DigiCMB

The new corporate blog of BlackBoard offers interviews with several interesting experts in the field of educational technology. ARCLog points us to George Lorenzo, writer, editor and publisher of Educational Pathways, a newsletter that covers online learning in higher education". He focuses on one item in the interview about information literacy : "Everything surrounding what information literacy and information fluency mean today is a very big topic. A new generation of students are Googling their research, instead of going to the scholarly research that one can’t find so easily on Google. For instance, I think there are many more problems related to plagiarism today. In K-12, students now customarily go online and copy and paste information so easily without appropriately attributing their research. This is a problem, I think, that is going to grow larger." Other relevant recent posts are about blogs, podcasts and rss ...

"Drs. Daniel Pauly, director of the Fisheries Centre at UBC and Stergiou (of Aristotle University in Greece), compared WoS and Google Scholar using 114 papers from 11 disciplines from 1925 to 2004. With papers published pre-1990, they found that citation counts were more or less proportional. When Thomson ISI revealed that a paper was cited 10 times as often as another in the same field, Google Scholar usually found the same 10-1 ratio. Surprisingly, for post-1990 papers, the actual number of citations was almost the same." From: Dean Giustini , UBC Google Scholar Blog Can we conclude that this outcome is also relevant for the discipline Medicine? Another study that reaches some of the same conclusions: http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.IR/0504036 It is good to follow the discussion via http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/googlescholar/archives/023442.html

Spotted by Dean Giustini : " Google Hires A Physician - For Google Medicine? Dr. Larry Brilliant has been hired to lead Google.org, the search giant's philanthropic arm. Larry Brilliant is a physician, epidemiologist and specialist in international health. In the 1970s, he took a lead role in the WHO's campaign against smallpox and worked for the United Nations in eradicating blindness and polio. In 1978, he founded the Seva Foundation, an organization committed to sharing technology and skills with the developing world. The executive and staff at Seva, based in Berkeley, California, are an eclectic mix of social workers, doctors, engineers and new age types working to close the digital divide. Has Dr. B. heard of Google Medicine? Now there's a legacy assignment for him. With about a billion dollars to spend, how about allotting some Google foundation money to improving access to information for developing countries?" Will Google go as far as Bill Gates do...

Case study about EZproxy log-files that can be used to study user behaviour "Lessons learned from analyzing library database usage data " by Karen A. Coombs Library Hi Tech, Volume 23 Issue 4 2005 (pp. 598-609) In addition to our statistics of SFX-usages log-files and together with the stats we get from the publishers this should make a great subject for study!

Is it a thought to make the overview of Dutch Librarians blogging by WoW! Wouter over het Web more visible to everybody by inviting the bloggers to make themselves visible via Frappr Blogging Librarians ?

The annual Horizon Report of the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI)identifies and describes each year six areas of emerging technology likely to have a significant impact on teaching , learning , or creative expression in higher education within three adoption horizons: a year or less, two to three years, and four to five years. The areas cited for 2006 are: • Social computing • Personal broadcasting • Cell-phone-accessible educational content and services • Educational gaming • Augmented reality and enhanced visualization • Context-aware environments and devices A report certainly worth reading!

Internet Librarian International 2006 Information Today invites proposals for presentations at Internet Librarian International 2006, to be held at the Copthorne Tara Hotel in London, UK, 16-17 October 2006. The emphasis is on the practical rather than theoretical, and on case studies and proposals about initiatives in your library, not product pitches or overviews. From: Karen Blakeman Podcasts in Libraries: overview http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Podcasting Applied Surface Science: Blog-based research notebook: Personal informatics workbench for high-throughput experimentation Very interesting article... Blog-based research notebook: Personal informatics workbench for high-throughput experimentation f/t via Science Direct (sub req'd) doi:10.1016/j.apsusc.2005.03.235. From: Christina's Lis Rant How about the Aquabrowser implementations at Libraries? Testing DynaMed The medical library Homburg/Saar is testing DynaMed (comparable with UpToDate?). From: MEDI...

Just a summary of interesting items I came across, but had not time to mention before Metadata and Data Quality Problems in the Digital Library "Jeffrey Beall’s new article in the Journal of Digital Information (6.3) describes the main types of data quality errors that occur in digital libraries, both in full-text objects and in metadata. Studying these errors is important because they can block access to online documents and because digital libraries should eliminate errors where possible. Some types of common errors include typographical errors, scanning and data conversion errors, and find and replace errors. Errors in metadata can also hinder access in digital libraries. The paper also discusses the responsibility for errors in digital documents and offers suggestions for managing digital library data quality." From: http://digitizationblog.interoperating.info/?p=287 "Millenial Net Value(s): Disconnects Between Libraries and the Information Age Mindset is a p...

