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.