Presenter Notes The Knowledge Network - A Brief Tour Slide 1 This ...

Presenter Notes
The Knowledge Network - A Brief Tour
Slide 1
This presentation is a brief tour of The Knowledge Network website created and maintained by Knowledge
Services Group of NHS Education for Scotland.
Slide 2
This is the homepage of The Knowledge Network.
The pages on the website are made up of a series of feature boxes called widgets. A widget is a labelled box
holding text and pictures, like the Explore Knowledge Network Features, Announcements or What is Here
for Me? boxes shown here. The widgets or boxes of content at the foot of the page can be removed from
the page, moved around on the page and, their content can be changed so that it suits your needs.
Slide 3
Near the top of the page, you can see several tabs : Home, Portals and Topics, Communities and so on. The
homepage is built this way to help you find the tools and information available through The Knowledge
Network.
The Portals and Topics page for example holds information and links to all of the portals attached to The
Knowledge Network. A portal is a page or collection of pages on a single subject.
The Communities page holds general information about communities, information to help you with your
communities and, when you’re logged in to the site, this page also lists all the communities you’ve joined. A
community is a group of people who work together on a shared interest.
When you’re using tabs, the selected tab always changes colour – to help you retain your sense of
direction!
There’s also a blue band just under the tabs where important announcements are displayed. If you prefer,
you can close this band after you’ve read the message.
Slide 4
Looking at the homepage in more detail……
Registering with The Knowledge Network lets you get to 1000s of full text journals, 100s of ebooks, and
more than 100 databases. This is information paid for by Knowledge Services Group that you can use at no
charge.
Your registration lets you use all of these things from any computer, anywhere, any time.
To register for your password and username, click the link in the top right of the home page, then follow
the on-screen instructions.
The Help and Training link in the middle of the homepage takes you to the section where you can find help
on using The Knowledge Network and information on upcoming training sessions.

Slide 5
On every page of The Knowledge Network, there is a search box.
The search box on the homepage offers most options. If you use the search box as it is, your search is a
basic one and uses the whole of The Knowledge Network to find what you’re looking for. You can also limit
the search to only clinical evidence and guidance by clicking the little button next to that option.
If you choose advanced searching, you can add more search terms to focus your search better.
You could also choose to search only the library. This lets you search for a journal by its title, for an article
within a journal, or for a book.
There are two further presentations in development to help with searching. One is called How to Search
and describes the basic mechanics of searching electronic resources and the other is Searching The
Knowledge Network about applying search techniques using The Knowledge Network as the search-source.
Slide 6
The key areas widget gives each audience single-click access to its own tailored area of The Knowledge
Network. As you can see, there are areas dedicated to Admin and Support Services, Social Services,
Management, Evidence into Practice and Quality Improvement. The Admin and Support Services link takes
you directly to the Admin Centre.
Slide 7
The Features widget allows you to scroll through a series of important features and functions available
through the website and to link to any of these you might like to explore further. Scroll by clicking the white
arrow heads and explore a feature by clicking in its box.
Slide 8
This is the lower part of the homepage.
You can change the display here by adding and removing widgets and re-ordering them in this panel to suit
yourself.
To move a widget, click on its title-bar and drag it to the position in the panel where you’d like it to appear.
To add or remove widgets, click Add a Widget to the Panel by clicking here.
Slide 9
This is the widget library which you’ll see after clicking the Add a Widget link.
The names of currently displayed, removable widgets are shown in the top half of the page. These are
removed by clicking the cross in the little box beside the widget name.
You can add widgets by choosing the ones you’d like from the library in the lower half of the page.
Slide 10
This concludes The Knowledge Network tour. We hope it’s been helpful. If you have any questions, please
contact us at the email address shown here.

And…. look out for the Knowledge Nuggets, a regular news-sheet that gives details of planned training
sessions and other updates from Knowledge Services Group.