DigiCMB

Thanks to Dean GiustiniUBC Google scholar blogger . January 30 2006 "The National Library of Medicine is retooling its PubMed search engine....according to an article in today's Bio-IT World PubMed getting a makeover . David Lipman , Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), says that he has consulted search engines MSN Search , A9 Search and Google " Dean sees three main search issues for possible improvements to become more user-friendly: address users' demands for easier navigability (represented by Google and Google scholar provide better interoperability within citations to NCBI genome data (which Google cannot do) link to full-text outside of the NIH to items in open access repositories and in the deep web. The article mentiones that "The goal is to make it easier for users to uncover information related to their query, which may remain harder to spot with the current system." according to David Lipman. If you take in...

I found this link in the blog of a Dutch digital trend watcher ( Frankwatching ). The wiki publishes a almost endless list of things you can do with RSS. It is updated frequently. A few remarkable items: follow webstats via RSS: Via www.urltrends.com you can get the amount of incoming and outgoing links from your website. Ofcourse you have to register to activate the rss-functionality make a TAG-cloud of your or any collection of RSS-feeds to show visually what keywords are popular/important. http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/DIGICMB/default/50 Wotzwot lets you make a RSS-feed maken of almost any website, this can be useful for sites who don't offer RSS yet! Just mention a starting and end point of the specific page. With FeedFire it is even simpler: just add an url, push the button and there you have an RSS-feed (not 100% mind you). Another "feedscraper", but Feed43 makes it possible to convert elements of pages into RSS instead of the standard complete page. Keep...

Today I started to understand how podcasting works. It's plain simple a RSS-feed delivering audio-files! Just suddenly while working on a test-toolbar ( http://digicmb.ourtoolbar.com ) to improve our QuicksearchCMB medical library Toolbar (http:quicksearchcmb.ourtoolbar.com) and adding the radio-element into the Toolbar I saw the option to add podcasts ( www.effectivebrand.com ) into the radio just next to your favorite radiostation! A quick and dirty search for (medical) podcasts and I could add a few examples like: instant anatomy (via http://www.podcastalley.com/ ) Journal of Medical Practice Management EduKast podcast on "ICT en Onderwijs" (in Dutch) Noorderlicht VPRO (Science & Dutch) If you subscribe to the RSS-feed of the podcast by entering it into your podcast-"player", or in this case into the radio-element of the Library Toolbar (and anybody can even without an account of Effectivebrand) you will automatically will receive the available podcasts ...

Manhattan Research to Host Webinar on February 15. The insight and data are based the comprehensive telephone-based research study titled, Taking the Pulse® Europe, conducted among more than 1,000 physicians from Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom in the fourth quarter of 2005. These European physician market trends will be discussed in a free webinar titled The Year Ahead: European Physicians Online in 2006 on February 15th at 9:30am EST/ 2:30pm GMT The 5 trends are, according to Manhattan Research: 1. Reliance on the Internet : Accessing for Professional Purposes On a daily basis, 84% of all European physicians use the Internet (for any reason). A majority of their access is for professional use, such as online journals, searching literature databases, accessing clinical trial information, and searching for prescription drug information. 2. Technology Infrastructure : Well Established In addition to using the Internet for professional purposes, 86% of Europea...

From: Press release, Philadelphia, PA, USA - London, UK - January 20, 2006 " THOMSON SCIENTIFIC AND MPS TECHNOLOGIES ( www.mpstechnologies.com ) AIM TO GIVE LIBRARIANS A CLEARER UNDERSTANDING OF HOW JOURNALS ARE BEING USED. A collaboration between Thomson Scientific and MPS Technologies aims to build links between their library products. MPS has launched ScholarlyStats , a service which consolidates usage reports from multiple platforms to give one view of usage. Thomson Scientific’s forthcoming Journal Use Reports will provide a unique offering for libraries, to combine data on usage, citation and institutional academic research. By integrating these two products the companies aim to enhance the ease of access to this valuable data for information professionals. Thomson Scientific’s Journal Use Reports will be a new tool to provide libraries with a 360º snapshot of the utilization of all the journals and serials. This tool will harness the power and depth of Thomson Scientific ...

