All the wonders of an Athens account

Hello all. Yesterday I explained about the wonderful things we have in the library to offer. Today, I shall dazzle you with the magic of on-line resources.

SWICE homepage

YOU can search the healthcare databases, access e-books, e-journals and much more by simply registering for a NHS Athens account at the SWICE (South West Information for Clinical Effectiveness... in case you're interested!) page. The registration process is FREE, very straightforward and if you use a trust PC you can activate your account pretty much instantly. For those of you who have registered before, but need to do so again, you will notice that layout is a bit different. This is because of an "upgrade" (apologies for the slight cynical sarcasm) recently, but it works in much the same way. Just make sure you enter 'Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust' as your organisation and a email will be sent to you with the activation link. Click on the link, set up your own password and ta-da!... you now have an NHS Athens account.

So what do you get with an Athens account? Well, as I said previously you'll now be able to carry out literature searches using the healthcare databases including MEDLINE; CINAHL; BNI and more. You'll be able to save, retrieve and print your search results and (fingers crossed!) link to the available full text articles.
You'll also have access to over a 1000 journals on-line. You can search for journal titles and see what access there is here. If there is access to the journal you're looking for, the search results will display the start and end dates of availability. It will also tell you if the journal is available in print at the library. If the journal isn't available electronically or in print and you want an article from a particular issue, let us know and we'll get it for you, no problem.
The e-books that are available can be found here. You'll also be able to find them by searching the library catalogue.

But databases, books and journals are not the end of it, no sir. Your Athens username and password will also let you access lots of other exciting things such as Anatomy TV, BMJ Learning and UpToDate. Links to these sites can also can be found on this blog and I'll go into more detail on each later on... oh the anticipation!

For those of you that haven't already rushed off to register/re-register/renew your Athens account, I'm sorry if this post has sounded a bit like a sales pitch. We really just want you all to make the most of this brilliant resource that will hopefully help you achieve top quality evidence-based care (there I go again... sorry!).

As with anything library or information related, please contact us with any questions or queries we're always more then happy to help.

Until next time...