DigiCMB

Just a few days ago I had a discussion about our OPAC with a colleague. I told her that the overviews we are making of our medical library collection by subjects and by publication type should be possible to generate easily from within our Library Catalogue. And not only by us, but of course by the users. The overviews are only useful if the Catalogue is properly maintained and if all records get proper subject keywords. Our Catalogue it the typical example of a by-product of a acquisition system, a traditional library system with modules that focus on administrative functions instead of functional services for the users. Tomorrow I am going to show her the new Catalogue of the North Carolina State University (NCSU) and let her read the column of Roy Tennant in LibraryJournal.com of a few days ago. Fixing Library Discovery By Roy Tennant , LibraryJournal.com, June 15, 2006 http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6341887.html Roy mentions s he is "seeing some major new interfac...

The following text can be used to "brainwash" new library staff, library school students and in certain cases to give existing library staff a new "mindset" if they seem to be stuck in a 20th-Century mindset. Print these lines on a Virtual Librarian Trading Card and pass them around in Library World. They can be used as meditation Chant. Wake up and practice every morning. Gather your staff each morning around the coffee machine and chant for 5 minutes. Never leave the library if you haven't read them outloud at least once a day. These are the first lines: All technologies evolve and die. Every technology you learned about in library school will be dead someday. You fear loss of control, but that has already happened. Ride the wave. You are not a format. You are a service. The OPAC is not the sun. The OPAC is at best a distant planet, every year moving farther from the orbit of its solar system. The user is the sun. The user is the magic element that transform...

Do we say "NOUGHT or Oh"? During the last IP-lecture about "Zoekmachinaties / "SearchMachination" there was short and not conclusive discussion about how to pronounce Web or Library 2.0 . According to the typical british Simon Lande it should be "TwoPointNOUGHT". In fact that was the only way he ever heard it, if I remember correctly. What I suspected that day was confirmed yesterday while listening to a group Americans in an OPAL session. It must be a UK versus US-english thingy. I cleary heard Michael Stephens say it numerous times: Web TWOPoint OHHoe. So if you are planning on presenting about this, make your pick -;) Technorati: Categories: OPAL , programming , libraries , Secondlifelibrary , web2.0

What is happening with Ask.com? They certainly decided to put some extra effort (and money) in it. Not only did they started a new search service for blogs , it is now also possible to make a connection to your our own collection of search databases & resources. The default search engine for the Effectivebrand.com Toolbar is Ask.com. If you have an EffectiveBrand Toolbar like the QuickSearch CMB Toolbar you can add (almost) ALL of your exclusive databases to search via the Toolbar. In that case all users HAVE to install the Toolbar. However, there can be a lot of reasons why someone is not able (or allowed) to install it at their work. Now they can use -for the search function of the Toolbar at least- the following link: http://search.platformaonline.com/Results.aspx?q=patellar+tendon+rupture&ctid=CT142118 This link merges the Ask.com search engine with the databases from the CMB Toolbar via the EffectiveBrand site. The result is that anybody can see and use all "...

Just to let you know what's happening in the virtual world ... Health information is one of the leading uses of the Internet by adults. Second Life Library and Medical Library are offering some programs to help you ("Consumers in general") find credible information. The programs are free. June 21: Finding and Evaluating Health Information on the Internet – Maxito Ricardo ( Tom Peters , OPAL Coordinator) will show attendees how to look for health information on the internet and how to evaluate it.June 28: EBSCO Consumer Health – The Library has received a new trial for access to Ebsco Consumer Health Complete, a database with articles on a variety of health topics. Times: at 1:00 p.m. sl time and 7:00 p.m. sl time: Central Time15:00 & 21:00, Dutch 22:00&04:00 -;( June 28: EBSCO Consumer Health – The Library has received a new trial for access to Ebsco Consumer Health, a database with articles on a variety of health topics. Times: at 1:00 p.m. sl time and ...

