Help

About PHORMS

At the core of this site is the Public Health Online Resource Management System (PHORMS).

Resources

PHORMS manages and facilitates access to resources. A resource could be a Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat document, an Excel spreadsheet, an Access database or a graphical image. It could also be an event, an item of news or an individual’s contact details.

Searching

The website is database-driven. The database stores information about every resource (metadata) which is interrogated when you enter a search term in order to find resources.

Interoperability

Some other former Public Health Observatory websites (ERPHO, SEPHO, and LHO) were built using the same technology and can communicate with each other. The means the user can choose to search all four websites at the same time and retrieve a much fuller list of resources. This is an interoperable search.

Registration

Becoming a registered user of the website will enable you:

• To access discussion groups
• To access restricted material
• To add your own resources to the website database
  To use ‘Network’, an online address book of public health professionals that includes their interests and skills

Searching

There are two different ways of searching for resources:

Quick search

Entering a search term in the Quick search box on the menu bar will look in any of the following fields: title, description, body, URL, description, rights, spatial coverage, creator, publisher and contributor.

Standard logical operators are supported:

• Use an uppercase ‘OR’ between search terms to retrieve pages that include either term
• Use an uppercase ‘NOT’ before a term to exclude it in the search
• If more than one search term is entered with any logical operators, the ‘AND’ operator is entered automatically to restrict the search to only those resources that match all the terms entered
• Use ‘AND’ to group terms and operators, e.g “Derbyshire AND NOT (county OR council)” will retrieve resources including the term “Derbyshire” but not “county” or “council”

All text searches support phrases, stemming and word variations:

• To search for phrases put quotation marks around the words
• Use the % character either side of the term for word stemming
• Use the * character at the end of a term to search for word variations
  

Guided Search

To come…

Downloading files

Most resources on this website are in the following file formats:

• HTML is the basic file format used on the Internet, this page is in HTML format. It is our policy to make as much information as possible in this format. Resources may also be made available in the following formats.
• DOC is the file type for documents created using Microsoft WORD. This is a widely used word processing package.
• XLS is the file type for documents created using Microsoft EXCEL. This is a widely used spreadsheet package.
• PPT is the file type for documents created using Microsoft Powerpoint. This is a widely used presentation package.
• Portable Document Format (PDF) are usually electronic copies of paper documents. To read them you will need a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader.