ProQuest has acquired British Nursing Index (BNI), a database for nursing and midwifery in the UK, that has been compiled through a partnership of the libraries at Bournemouth University, Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, the Royal College of Nursing and Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust.
This interesting tidbit of news was brought to our attention by KnowledgeSpeak in their post, “ProQuest acquires BNI.” This is part of a longtime relationship through Dialog, a business unit serving the professional market.
Their challenge is to index more than 240 English-language titles, including essential international nursing and midwifery journals and selective content from medical, allied health and management titles. They rely upon indexing by librarians with experience in providing information services to nurses and midwives.
Many people think of midwidery as old-fashioned. Some people think of human indexing as old-fashioned, too. However, both are highly useful and at home in the digital world. We hope that the human indexing is computer-assisted, though.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
Both midwifery and manual indexing are traditional and highly skilled practices, and both have seen a resurgence where human care, interaction, and quality are valued. Computer technologies are great but are not the full solution. They shouldn’t stand alone without human monitoring and oversight–for proper quality control and ability to intervene to maintain the best results.