NMAP celebrates its second birthday

During April, NMAP - The UK's free gateway to high quality Internet
resources for Nurses, Midwives and Allied Professions has been
celebrating its second birthday.

The NMAP service, which can be found at http://nmap.ac.uk/ was
launched during April 2001 and since then has served over 3 million
pages of information to its users.

NMAP aims to help students, researchers, academics and practitioners
find the information they need from the Internet without endless
hours of searching. Each of the 2800 Internet sites in the database
is hand selected for inclusion within NMAP, and is evaluated
according the BIOME Evaluation Guidelines
(http://biome.ac.uk/guidelines/eval/). This ensures that a search of
the NMAP database only returns links to Internet sites and resources
relevant to nursing, midwifery and the allied health professions.

NMAP also provides the core database for the professional portals
within the National electronic Library for health (NeLH).

An evaluation of NMAP was completed by 671 users.
. Findings indicate: -
· 88% of respondents were able to find the information they
wanted easily.
· 84% rated the relevance of the resources they found as being
Good or Excellent.

Further evaluation work is underway looking at the ease of use, and
in conjunction with this we will be enhancing the pages to make key
information even easier to find.

Last year the NMAP team authored two freely available online
tutorials as part of the national Virtual Training Suite (VTS).
The `Internet for nursing, midwifery and health visiting'
and `Internet for Allied Health' tutorials aim to teach Internet
information skills in specific subject areas, looking at key
resources in the field, how to search for resources, and how to
evaluate the information that you find. The tutorials can be accessed
from http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/

NMAP is produced by a core team of information specialists and
subject experts from the Universities of Nottingham and Sheffield and
the Royal College of Nursing assisted by other key organisations
throughout the UK. NMAP is an integral component of OMNI (Organising
Medical Networked Information), a well-established service that has
been serving the UK health and medical communities since 1994. NMAP
provides more specialised information for the nursing and allied
health communities, focusing on information of relevance to nurses,
midwives, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, dieticians,
health visitors, podiatrists, chiropodists, speech therapists,
theatre practitioners and radiographers. OMNI and NMAP form part of
BIOME, the health and life science hub of the national Resource
Discovery Network (RDN). The RDN is funded by JISC (the Joint
Information Systems Committee).


Notes for Editors:

The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ provides a
series of high quality subject-based Internet services, together with
the convenience of an interdisciplinary tool, designed to help users
gain maximum benefit from the Internet.

The JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) is a strategic
advisory committee to the UK higher and further education funding
bodies. The Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Further
Education Funding Council, the Scottish Higher Education Funding
Council, the Scottish Further Education Funding Council, the Welsh
Funding Councils and the Department of Higher and Further Education,
Training and Employment currently funds the JISC. The JISC works in
partnership with the Research Councils.

CONTACT: Lisa Gray, BIOME, Greenfield Medical Library, Queens Medical
Centre, Nottingham, NG7 2UH. Telephone: 0115- 8493251 Email:
help@...