Bank holiday opening hours - Monday 25 May 2009

The Royal Free Hospital Medical Library will be open on bank holiday Monday 25 May 2009, from 10.00am - 5.00pm.

Resources on Swine flu

The Royal Free Medical Library has compiled a list of links to information and web resources on Swine Influenza (A/H1N1). Sources include:

Collections of information / summaries of evidence
Guidance and clinical guidelines
Original articles
General and patient information
News and blogs

If you have suggestions for further resources to be added, please contact Angela Young.

Bank holiday opening hours - Monday 4 May 2009

The Royal Free Hospital Medical Library will be open on bank holiday Monday 4 May 2009, from 10.00am - 5.00pm.

Royal Free Library Easter 2009 opening hours

• Monday 6th April 2009: 9am-10pm
• Tuesday 7th April 2009: 9am-10pm
• Wednesday 8th April 2009: 9am-10pm
• Thursday 9th April 2009: 10am-5pm
• Friday 10th April - Monday 13th April 2009 inclusive: CLOSED
• Tuesday 14th April 2009: 10am-5pm
• Wednesday 15th April 2009: 9am-10pm & return to normal opening hours

New training timetable now available

A new timetable of information skills training sessions from the Medical Library for April to August 2009 is now available.


We offer sessions on literature searching using health and medical databases, resources for evidence-based practice, critical appraisal of a journal article and using Reference Manager software to organise and cite your references. If you are a researcher, why not come to our 'Assessing the impact of your research' session, where you can learn to use resources that provide citation data, such as times cited and your h-index.

We also offer library inductions on a drop-in basis on Wednesday afternoons at 3.00pm. For more information see the library's information skills training web pages.

EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service)

EThOS is a new British Library service aimed at providing digital copies of UK PhD theses direct to the researcher, over the web. It is a database containing over 250,000 UK theses with the added functionality to enable the requesting of digital copies of selected theses.

Researchers do not need to be registered with the system to search the database, but will need to register if they wish to request a digital copy of a thesis.

Many of the participating UK institutions support Open Access to their theses, so downloads of these digital and digitised theses are free to the researcher. UCL is an Open Access sponsor.

Where a thesis must be digitised before supply, there will be a short delay before it is accessible. However, the requester will be informed when the thesis is available and can then log on to the system and download the thesis. The theses are supplied as zipped pdfs. Alternative formats (CD or paper) are also available for purchase.

EThOS can only offer the theses of participating institutions. Whilst it is expected that a large number of institutions will participate, the British Library cannot supply from an institution which chooses not to. In this case, it may be possible to obtain a copy via UCL Library Services' Inter Library Loan Service. A list of participating institutions is available at http://ethos.bl.uk/HEIList.do

There is an FAQs page and if you have any other queries about the service, contact the ILDS office at interloans@ucl.ac.uk

EThOS was launched in January 2009 and is currently in Beta phase. Over the coming months you will see enhancements to the service.

BMJ Best Practice

UCL has a trial of BMJ Best Practice until 11 March 2009.

Best Practice, part of the BMJ Evidence Centre, is a decision support tool that combines the latest research evidence with guidelines and expert opinion. It takes a patient-centred approach that covers diagnosis, prognosis, treatment and prevention in step-by-step stages.

Please send feedback on the BMJ Best Practice trial to ejournals@ucl.ac.uk. Feedback helps librarians assess the importance of new resources.

• Access the BMJ Best Practice trial
• Trial expires: 11 March 2009