This week: miniguide on consumer resources for drug and supplement safety. These resources were found in the INFOMINE database. INFOMINE also offers resources for nutrition, food safety, health conditions, preventive medicine, clinical trials, and practice guidelines. (Links in this paragraph direct you only to free resources. Customize your own search using INFOMINE Advanced Search.)
Dietary Supplements Labels Database
Ingredients and labels of more than 2,000 brands of dietary supplements.
Herbs and Supplements : MEDLINEplus
For each herb or supplement an evidence-based monograph gives the following: description, synonyms, tested and traditional uses in humans and animals, doses, safety, interactions with other herbs/supplements/drugs/foods, and bibliography.
Mayo Clinic : Drugs and Supplements
Look up information on prescription drugs, non-prescription drugs, and dietary supplements.
DailyMed : Current Medication Information
The National Library of Medicine provides the information from package inserts and drug labels of FDA approved prescription medications. Includes description, clinical pharmacology, indications and usage, contraindications, warnings, precautions, adverse reactions, dosage, and supplemental material.
Drugs@FDA : A Catalog of FDA Approved Drug Products
Drugs@FDA, is a searchable database that offers information about most human drugs approved by the FDA since 1939. It contains information about approved prescription drugs, some over-the-counter drugs, and discontinued drugs. For each drug you'll find FDA application number(s), active ingredient, therapeutic equivalents, strength, dosage, marketing status, labels, approval history, and approval history documents.
October 26, 2007
Drugs and dietary supplements
October 18, 2007
Science and educational video miniguide
Once a week, we'll feature several resources from the INFOMINE database in a miniguide on a particular topic. The miniguides are intended to be samplers of our coverage, not comprehensive lists.
This week, a selection of science and educational video websites:
SciTalks
SciVee
NASA Video Gallery
MedlinePlus Videos of Surgical Procedures
Folkstreams : The Best of American Folklore Films
Open Vault : WGBH Media Library and Archives
Many more websites offering video and multimedia can be found in INFOMINE. Use the keywords video or videos in your search; or navigate to the subject area that interests you and choose Resource Types in the browse options. Select "Video" to view all the records in a category which contain video content. Record annotations generally indicate whether a site is exclusively video-based, or whether it offers videos together with other content.
October 14, 2007
Government blogs
INFOMINE's Government Information category features a large selection of official government websites, information about government(s), and data from government sources.
We have a selection of government blogs catalogued; recent examples:
Dipnote : U.S. Department of State Official Blog -- blog on foreign policy and activities of the U.S. State Department
Gov Gab : Your U.S. Government Blog -- government information for everyone; conversational format with links to agencies, National Parks, and other government resources of general interest
Also added recently is a directory of U.S. government blogs:
Blogs from the U.S. Government : USA.gov
October 12, 2007
Quick facts
Take a look at our General Reference Resources to find reference websites in 19 categories. The pages offer good coverage of their topics. Categories include colleges, dictionaries, eJournals, and writing guides, among others.
October 8, 2007
Search tips
Our Search Tips page demonstrates the many ways to formulate a search using INFOMINE. Here you can also see an explanation of the metadata we use in our records. In addition to controlled vocabulary like the Library of Congress Subject Headings, we also tag records with keywords.
One of our unique features allows anyone using INFOMINE to browse subjects, keywords, authors, titles, and resource types. For example, on the Social Sciences and Humanities subject page the browse options are displayed in the bottom bar of the search box; they are displayed thus on each subject page. This browse function can also be used when you run a search from the INFOMINE main page. Select the [More Info...] link under any entry in your search results, and you may then click any of the authors, keywords, subjects, or resource types to find related websites in INFOMINE.
October 5, 2007
Open access ejournals
INFOMINE, in addition to providing records from our editors and an optional subset of "robot" created records (viewable by marking the checkbox "Include Computer-Selected Websites" on the search results page), also offers catalog records from the Shared Cataloging Program. These entries do not appear on our What's New page; it is reserved for human-created entries.
There are a few ways to isolate open access electronic journals in your search. From the INFOMINE Electronic Journals search page, either select "Free" in the Resource Access dropdown, or enter the term "open access resource" with your search term in the main search field. Shared Cataloging Program records in INFOMINE generally use this tag to indicate a free resource, though it may also indicate (and provide a link to) a portion of free resources within an otherwise access-restricted site. In this way, searching with the included term of "open access resource" may return a larger number of records than simply selecting "Free" in the Resource Access box.
A reference librarian is your best source of information if you are unsure about the access requirements of any fee-based resources.
October 1, 2007
RSS feeds
This summer, INFOMINE implemented RSS feeds for our main What's New page and all individual subject pages. What's New displays the resources added by our editors within the past 20 days. You can find them here:
