VIRTUAL LIBRARY
QUOSA Virtual Library is a highly versatile document management system with uses ranging from allowing a small team of researchers to share scientific literature related to their subject area to providing a very large company or institutional repository of annotated scientific papers, presentations, patent documents for access with rich search options.
QUOSA Information Manager leverages QUOSA Virtual Library as a source of full-text articles when automatically retrieving journal articles from user searches in PubMed, Ovid, and similar gateways - thus automatically delivering internally available documents.
Sample Virtual Library Use Cases:
Common repository for laboratory documents
Many academic labs currently have no way to efficiently share their various documents, from interesting articles from a journal to internal laboratory documents such as PowerPoint presentations, images, laboratory meeting notes, etc. With the Virtual Library, laboratories can publish all of their documents into one place (with many folders), and all of the documents and articles can be searched in full-text. Of particular note is the problem of managing images. Some labs have started to import their image files into PowerPoint slides and add a caption to the image describing what it is. This caption can be searched by the Virtual Library, giving the lab members a way to search their image repositories.
Medical librarian monitoring research topics for clinical researchers
Clinical librarians are occasionally asked to monitor the literature on a specific topic for a group of clinical researchers. QUOSA and the Virtual Library can offer the librarian an easy, efficient way to gather and distribute this information to the researchers. First, the librarian could set up an alert in QUOSA to monitor a topic (or set of topics with Batch Query). When the alert has run, the librarian could preview and/or add annotations to the articles of interest. Once they have an article that they’d like to send to the clinical researchers, the librarian can simply drag and drop the article to the Virtual Library, and each of the clinical researchers that has access to the Virtual Library folder will be notified of the update the next time they launch QUOSA. Using QUOSA and the Virtual Library can offer the librarian great gains in efficiency in finding, curating, and delivering relevant articles to clinical researchers.
