Friday, September 10, 2010

Emerging Technology in Medical and Health Information. MedLib's Round September 2010

The theme of this Round is: Emerging Technology in Medical and Health Information.

Due to a very low amount of submissions I feel obliged to write some post around the theme and the few submitted contributions.
I asked the colleagues specifically out there to post on the theme ánd comment on my Continuing Education Course (CEC) at EAHIl 2010 that was totally focussed on this theme, and help me that way keeping this public course up to date at :http://www.netvibes.com/emergingtechnologiesinlibraries.
The course touched emerging technology issues relevant for academic and medical libraries & librarians.

Is it the holidays? Do they not read my blog at all? :-) Is it too far from everybodies daily work? Too vague or abstract? I have been alerting for submissions on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, but maybe it is just bad timing.
You'll get a second chance ... (read the end of the post now)
For me this year, and a part of 2009 has been focussed on this topic, but not specifically limited to medical and health information. Technology is spreading and touching every sector of industry, business, education and even personal life. New technologies arising in one sector, can, to a growing extent, more and more easier applied to others. Working closely together with an academic library gives you, as medical librarian in a large teaching hospital an big advantage. Many medical librarians in Europe and in the world, work much more seperated. I had the privalige to be involved in organising a brand new conference focussing on these emerging technologies in academic libraries EMTACL10  with colleagues from NTNU UBit
Major topics there were:Mobile technologies, Linked data, Semantic Web, New literacies, Supporting research, Social Networks, Mash-ups and all the videos and presentations are still out there.
Here are the post that were submitted or selected by me for this Round


So, we have some interesting technologies presented in these posts:
  • Audience response systems (ARS) and Prezi
  • Location-based services
  • mobile applications
  • search and self-publishing tools


But there are so many more .... and many of us are wondering where to start (or to stop). At a meeting in Münster with a room full of German medical library directors ,we discussed what influence all these technologies could have on the library as organisation and on the staff for the future.
The results will be presented by Oliver Obst at the AGMB Tagung 2010, the national yearly meeting of German medical librarians.
You can get a good overview on existing technologies being used in academic libraries in:
Emerging Technologies for Academic Libraries in the Digital Age | by LiLi Li, Georgia Southern University, USA

Want to read more on what future technologies could hit our libraries? Read this:


Envisioning Future Academic Library ServicesInitiatives, ideas and challenges Sue McKnight, editor
ISBN: 978-1-85604-691-6
Or you can have a go at the high-quality presentations of the
Digital Libraries á la Carte 2010Tilburg University, the Netherlands, 26-30 July 2010 a whole week (5 days) modular course on digital libraries.
A few highlights are:


If you after reading this post, feel ready to contribute in any way .. write a comment or even better .. Submit your blog article to the next edition of medlib's round using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

4 comments:

Mark Rabnett said...

Thanks for your work on this. We do read your blog and are grateful for it.

Fat Loss 4 Idiots said...

If new technologies are arising in the medical fields then it would be very helpful for the patients regarding that field.

Kathleen said...

Guus,
Don't give up blogging - you are a beacon of light and knowledge for us medical librarian/bloggers around the world!

digicmb said...

Thanks Kathleen for the nice words! It's a great group, glad to a part of it!