The Second Life Medical Library is focussing on three main targets:
1. Consumer Health Information : a special Consumer Health Library will be build and the project manager Carol Perryman (with colleagues) will map all excisting Support Groups in Second Life, and do a special outreach program, to improve Health Information transfer in a broad sense. Currently we already have been abled to track down a long list of Support Groups.
It is for this project that the Central Medical Library of the University Medical Hospital Groningen in the Netherlands is official participant and I am dedicating some time. More on this project later! It will be the most important project the Second Life Medical Library will focus on.
2. And we want to do the same for any Educational, Clinical or Research activities related to Health or Medical subjects that take part in Second Life. Many Academic organisations are stepping in or thinking about it. Have a look at www.simteach.com! Sl offers a lot of simulation power. Already there are thoughts of developing CME, offering services to special educational groups. There are plans for a Virtual Hospital. The Medical Library can offer help and support in getting the right resources & information needed. We can offer meeting space and special programs for the exchange of information.
3. Experiment and development of new ways of interaction between users and libraries. With open minded people who are willing to invest time to try to improve library services in general and really learn what user want & need.
Already we have a portable (well, in fact Head-Up Display) searchTool that can search Second Life Library , Second Life stuff itself but also special web resources, such as WorldCat, Google, Amazon ...
Library Tours can be selfservice by means of a tool like Chatfeeder that users carry with them.
They can read e-books, listen to audio-books and look at streaming video.
We have RSS-feeds visually displayed.
We can search PubMed in Second life, offer Reuters health News.
Our virtual Reference Desk is using QuestionPoint and we are training a Chatbot to talk to people when we are not there, for some reason.
And this is just the beginning.
Some people go fishing ......
Here a short overview of all new updates around the Journal apps we are supporting. Personally I am most excited about the anouncements of " docwise " making big steps to keep up with BrowZine & Read (Integration -"Open in"- with Dropbox, Evernote and more, save and email full text articles), but making a hug jump with unique features, like shareable Folders with docwise users ánd a RSS reader feature (boldly called Google Reader replacement!). Bring it on! BrowZine : just published the Android Version of their App to which the CMB UMCG now has a subscription. To be downloaded from Google Play Store or Amazon App Store the following publishers have been added Project MUSE Cambridge University Press American Marketing Association Academy of Management Royal Society of Chemistry Institute of Physics American Physical Society Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) American Geophysical Union International Society for Optics a...
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