It was a while back that I caught the video on the PDB site which explained all the functionalities that its interface has. It was nice to see the video uploaded on Bioscreencast.com.

It would be a huge understatement in this genomic age to say that Biology now largely resides in the database. Be it PUBMED or FlyBase We have databases which range from the all encompassing to the niche. While many are automatically put together, a significant number of them are manually curated.

As Jon Udell wrote in his article on search strategies, the tacit skill required to query these databases is something that not all of us possess. Some of us are better queriers than others. Screencasts, which are basically movies of your computer screen are a very effective way of communicating user database interactions.

At Bioscreencast.com we made it a point to have a category called “Database and Biosearch”. Like the screencast from the PDB we are happy to have contributions from other Databases like the new Uniprot to niche ones like the Membrane Protein Databank.

It will be great to see more of such screencasts, from curators and end users alike.