SSSC 23 Things Digital - Thing 7: Finding Resources

SSKS is vast! I've heard of IRRIS before but not Social Service Knowledge Scotland.  I have made an Open Athens account for myself, but I have to say a lot of the resources that come up in my searches are a bit technical, the jargon is above my head.  There is so much just on the SSKS site but I can see the potential to use Open Athens to research some of the trickier support issues I come across, or evidence the benefit of some of the initiatives I want to try to present to dubious colleagues.  

SSKS will now be my go to place to find information or learn about what I need as everything is there in the one place for reference.  I searched for information on PTSD, trauma AND OCD and will go back to collate and read through certain snippets I found.  There's a surprising amount of info on Vitamin D and schizophrenia which hasn’t been so easy for me to find on google alone.  I find it means more to service users when I can officially reference information from an official health source rather than from the media in general so yes SSKS will be so very helpful in all sorts of ways. 

I have used google advanced search before.  I have led some service users through an Open University Digital Skills course where one of the exercises was to learn how to use google advanced search which a couple of folks found helpful as one wanted information based from Australia to help support her dad and another saw the benefit of using date ranges in furthering her ancestory searches.  

Overall SSKS is the official place I need to go to, to source reliable, relevant work related information and enable referencing professionally.