**Apologies for cross posting**

Dear all

From today, the NLH Single Search Environment is available for you, as NHS
library staff, to test.  Please do not make it available to your end users
yet - the full launch to the public will be on January 10th 2005.

We're releasing it to library staff early for 2 reasons:
1. It will give you a chance to familiarise yourselves with the search and
how it works
2. It gives you the opportunity to contribute to our testing phase prior to
the launch in January, and feedback your thoughts, comments and suggestions

The web address to go to is http://search.library.nhs.uk

There are a couple of things for you to be aware of.

Because this is still a test site, we cannot enable your individual Athens
passwords to let you log in and search all the resources.  Instead, we have
set up an Athens account for each Strategic Health Authority area.  When
you are using the site, please use these test accounts to do logged-in
searches and test the MySearch features.

Due to the nature of the lis-medical and lis-nursing lists, the Athens IDs
have only been emailed to the core-content and lis-lkdn discussion lists.
If you cannot obtain the passwords from those lists, please email
[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>, stating what your job
is,  which organisation you work for, and which strategic health authority
you come under, and he will send the relevant username and password to you.

Also, please remember that what you will see is just the first phase of the
work that is being carried out.  We know there is functionality that you
would like to see that isn't there for the first release on 10th Jan 2005.
Planned work for phase 2 includes assisted searching, terminology services,
relevance ranking, search history and user tracking.

The LKDN Informatics Group is also gathering feedback about the development
of the NLH site, including the personalisation and localisation aspects
which are related to the future development of the Single Search
Environment - see David Peacock's email to lis-medical on 9th November for
details of how to get involved.

If you want to take part in testing and send your feedback, please:
1. Print out the attachment
2. Work through the tasks and make any notes in the comments column (this
may take a couple of hours to do in one go - but you can work through it a
bit at a time)
3. Go to <http://www.insitefulsurveys.com/Survey.asp?SI=78646509802> and
enter your comments against the appropriate task number.  You hopefully
won't have comments to make about every task, so you can leave blanks on
the feedback form.  If you want to work through the tasks bit by bit, you
can send in your feedback bit by bit too - just choose individual task
numbers from the feedback form.
4. Please put your contact details on the form, so that we can contact you
if we need more detail or to clarify any of your comments.
5. If you encounter problems with the search, providing examples of what
you were searching for and in which databases will make it easier for us to
replicate the problem.
6. We need to have all responses for the testing back by Wednesday 22nd
December so that we can collate them and pass any necessary changes to FDi
(although you can continue to use the site to familiarise yourselves with
it after the 22nd)

Thanks very much
SSE Implementation Team