DigiCMB

Yesterday I did the tour from Groningen to Amsterdam to The Hilton Hotel to participate in the Workshop about Web 2.0 and to listen to the lectures delivered in the afternoon sessions. The "IP-lezing" is the yearly do organized by the journal "Informatie Professional" To my surprise the rooms for the workshops were only partly filled. Not even half of the chairs was occupied, while the organization ensured us that ALL workshops were completely booked, with a waiting list! 32 Participants in a room for 150? The content of the workshop about Web 2.0 was not what I expected and to put it bluntly not worth the money, for me that is. Although the presentation of Simon Lande was a nice overview of mainly the definition of Web 2.0, it never got any deeper than a introductory level. Instead of getting deeper into Web 2.Nought, by for instance looking at services that Libraries already have created with some kind of mash-up, we had to think about how to use blogs & wikis...

A few weeks have passed since I first mentioned the Second Life Library 2.0 initiative from Alliance Library System and OPAL I must admit I got a little dragged in .... I am now "in charge"of the Second Life Medical Library 2.0 and have a special building to take care of. Luckily two people from the US are joining me in this adventure. This will make my boss very happy, as usually meetings in Sl take place at 17.00 SL Time (02.00 over here!) or later. Have a look at some pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/13641057@N00/ Remind you this is all still very out of interest from my part and not part of my actual day job (Real Life RL or First Life)-;) But interesting things are developing .....into serious business. Lots of workshops, meetings, sessions are organized in or around the Second Life Library Buildings. It draws a lot of attention. And believe it or not .... the Medical Library is going to have it's first trial to an online database for Consumers Health in J...

Published in JMIR by Günther Eysenbach : "A study published today in PLoS Biology provides robust evidence that open-access articles are more immediately recognized and cited than non-OA articles" This editorial provides some additional follow up data from the most recent analysis of the same cohort in April 2006, 17 to 21 months after publication. These data suggest that the citation gap between open access and non-open access papers continues to widen. I conclude with the observation that the “open access advantage” has at least three components: a citation count advantage (as a metric for knowledge uptake within the scientific community) an end user uptake advantage a cross-discipline fertilization advantage. More research is needed, and JMIR is inviting research on all aspects of open access. ......." J Med Internet Res 2006;8(2):e8)doi:10.2196/jmir.8.2.e8

Thanks to: eHealth The British Medical Journal has rolled out a Best Treatments website billed as "clinical evidence for patients from the BMJ". It has two searches - one for patients and one for physicians as well as an index of health topics. However, selecting a condition as a US user gives this message: Sorry, BestTreatments is available only within the UK." You are then directed to MyUHC.com if you are a member of Consumer Reports Medical Guide . Consumer Reports offers some information but also encourages the user to "Subscribe to ConsumerReportsMedicalGuide.org for the in-depth report, including comprehensive Treatment Ratings ."

The EU Launched a new Public Health Thematic Portal. The Health and Consumer Protection Directorate-General is pleased to present the Health-EU Portal (the official public health portal of the European Union) and the wide range of information and data on health-related issues and activities at both European and international level. The main objective of this thematic Portal is to provide European citizens with easy access to comprehensive information on Public Health initiatives and programmes at EU level. The portal is intended to help meet EU objectives in the Public Health field, it is an important instrument to positively influence behavior and promote the steady improvement of public health in the 25 EU Member States. Target audience: The Health-EU Portal is directed at those who want to keep informed about issues affecting their health, and at those who wish to keep up to date with policies and decisions taken at European, national and international level. The Portal is also ...

The latest issue of Internet Reference Services Quarterly is completly filled with articles about the relation between Libraries and Google. Simultaneously published as "Libraries and Google " : "Learn to give your library patrons better service—using Google" One of the articles: Using the Google Search Appliance for Federated Searching: A Case Study Page Range: 45 - 55DOI: 10.1300/J136v10n03_06 Mary Taylor This article discusses the University of Nevada, Reno's experiment of federated searching with version 4.1 of the Google Search Appliance. The project's testbed included locally held CONTENTdm and geospatial data collections and a sample of records from EBSCO's Academic Search Premiere database. The latter set of records revealed the GSA's limitations in being able to index and retrieve content that is dynamically generated and that requires third party authentication. Keywords: Academic Search Premier, dynamically generated content, EBSCO Aca...

