extra £400 plus VAT for use by 20+ users.

For the technically minded and those who need to know, caredata uses HEADFASTICD retrieval software. The system requirements for a standalone Windows version are an IBM compatible PC, Windows 3.1 or higher, CD-ROM drive (ISO 9660) with MSCDEX DOS extensions, SMB hard disc drive free, 4MB+ available RAM, and EGAIVGA monitor. Installation is quick and easy, and involves simply running a set-up file from the CD using your program manager. This takes just a couple of minutes. The manual is easy to follow, with well laid out descriptions and diagrams of the screens.

caredata CD consists of a single CD-ROM disk containing three databases:

* the main caredata database of over 30,000 references to a wide range of social work literature.

• a full-text database of the UK Department of Health circulars from 199516.

• an international Social Work database of over 1,600 references from the main Social Work journals throughout the world.

The Windows version displays a choice of the three databases on start-up. Once you have made your choice a form appears displaying the fields which you can search in. By in-putting words on entry lines of the form the user can search in one or a combination of fields. Truncation is available using *. As an example, if you go into the main database and type in 'elder abuse' in the caredata keywords :field, it will come up with 218 items from a variety of sources. There are icons at the top of the screen and by clicking on these you can then obtain more detail about an item, mark an item, sort items, write them to a disk and print them out. Simply placing the mouse over the icon brings up a description of it so this makes the database easy to use and find your way around. There is a good on- line Help facility which is comprehensive and detailed, including diagrams and hypertext links between items.

The entry lines have their own index so it is easy to browse each index to obtain a sense of what is there or to check spellings. The index is also useful when searching by author. As well as verifying existence and spelling you can pick up any different index terms that exist for the same author, for example, D. Miller, Dave Miller and David Miller.

To give another example - say a student knows that the journal 'Community Care' is in the library and wants details of any articles on 'poverty' within that journal. 5/he can type in entries as shown in the screen below to give her/him a listing of possible relevant titles. A search would find 77 articles related to poverty between 1987 and 1996.

These results are displayed in a short summary screen. A double-click of the mouse on any item takes you to the detailed display which contains bibliographic details, caredata keywords, the NISW Library accession number and shelf location, and an abstract. The retrieved items can be tagged and printed out or downloaded to a disc. All of this is a really helpful resource and service - producing very quickly a printed list of references which can then be turned to on the library shelves.

Students do sometimes use databases and then feel frustrated that they only have ready access to a small proportion of the items. caredata has made a start in providing some 'full text' material with selections of articles from four journals, the Joseph Rowntree Findings, the NISW Briefings and newsletters and some NISW publications. We imagine some of the negotiations with publishers are difficult but this (so far) limited availability of full text articles is a welcome move in the right direction.

Having the DoH circulars available in full text on a separate database is very helpful. You can just 'browse' down the list of these and have a look at those which are of interest. The third database is an international Social Work database. Many courses have rightly developed an international dimension to their teaching but staff knowledge and library resources have sometimes lagged behind. This makes this database on international social work especially helpful as a resource for students and staff.

We have a few minor criticisms of the database. When combining keywords using the index, the Boolean operator is set on OR rather than AND. We suspect that your average user is not geared up to the searching of synonyms, and wants to simply combine two or more concepts. We would suggest therefore that AND should be the default. Keywords can also be combined on the initial search screen, without the need to check the index. However they must be linked with '&'. A search using 'and' leads to non-retrieval of results. Again this alteration would make using the CD a lot more intuitive. A further cosmetic change would be to add descriptions to the detailed display, describing AUTHOR, TITLE etc. While most of these are fairly obvious a format description has obvious benefits. Many students initially have trouble differentiating between different references i.e. whether the reference is to a journal article or a book, and a handy prompt would be welcome.

These are improvements we would like to see rather than criticisms of the database, which is one of the more user friendly CD products on the market. It covers a very wide range of 'welfare' topics so could be useful to many different types of student. It is certainly an invaluable addition to any social work library and well worth the investment.

For further information about caredata, contact Simone Casey at NISW +44 (0)171 387 9681 (email: scasey@nisworg.uk)

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The journal has now ceased publication (2003)