Library websites are important for marketing library services and providing access to electronic resources.
To determine the extent and quality of medical college (school) library websites in Pakistan, according to predetermined criteria.
A checklist of 40 items was developed from the literature on academic library website evaluation as well as observation of known best practice. The checklist was used on the 45 medical college websites that fitted initial inclusion criteria.
Of the possible 114 candidates for inclusion, 52 institution websites contained no information about the library, 17 only provided minimum details, leaving 45 medical college library websites that could be included. Library websites lack uniformity, and most of the important features as only three library websites contained more than 20 items from the checklist. The Agha Khan University Medical College, Karachi library website contained the highest (27) number of items.
The findings indicate the design of medical college library websites is generally inadequate in Pakistan. The websites are not performing a useful role in communicating with faculty and students. The findings point to inadequate website design skills among librarians or the lack of co-operation with professional website designers.
Marketing of library services and good customer relations demand improvements in the information architecture of medical college library websites as well as continued maintenance of the content to ensure that it is up to date.
Systematic reviewing is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. Information specialists are maintaining study-based registers to facilitate efficient conduct of systematic reviews. Classification of study-level meta-data -such as interventions –can result in much more accurate searches, saving time in the early steps of systematic reviewing.
To classify all pharmacological interventions from all schizophrenia trials.
We used Cochrane Schizophrenia's Study-based Register as the source of trials, Emtree and MeSH for synonyms, AdisInsight and CT.gov for research drugs and WHO ATC for marketed drugs.
One third of tested interventions on patients with schizophrenia are pharmacological (816; belonging to 106 clinical classes) with antipsychotic drugs being the most researched (15.1%). Only 528 of these medications are listed in WHO ATC. Around one third of these drug interventions are seen only in research (236; from 21 pharmacological/biochemical classes). Within the pharmacological interventions, we identified 28 ‘qualifiers’ including dose, route and timing of drug delivery.
Identification and classification of pharmacological interventions from trials require use of many sources of information none of which are inclusive of all drugs. Limitations of each source are helpful to understand. Classification of non-pharmacological interventions is now a priority for clinical and information scientists and professionals.