Want to see and hear the Creator of the Tame the Web Blog about Library 2.0? 4 sessions of one hour on one day about: WEBLOGS & LIBRARIES: An in-depth look at the Biblioblogosphere -- all things blogs, libraries and librarians. We'll discuss best practices and lessons learned to make your library blog the most dynamic area of your web site! Time: 9:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 8:30 a.m. Central, 7:30 a.m. Mountain, 6:30 a.m. Pacific and Second Life, and 1:30 p.m. GMT, NL Time: 15:30! INSTANT MESSAGING: DO YOU IM? How are libraries and librarians using Instant Messaging? This session explores a grass roots effort by many libraries to meet users where they interact online. We'll explore best practices and implementation strategies Time: 11:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 10:00 a.m. Central, 9:00 a.m. Mountain, 8:00 a.m. Pacific and Second Life, and 3:00 p.m. GMT, NL Time: 17:00 SOCIAL SOFTWARE: A SURVEY OF WEB 2.0. Librarians are finding their users are interacting online ...

Yesterday I (and Geert Lobbestael, Medical Library AMC) mailed the PubMed helpdesk to ask about the errors I -and our users- keep getting when using our link to PubMed WITH the Institutional Share option of Filters & Outside Tools together with their own personal MyNCB-accounts. I think that this feature should NOT conflict or intervene with PERSONAL MyNCBIs. Maybe there is a simple solution, and I just do not know it. If you agree with me, please send a mail to PubMed to let them know you want this problem solved too. Many thanks in advance. This the text of the mail: Dear Customer Service,In PubMed it is possible to get a tab for full text of your library by using a shared Filter Selection. Up to now we haven't been able to combine this with a personal myNCBI. The error message is 'You need to sign out of myNCBI to use this feature'. Our Central Medical Library (inlugrmlib, University of Groningen, Netherlands) has an outside tool registered (RUGLinks) and we are...

Will "Google Office" become important for academic physicians? Writely.com : online word processor & Google Spreadsheet We can already use Writely.com to collaborate on articles. You can see all the revisions and see the changes in real time.... Also with Writely, all collaborators always have the latest version of the document. With the recently released Online Spreadsheet Google Spreadsheets , you can now combine the data online and share it with other researchers. More info from the Clinical Cases and Images - Blog: "Importing or exporting a MS Excel document is easy. Whenever you are ready with the data analysis, just switch to Writely to prepare the abstract and manuscript. HIPAA compliance is a must -- no patient-identifiable information can be stored on Google servers.Google Spreadsheets and Writely will definitely be very useful to physician researchers around the world. Whether they are called "Google Office" or not, these 2 services will chang...

OCLC published an additional report to the December 2005 OCLC Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources report: College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources Based on the content of the first report this is a must-read report. I haven't read the 100 pages yet, but will surely report back on this. "this report is a subset of the original Perceptions report and provides findings from the online survey in an effort to learn more about: Library use Awareness and use of library electronic resources he Internet search engine, the library and the librarian Free vs. for-fee information The “Library” brand " Tags: OCLC , user , environment , library Is This New OCLC Report Worth It? by StevenB / ARCLog

This Editorial states what the BDJ plans to do in the future, and there are some nice things worth mentioning: the open peer review process , recently started new presentation formats, new reviewing protocols they are ready to publish multimedia works, including podcasts. Ramsey’s “MultimediaBootcamp” paper is the first BDL piece to feature movies: Ramsey EC: Multimedia Bootcamp: a health sciences library provides basic training to promote faculty technology integration. Biomedical Digital Libraries 3 (3): 2006. [http://bio-diglib.com/content/3/1/3/]. "...One strength ofBDL is the variety of article types, including hypotheses, which are, “short articles presenting anuntested original hypothesis backed solely by previously published results rather than new evidence” Browse All Articles The Future of Biomedical Digital Libraries Banks, Marcus A. Peay, Wayne J. info:doi/10.1186/1742-5581-3-5 Biomedical Digital Libraries 2006, 3:5 Biomedical Digital LibrariesThe Future of Biomedic...

The enabling of search engines to find content in journal/Publishers websites is very effective for increasing the readership of academic journals. Is this a shocking result? No, but the researchers at the Centre for Publishing at University College London wanted to find the proof and "used a deep log analysis, which collects “digital fingerprints” of users of specific internet sites, to track use of the online version of Nucleic Acids Research " They also were abled to proof that "the introduction of open access publishing in January 2005 achieved a small further increase of about 19% in use of the journal. Most of this increase came from eastern European countries" The statement that "Search engines increase online journal use more than open access" is a bit weird. What kind of increase would there have been when only the introduction of open access was achieved? That way all search engines would have picked up these articles and the increase would ...