We health sciences librarians take part in systematic review searches that in some cases involve very long search histories. The current Ovid platform allows saving of search histories either as non-executable text files, or as executable files inside Ovid personal accounts. Many librarians prefer the latter mode of saving because we can re-run and/or modify the searches easily.

As librarians we do searches daily, it is very easy to accumulate a very long list of saved histories in our Ovid personal accounts, which makes work less efficient because Ovid does not provide any form of filing by sub-folders or file management. Everything is in one clumsy long list. We need a way to archive older histories without deleting them or giving up the capability of reviving them with the click of a few buttons.

We would like to ask Ovid to develop a feature that allow users the option to save search histories on their local computers as executable text files. These text files have small file sizes, can be stored and archived easily on a local computers, can be re-executed on demand as long as the correct text files are uploaded to Ovid during a search session. These files can also be shared with library users so they can re-run the searches in their own Ovid sessions.

Example of such a feature can be found in the Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics) search interface.