Another Elsevier news: the launch of a citation tracker in Scopus promises easy use of citation data to researchers. If this use is or will be as usefull as the Web of Science tools will be clear the next years. I think they will not stop at this and develop more. A quick scan tells me you can only evaluate 500 records at once and the data is limited to 1996. Although, a quick selection of 509 records from the hospital returns no error .... We will have to evaluate Scopus more and compare it to WoS. At this moment the scope of Scopus is too little. Everybody likes the search-interface and the way you can limit functions, but there are serious gaps in the content they are offering at this time. I am convinced that -to be a real competitor against Web of Science from the medical perspective- they have to integrate more content and it should not be their own content if they are sensible. The question is who will be the first to succeed in integrating the largest and best medical resour...

I must admit, a large bloglines subscription can be some kind of a burden, but i prefer this "burden" 10-times more than having to read all those emails you get returning from a shorter or longer leave when you are not abled to physically read them. So, i'll just summarize a few items with short comments from the last week I missed: Library 2.0 : Notes on OCLC's seminar at ALA Conference http://acrlblog.org/2006/01/23/rebranding-your-library/ Bedtime reading: Overview of Library 2.0 by Walt Crawford: http://cites.boisestate.edu/civ6i2.pdf " Do we need a Unique Scientist ID for publications in biomedicine?" http://www.bio-diglib.com/content/2/1/1 I just rembered this after reading the same question within the RUG-community. I think we do need this to improve scientific value, making knowledge management easier and more efficient. In a global perspective hunderds, maybe thousands are working on scientific output, evaluating, comparing the figures for the...

Just bumped in today, a book-review in InformationWeek of September 2005 explains the content of “The Google Legacy'' the book by Stephan E. Arnold and reveales the possible longterm goals of the Google Firm. Practically this means: the focus is on an accelerated use of high-speed fiber and wireless that could be used to deliver Google technology together with WiFi, VOIP, WiMAX ... Desktop Office Software: Google’s RTF (the mechanism in Gmail to add fonts, bullets, colors, etc. to a Gmail message) feature already implements some 70 percent of the functions of Microsoft Office; Google Maps has underlying technology that could compete with Microsoft’s PowerPoint and this all next to Google's search technology together with developments in communities forms the company's strategy for the next 10 or 15 years ... " Google's Patents Reveal Strategy To Beat MicrosoftAccording to history is about to repeat itself. Microsoft today is where IBM was years ago. And Goog...

Changing a Cultural Icon:The Academic Library as a Virtual Destination An EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 1 (January/February 2006): 16–31. Jerry D. Campbell Jerry D. Campbell is Chief Information Officer and Dean of University Libraries at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. A must read review, be sure to read the comments of the ARCLog !

Jenny Levine comments on ongoing discussions about Library 2.o, the nex generation of library services ...... "For me, "Library 2.0" is not just about making your content easier to use online or getting feedback from your users. It's about letting others use granular pieces of our content where they want, when they want, how they want, automatically, specifically online (although users can then also mash our content however they want in the physical world, too). Read that over a second time and you'll see that it is a very new concept for libraries." That is the part i like.... but Jenny explains about how she thinks about different aspects within the discussion. I am going to look for more info on the Library 2.o. A quick search gave we a white paper/pdf of Ken Chad and Paul Miller of TALIS called "Do Libraries matter? The rise of Library 2.0" Furthermore i subscribed to an excisting search via Technocrati for blogitems about Library 2.o

"Don’t Change The Resources, Change How Users Experience Them" It is good to see more dicussion about how to get our users to our resources! User education is one subject libraries do need to do differently from the way they have been doing it for years. But it has to be more convincing, more enthausiatic, with more passion and of course more integrated in medical teaching and together with the new technologies the students are already using. I must read more at the blog Creating Passionate Users and dig in.