Open J-Gate: An Electronic Gateway to Open Access Journals From the nn/lm scr blog Greg Bodin From the Open J-Gate website: Open J-Gate is an electronic gateway to global journal literature in open access domain. Launched in 2006, Open J-Gate is the contribution of Informatics (India) Ltd to promote OAI. Open J-Gate provides seamless access to millions of journal articles available online. Open J-Gate is also a database of journal literature, indexed [...] It offers now 3000+ OpenAccess Journal with 1500 of them peer-reviewed!

A survey of the use of electronic scientific information resources among medical and dental students by Kalle Romanov and Matti Aarnio BMC Medical Education 2006, 6:28 doi:10.1186/1472-6920-6-28 Published: 9 May 2006 Abstract available (provisional) Conclusions Use of electronic resources differs among students. Forty percent were non-users of full-text articles. Information-searching skills are correlated with the use of electronic resources, but the level of basic PC skills plays not a major role in using these resources. The student data shows that adequate training in information-searching skills will increase the use of electronic information resources.

Again The Krafty Librarian puts into word the opinion of many librarians in her post about Google Dilution? There are so many "Googlettes" or Googlings available that we start to loose the overview, and we don't like that. "The big thing many of our users want right now are meta search engines that will search the library catalog, MEDLINE, other databases, online journals, open access respositories, and their high school locker from 1973, all in one fell swoop" No, that not what they want, it's what they expect! (It is what we -librarians want -;) Théy want to be told that the search they did in .... was efficient and covering all their possibly relevant resources. If somebody does not tell them otherwise, they assume it was. I see comparable developments with PubMed, developments that are happening now with Google. Pubmed is seen as THE resourse for biomedical literature worldwide and was in it's first design with search aids like "mapping"...

Again an interesting article in the Journal of Medical Internet Research . This time a systematic review about the PDa use by Health Care Providers. Some Conclusions: Younger physicians and residents and those working in large and hospital-based practices are more likely to use a PDA. PDA adoption rates are already high and projections are for rapid growth in the short term. In general, it appears that professional PDA use in health care settings involves more administrative and organizational tasks than those related to patient care physicians are likely accustomed to using a PDA, and, therefore, technology expertise will probably not be a barrier to implementing PDA applications. there is an urgent need to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of specific tasks using handheld technology to inform those developing and those using PDA applications. This really does not bring up shocking news, but it proves again that medical libraries could (and should) do more in this area. We sho...

Do you know the feeling something is eating up your time, at work and private? Can you imagine how it feels if you can not do your daily feedreading, digest the content and come up with relevant stuff for your work? (No. it's not a writers block-;) For me it's a combination of being in a process of physical rehabilitation (patellar tendon rupture) and having so many things to do, after being away some time . There is somewonderfull stuff to do for the library. So, this time I made this digest of things that deserve more attention, but I am not abled to do that at this time. These are my "Keep New"items from Bloglines focused around a few topics, with some comments: E-BOOKS New NLM Gateway Resources THE BOOKSHELF By Greg Bodin on general (all entries) From the NLM Technical Bulletin: NLM Technical Bulletin May-Jun 2006 Technical Notes Two New Resources have been added: Household Products Database and the Bookshelf , a growing collection of full text biomedical boo...

This is a post about mentioning a small project about PDAs for Nurses. With the selected content that is offered it would be a great start for something simular here. We could add UMCG protocols as well. It could be a great way to bring the library closer to the nurses. Nursing Students and PDAs Post By The Krafty Librarian After UMASS faculty and librarians noticed nursing students using and relying on traditional medical reference books, systems librarians Apurva Mehta and John Callahan and assistant professor Patrick Scollin decided to create a better way for student to access library resources and texts at the point of care. The UMASS team applied for and received a grant for $18,000 and began a PDA loan program at the campus library. Students began to borrow and use the PDAs while on clinical rotations. The program is now in its second year and there are 35 PDAs for loan at both UMASS Lowell and Boston campus libraries. Five PDAs are held by professors instructing nursing clinic...

In Usatoday : Google Health: Probably coming next week Next Wednesday at the annual Google Press Day "exciting" announcements will be made. Marissa Mayer , Google's VP of search products and user experience, did not want to say very more to the editors of USAToday, but perhaps there will come an end to the speculations about such a health search portal by Google. She did mention that Google will start to integrate video into the results and that the presentation of the results will "change a lot" the next couple of years. P.S. Sorry Andre, i did not read your post earlier. Having so many Groningen blogs to keep up with is good for discipline, but the risk of duplication is getting higher!