Official launch of LIVIVO – The Search Portal for Life Sciences
“The test phase is over. LIVIVO is now the only search portal offered by ZB MED,” said Ulrich Korwitz, Director of the ZB MED, addressing around 100 invited guests at today’s ceremony held to mark the launch of LIVIVO. “As well as bringing all our life science subject areas together, LIVIVO also represents an improvement in search technology which gives users even more accurate results,” Korwitz continued. With the LIVIVO discovery service, users can carry out interdisciplinary searches of 55 million records from 45 quality-reviewed specialist databases.
The new search technology uses specialist ontologies from the life sciences which are integrated in the search portal. As well as finding specific terms and groups of words, the portal also returns hits containing alternative word forms, synonyms and abbreviations – not just in English, but in multiple languages. Users can also filter their results by the subject areas of medicine/health, nutrition, the environment and agriculture.
The list of search results in LIVIVO offers additional information on how users can access the texts and other related materials. Wherever possible, links are provided to freely accessible sources and full texts in order to promote the concept of open access. Where available, articles also feature links to the research data they are based on.
LIVIVO has also been designed to identify which journals are licensed and freely available at whichever search location is selected (e.g. on a university campus). Users can also use LIVIVO to request the delivery of documents directly from ZB MED using the library's document delivery service for its own stocks or its full service package for third-party holdings.
Usability test phase
A beta version of LIVIVO went online in April 2015. The purpose of the test phase was to check and further enhance the functionality of the new portal. To make it as user-friendly as possible, the LIVIVO test phase also included a usability study run as a student project as part of the MALIS (Master in Library and Information Science) course at the Technical University of Cologne. The test participants confirmed the user-friendly nature of the LIVIVO interface and provided useful suggestions for improvement, some of which have already been implemented in the ongoing development process. Far from being a ‘static’ product, LIVIVO is constantly evolving.
Closure of previous search portals
The previous search engines MEDPILOT and GREENPILOT, which were separated into subject areas, were taken offline on 10 November 2015. From now on all users will be automatically redirected to LIVIVO. Users with MEDPILOT and GREENPILOT accounts will simply be able to use their access credentials on the new search portal.
