DigiCMB

The first week of the new year is dominated by my quest for a new mobile phone. My work htc tytn II is 2 years old, but what's worse, is it's inability to keep connected to any providers network. I only use it for wifi-access .... My personal Samsung "died" in Portugal. My boss is waving around with her personal new iPhone and I keep feeding her with nice (medical) apps.  I am limited to a business phone subscription provided by KPN, and they don't deliver iPhones. And if you want a new phone, you just have to buy a new one. No nice deals including new phones... So, how can I buy an iPhone, make my boss pay and still use the KPN as provider? I do not JUST want an iPhone , I want to make a library application for the iPhone. The trend is "going mobile". Within the hospital I see more and more staff and students using iPhones or "simular" devices. Hospital policy is NOT to support any other but the standard issued devices. But with our conte...

If library patrons are using your expensive database interfaces for extensive search, you are fine. If you suspect they prefer another database, that's free, fast and simple, you're in danger. If you can prove they really use that free, fast and easy search, you're too late :-) So, our users think our resources are not fast and not easy to use. We HOPE they know it's not free, although this perspective can go both ways in .. They might even say "Well, it's not worth the money, because of poor performance and not being user-friendly.. We like them to believe it's worth the money, because WE decided to buy it based on it's quality. If they don't think it's worth they money, how do they think about us? Besides free, fast and easy, there some other reasons for patrons NOT to use our preferred licenced databases: they simply don't know about them, or  they can't tell the difference or the added value for that matter they can't fi...

Roy Tanck 's Flickr Widget requires Flash Player 9 or better. Get this widget at roytanck.com The IPC of the EAHIL2010 Conference did meet in Lisabon, Portugal on December 14-15th. On the agenda: abstract grading, presentation schedules, Continuing Education, poster sessions, venue exploration etc. The local programm committee did an enormous job preparing almost everything in a proposed agenda and conference schedule. It is amazing how much has to be done to run a conference of this size. While we were dining in Restaurant Valbom , close to our hotel Sana Executive , they were probably still preparing for our arrival on Monday morning. The meeting was hosted in the facilities of Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian surrounded by a wonderful garden  Jardim Calouste Gulbenkian . After a little slow start on grading and discussing the large amount of abstracts for papers and posters (140+), we managed to finish them all at the end of the 1st day! It was an honour t...

NARCIS ,  the gateway to the Dutch Scientific information (National Academic Research and Collaborations Information System)  has included a new repository: the repository of the NIVEL : the Dutch Institute for research of health care. It concerns about 2500 open access publications, that is 40% of the publications of NIVEL. "NARCIS provides access to 381,311 scientific publications ( 191,575 of which are open access publications), 8,930 data sets, and information on researchers (expertise), research projects and research institutes in the Netherlands"  It will be developed within the framework of SURFShare , in close cooperation with the Dutch universities and NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research). 37 Repositories are now included in NARCIS .  MYCROFT SEARCH PLUGIN As of now a so-called NARCIS search plugin is available for the Internet Explorer and Firefox browser at the Mycroft Project page: http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.ht...

The library organised a open meeting for staff of the UMCG on December 7th, focussed around the scientific database SCOPUS. The audience (53) -mainly researchers and a few clinicians, but also a couple of librarians of the Library of the University of Groningen . (we simply couldn't keep them out of the room :-)- were gathered in the so-called "Rode Zaal". Presenter was Chris James , Account Development Manager at Elsevier. In his first session he covered the basics of Scopus and tried to get some response from the audience. Some remarkable responses: "who is using Scopus?" : no hands. (Scopus became available at the University in the second part of 2008) "Web of Science" : no hands Comment: Clinical and medical research staff is using Pubmed heavily. Database choices and search habits are hard to influence and change takes time. We probably also got a relative "new" group of researchers. And still a lot of work to do as library in re...

A lot of useful information about the role social media is playing now related somehow to the (public) health. If you got no vision on social media versus health or health care, this is the presentation to watch. To tweet or not to tweet? : Exploring the use of Social Media for [public] health View more presentations from Francisco J Grajales III . Related articles by Zemanta Why don't the healthcare companies use social media? (startups.com) 5 Reasons Corporations are Failing at Social Media (rachelcarterpr.blogspot.com) How has Twitter improved your health? (medicineandtechnology.com) Healthcare Debate Explodes on Twitter (huffingtonpost.com)