DigiCMB

The first part of 2009 I am going to put the Pubmed Toolbar more in the spotlight. I have added into the search box the options to directly search in: Find Systematic Reviews Clinical Study Category Search Medical genetics Search PubMed Help The NLM Gateway (all-in-one search) and of course PUbMed itself, the Journal Database & MESH A MessageService was entered, and a Chat box powered by Meebo, a Twitter PubMed RSS to see who is tweeting about Pubmed on Twitter! Usage has already doubled since Januari 1st 2009! More info on NLM Toolbars on: http://nlmtoolbars.blogspot.com Tags: pubmed , toolbar , search , medical , nlm

With the current Library-Management-System we are using at the Libraries of the University of Groningen, it is not possible to get an output on newly added books or publication to the Catalogue in RSS (or otherwise). So many, many hours of library staff have been put into the fabrication of static lists and overviews, mostly manually. A special project was set up last year to create a new system just for that. It resulted in a complete new portal outside the current CMS of the University, because that does not support or offer the desired functionality. It has the looks of the University and you can see it here . Lists are available sorted by subjects or location. See: new books of the Central Medical Library new books on the subject Medicine (unfortunately both links are static links to a month) The result is a list sorted by author with limited info and the url to the OPAC-record. Bonus is the RSS-feed option: You would expect to be abled to see the new books as they ...

I have tried to talk about this in my neighbourhood, and have waited to see if local or national corps and orgs would tackle this in an effective way. They did not, yet. So I support the following call to sign a Petition of protest. Please read it and if you agree with the stated issues, join me in signing too. Dear Friend, I hope you'll join me in signing the petition "Stop the OCLC powergrab!". You can do so right now at: http://watchdog.net/c/stop-oclc OCLC, the not-for-profit that provides library services around the world, has gone too far. Originally, it was a library collaborative -- one library could catalog a book, upload it to OCLC, and then other libraries could save time by reusing the catalog information. But as the price of such technology has fallen, its prices have risen. It charges membership fees, record retrieval fees, user support fees, and fees for all sorts of additional services. But now it's gone a step too far -- it wants...

Netvibes took their mission statement very literally yesterday with our Public page of the Central Medical Library. The Universe, http://www.netvibes.com/cmb was -at one moment- almost empty and at least half of our tabs were gone (as in deleted). I got the biggest scare of 2009 so far ... After a few minutes, and re-loading the site several times, logging out and -in again, all 150+widgets appeared to be listed in the Tab "Lost &Found". They really mixed my web up .... That was sort of a relief. I emailed Netvibes Support and started to make emergency repairs, but made sure I got copies of that Lost & Found tab first. Next morning after a bad night sleep, all tabs were restored, including my newly made repairs. The response of Netvibes Support was received very soon: Dear Netviber, This was due to a desynchronization of your public page with our server. If it happens again, do not move any module and use this url: http://www.netvibes.com/?reset_cache=1 ...

Monday Januari 12th 2009 the new search engine PurpleSearch went "live"for the staff and students of the University of Groningen and the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG). Wat is PurpleSearch? PurpleSearch (PS) is an experimental search engine for the simultaneous or federated search of scientific literature databases. in total PurpleSearch is searching in 100+ resources at the same time, catalogues, bibliographical databases, fulltext journals and e-booksover of which the metadata can be searched. In most cases the searched resources are licenced databases, but also freely available data-sets are included, like Google Scholar. Read more on PurpleSearch Have a look at PurpleSearch , and test de search engine. interview with the creaters of PurpleSearch There is a Widgetbox widget available: and a iGoogle Gadget with tabs , but also a Netvibes widget Currently the search through the PurpleSearch widgets and gadgets is being chann...

