The Bioscreencast Blog

How often have you heard someone say ” I dont know how you look for something in there” . Database querying and search has become an essential skill to possess in this genomic age.  Be it PUBMED , FlyBase or the PDB, we all rely on these databases to find our everyday information.

As Jon Udell commented in  his article on search strategies, database querying is definitely a skill , and good searchers tend to have deep and hidden reservoirs of tacit skill that they can harness . And, as he says , like many other skills effective search can be learned.

We at Bioscreencast.com believe that screencasts are a good way to capture user-database interactions . It was for this reason that we decided to have a category in our library called “Databases and Biosearch”.  Thanks to uploads like the recent one from the PDB , we have user uploaded screencasts that show you how to search databases, ranging from the new Uniprot database , the gaggle proteomics workbench to the Membrane Protein databank .

We hope that the next time you hit on a clever querying strategy  or put together a public database, you screencast it for us all to benefit from.