The Vancouver Coastal Health library team serves a large georgraphic area in southwestern British Columbia.  We wanted to reach out to allied health professionals in our health authority as we noticed that they were not heavy library users. In order to support their work and promote the use of library resources, the library created a special website comprised almost entirely of content from RSS feeds in order to help allied health professionals keep up to date on what’s new in their discipline.

In addition to current health headlines from respected news sources (CBC, WHO, BBC, Health Canada and the BC Ministry of Health) the library team sought to provide our users with a single place to go to view the most recent review articles, research articles and practice guidelines available, especially those that are related to their specific discipline.

We promoted the idea by presenting at professional practice committee meetings, staff meetings and departmental/discipline councils.  We asked that the leaders of each allied health profession speak to their colleagues about the website and determine the subjects they felt they needed to keep up to date on.

The library staff then performed in-depth and focused literature searches using MEDLINE, CINAHL and PsycINFO on the ebscohost platform, using the list of topics provided by the health practitioners. The searches were saved as alerts to be run daily and exported using RSS feeds.  The feeds were then loaded onto our website.  What the users see are the five most recently indexed articles on the topics they determined were most relevant to their discipline and their work. View the website at www.vchlibraryservices.blogspot.com.

The titles of the articles for each search/RSS feed on the site link to the citation and abstract on ebscohost where they can view the full-text article if it is available.  In addition to the RSS feeds for each search alert we also placed a link back to the original literature search on the site so all of the articles on a topic can be seen, not just the most recent.

Presently, we have 84 search alerts feeding into the website.  They are categorized by the various allied health disciplines, with each discipline having its own page.  The content of the site is automatically populated by search alerts and daily news feeds.  As such, it is always up to date and very easy to maintain.

For me, the trickiest and most rewarding part of creating this service and the website is actually doing the literature searches.  As much of the allied health professional literature is found across multiple databases I had to be very creative when designing the search strategies.  Cross database (multifile) searching is always tricky, especially when you are trying to be really precise.  Incorporating subject headings, applying limits and removing duplicates from multiple databases is not easy, especially when you have to keep all of your search terms in a single “search”.

I found that, at least in ebsco, subject alerts don’t work if you combine search sets ((1 OR 2) AND 3…).   I didn’t have any luck creating search alerts with RSS feeds from Ovid due to a problem with compatibility.  I also tried getting feeds from PubMed but found the links were not stable.  Ebsco was the only database provider that was able to do what I had envisioned.

What started out as a small idea and something fun to muck around with has grown into a great new service that is truly relevant and patron driven.  The VCH library staff has yet to determine how to accurately measure the site’s usage and impact.  Our users, however, love what we have done for them and provide us with great feedback. We continue to get requests for additional topics and are looking forward to expanding the service to other health professionals in our health authority.

For more information, contact, Shannon Long, Librarian, Vancouver Coastal Health Library Services at (604) 244-5165 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .