The continuing information problem

"For many practitioners working in the field of social care or social work access to information is a continuing problem. Work time is dominated by heavy caseloads and there often is a lack of awareness of, and access to, information resources. As a result the practitioner often falls back on the 'quick and dirty' search on Google and is then faced with vast amounts of information, much of it not validated. Yet enormous benefits could be gained from using specialist bibliographic databases covering social policy and practice to find existing research and practice evidence.

To address this issue staff at the Centre were actively involved in facilitating the grouping of these five UK specialist database producers through a major database vendor."

Alan Gomersall, ESRC Centre for Evidence Based Policy and Practice