PCEL - Help Section

Primary Care Electronic Library (PCEL) Community Health Sciences St. George's, University of London Cranmer Terrace, London, SW17 0RE Email: pcel@sgul.ac.uk
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Help

PCEL is written using Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) which conform to World Wide Web Consortium standards. To confirm this click on the XHTML or CSS links in the footer of each page. In order to make PCEL more accessible to users with disabilities, a text only link is provided in the top right hand corner of each page. The text only content is drawn directly from the source of the refering page, ensuring that it is always up to date. Accessibly pages confirm to the Double A standards of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI-AA).

The search facility, available from the top left hand corner of each page and the home page, performs a boolean search on the resources indexed in PCEL. Some of the boolean operators available include:

+	A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in the returned search results.
-	A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in the returned search results.
*	The asterisk serves as the truncation (or wildcard) operator (eg respir* will match respiratory and respiration)
"phrase"	A phrase that is enclosed within double quote (") characters matches only search results that contain the phrase literally.

Full instruction on the use of boolean search operators can be found at the MySQL Reference Manual. An advanced search facility is provided for those users not familiar with boolean operators and those who wish to search indiviual database fields.

The three directories (custom directiory, Medical Subject Headings and SNOMED CT) are arranged in a similar fashion. This is illustrated in the diagram below:

Directory structure

A	Header. Contains information regarding the current browsing point in the directory. The title of the current concept, as well as a link to its parent, is displayed.
B	Sub-categories. A list of all the sub-categories of the current concept is displayed. Following each sub-category in parenthesis is the number of resources contained in children of the subcategory.
C	Resources. A list of PCEL resources categorised under the current concept.

Last updated: Thursday 6th May 2010