The "Krafty Librarian" published a mixed list of medical podcasts, partly for consumers and for medical professionals. The list contains 34 podcasts of which there 4 already with VIDEO. http://www.kraftweb.net/kl/podcasts.doc I have not had time to listen to them all, but I want to give you a few examples: - Access Medicine http://books.mcgraw-hill.com/podcast/acm/ - DentalCast http://www.dentalcast.net/ - Nature http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index.html - New England Journal of Medicine http://content.nejm.org/misc/podcast.shtml - Science http://www.sciencemag.org/about/podcast.dtl

Readers of my blog know I am convinced that libraries should get their services into the various user environments. I will go a long way to prove and investigate this. Libraries are always thinking about how to get responses from users, doing surveys, questionnaires. My organization is a large Academic Medical Center with 8000 staff members. I found out a perfect way to scan how much the organization is aware of your services! It's gives you a view from almost all departments of your hospital. You get direct response from everybody. You get inside info on how efficient different departments work and how communications are between them. I am surprised nobody else thought about this before. It's so obvious. You become a patient in your hospital! Do an "undercover" act and start at the A&E department. If you want to do it really convincing, you involuntarily rupture you patella of your right knee. From there you get diagnosed by interns, checked by medical staff...

The biggest problem with pda's for medical purposes is the screen size. For many things doctors need bigger screens. Phones are growing more and more into complete pocket workstations. I think "smart phones" will be the future. Or to put it better, you will have ONE tool in the future. It will be a portbale workstation, with flexible screen, an infrared keyboard. You will use it as your tool to manage and interact with work and social communities in the most broadest sense. Pda's are changing into gadgets that can phone, but the gigantic numbers of cell phones is dictating the market and therefore the research and development. Philips is heading into the right direction with it's ROLLABLE DISPLAY to be used for all kinds of gadgets, like cell phones The size is really amazing and i think it will be growing. There is a huge market for services via the Internet, and Philips realizes that people will use their phones even more if the displays would be larger. I w...

Title Blog: "One Entry to Research : critical assessment of Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar" Updated by Lars Iselid, Umea university Library, to document a swedish BIBSAM-project. (Thanks Wouter for the news and for the kind words about my blog!) This blog is about comparing three mayor players (who are trying to beat each other) to gain commercial success, but do they also want to improve the scientific research? Scopus has started the process with new features, but ISI is also developing things and Google .... who knows what they are developing in pre-beta ..? This blog will be followeded very closely from Groningen .

FrankWatching starts a series of blogitems about subjects concerning Web 2.0 developments. The first part is about completely automatically generated news-sites without editors and all, build with content of other websites, blogs etc. Ok, it's in Dutch, sorry. Maybe I'll make a summary later or you can ask him to publish also in English? Can Google Translate from Dutch to English already?

A "have to read" item StevenB from ARCLog: "If you are exploring whether or not to get into federated searching at your library take advantage of a good post over at The Distant Librarian about a recent federated search symposium sponsored by the Alberta Library. There are some good notes on Roy Tennant’s presentation about the implementation of a federated search system for the California Digital Library, a speech by the product manager for Google Scholar, and presentations by federated search system product vendors. It looks like the sort of information that could be of use in the decision-making process" And what if you already have such a system like Metalib from Ex Libris? I will read the notes on Tennant, Google Scholar and the rest and come back with a quick&dirty evaluation.

I am interested in ALL reference services, and so far only heard people talk about SMS. Via ARCLog I now came across a podcast from PALINET about SMS Reference Services at the Sims Memorial Library at Southeastern Louisiana University. I have not been abled to listen to it, but according to ARCLog it is certainly worth listening. And the discussion on the blog gives extra food for thoughts!

"The Nature Podcast was launched in October 2005. It quickly climbed into the iTunes Top 50 in the US, the UK and other countries. The number of weekly downloads is now well over 30,000 and continues to grow" (Press release Nature, noticed by Oliver Obst, medinfo weblog ) You can listen to it from your Ipod, or your pc with your audio player, but you could also try it from within a browser toolbar with radio-element (see for example my testtoolbar: http://DigiCMB.ourtoolbar.com/ ) It's also nice to have a good radiostation to listen to while working.