Brand new article in JMLA via PMC : Google Scholar. Reviewed by Rita Vine, MA, MLSIn: J Med Libr Assoc. 2006 January; 94(1): 97–99. Copyright © 2006, Medical Library Association From Rita Vine: "Google Scholar gets better at indexing PubMed content, but it's still several months behind. With over a year since the launch of Google Scholar, I thought it was time to revisit my test of Google Scholar's indexing of PubMed content. In my Sitelines article, Google Scholar is a Full Year Late Indexing PubMed Content of February 8 2005, I ran a test to see how GS's coverage of PubMed stacked up. Using a randomly selected list of clinical trials on breast cancer (I wanted important articles that no physician would want to miss) spanning approximately 18 months of publication coverage, I discovered that GS was about one full year behind in coverage of PubMed. So, has anything changed? To re-test the coverage, I chose another 10 clinical trials on breast cancer from the curren...

Richard Akerman created a starting page in the Wiki for Widgets and asks -as i did previously- everybody to contribute to this page! http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Widgets

In the brand new NEJM-article Searching for the Right Search - Reaching the Medical Literature (Jan. 5, 2006, v. 354: 4-7) the author points to data compiled by High Wire Press, that Google provided the majority of referrals to articles in HighWire (56.4%). In fact, PubMed only accounted for 8.7% of the referrals to HighWire articles. While the number of searches conducted in PubMed has increaded to about 70 million/month, there is also an increase in number of people who are referred to PubMed citations and abstracts through Google searches. Comment of Krafty : So, like it or not, we are in a Google searching world. Comment of Oliver Obst : "Heute legen wir unseren Benutzern die MeSH -Suche ans Herz, morgen sind wir froh, wenn sie überhaupt Medline benutzen" My Comment: Further research into origin, habbits and search-behaviour of users is always usefull. It would be good to see how many of those Google users are from Universities who use SFX/Metalib or any other link...

Besides the Library Toolbar there are more little (or bigger) search gadgets possible. I am just trying to collect the ideas and could need some help! Please do not hesitate to contribute to this blog! The overview on http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Web_Browser_Extensions gives a overview of possible browser extensions but there is more. Here are a few nice gadgets I think are worth mentioning: a Library Search Widget ( http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/2005/08/cisti_ becomes_k.html (I just recently walked into the widget because the famous Rijksmuseum Amsterdam created a widget with different famous pictures appearing everyday on your desktop.) Microsoft Library Research Pane : http://catalogablog. blogspot.com/2005/11/ms-office-2003-research-pane_15.html ( http://www.ovid.com/site/about/press_release20030821.jsp? top=42&mid=52 ) The Desktop SideBar : http://scilib.typepad.com/science_ library_pad/2005/08/ google_sidebar_.html I think they should be ent...

First of all: A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO EVERYBODY! "May the library be with YOU!" Picked via old fashion mail discussion list LIS-MEDICAL@JISCMAIL.AC.UK from Andrew Booth. SLIM: Slider Interface for MEDLINE/PubMed searches This SLIM slider looks an interesting way of applying limits to Medline. In particular the study design field is potentially interesting for EBM http://pmi.nlm.nih.gov/slide/ This fits perfectly into the knowledge that users do like more VISUAL and GRAPHICAL interfaces. The Net-Generation will like this, it is ease to understand and the options are clear without having to read a lot of explanation. Learning by doing ... It seem the interface (the presets) does NOT go very well with FireFox, but maybe this is temorarily ... See also: SLIM: an alternative Web interface for MEDLINE/PubMed searches - a preliminary study Michael Muin* , Paul Fontelo* , Fang Liu* and Michael Ackerman* http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6947/5/37