A small new project has just been created in relation to the new Poken gadget . The Poken gadget works in a simular way as RFID, but different ;-) The Central Medical Library, UMCG will perform a small research into new ways of exchanging information with library users. The question we are asking ourselves is: How can we make library users more aware of our services, products, ánd our web-presence in the social web? And can we -instead of giving them business cards to take-away- find another way to pass that info on to them? With a special Library Poken placed at a central meeting place in the library, users can connect with that CMB Library Poken. They will take with them our details of the Facebook, Hyves, Twitter & Linkedin Library presence for now, but more will follow. (Youtube, Delicious, MSN, MySpace, Last.fm, ... you name it) The Library will get info about the users use of social networks. At the moment, both parties that have "poked" still have the option...

A returning question from participants in workshops and courses about using RSS & Personal Start Pages & Netvibes, is "How can I track the use of the Public Page (Universe) by Netvibes?) And what about the use of the Search & News widgets?" I am still looking for a good answer for the widgets tracking, because Netvibes is not offering tracking of individual widgets at this time, and I haven't heard any talk about it. So for this, we can only see the downloads from the eco.netvibes.com or widgetbox.com sites. (Google is offering -for their own gadgets- a manual for gadget tracking . Maybe some geek can/did try and mash this up to make it work for other widgets ...?) I DID find a way to keep track of the use of the Public pages! Create a Google Analytics account Add a website profile for the Netvibes Universe (i.e. http://www.netvibes.com/digicmb). This only works if you use the for the basic url. If you put the Google Analytics code (make sure you use t...

When you consider having a library presence in social networks, and got Facebook on your list for some reason (for instance, because ..% of your users have a Facebook account) think carefully before you actually create anything. The Group function is used very often, but actually does not offer that much functionality. Many applications, ( FB or Third-party) can not be added to Group-pages. My advice is to support any Group with one or more Facebook Pages (also referred to as Fan Pages). The most interesting application is by Facebook itself and is called "Static FBML" . Static FBML By Facebook Add advanced functionality to your Page using the Facebook Static FBML application. This application will add a box to your Page in which you can render HTML or FBML (Facebook Markup Language) for enhanced Page customization.) With the use of the Static FBML box (Facebook mark-up language) you can almost add any webcontent with html code into little gadgets/widgets in a Faceboo...

Dig Deeper with Social Media » Social Networking Software Task Force Short Courses 5:04pm Source: sns.mlanet.org Social Networking Software Task Force Short Courses Each course is offered a la carte so you can choose the topics that are of most interest to you and is free to current 2009 MLA members. Note that institutional members may only have one person complete each short course for CE credit. Please read the Technical Requirements page before beginning course work. RSS feed Google Youdao Xian Guo Zhua Xia My Yahoo! newsgator Bloglines iNezha Tags: mla , web2.0 , library2.0 , social networks

I can understand why they developed it. We need an easy way to exchange "business card info" and this one does it. Many simular tools will follow, but this one is fun! It does focus on a very young population. Maybe medical students? Or the large Hyves population in the Netherlands? I can imagine the Poken would do great at events and meetings. I hope Poken will spread fast and that they will develop in the right way Short movie about "How the Poken thing works". See it live from the Groningen Huis de Beurs Meet Up at January 7th 2009 ;-) http://doyoupoken.com http://doyoupokenwebshop.com http://doyoupoken.ourtoolbar.com http://www.netvibes.com/doyoupoken Tags: poken , social networks , doyoupoken Usgang Facebook Twitter Linkedin Hyves Hi5 : MySpace Badoo, Bebo, Flickr, Netlog, Ning, Plaxo, Skyrock, Spoke, Stdivz, Viadeo and Xing

I find it always hard to start-up again after a holiday period. Add to this feeling, the New Year happening, Christmas, loads of birthdays and memorials, the need to seriously look back at the previous year, ánd the necessity to give priorities to new challenges and tasks for the coming year, and then you know what I was doing the last weeks. First thing I said to myself about this blog was that it should focus a bit more on the direct relevance for the UMCG staff in relation to the Medical Library. So don't be surprised if you see posts about the specific UMCG situation here now and again. But I will always keep the new and weird stuff in here too. ;-). More and more subjects are being discussed via Twitter and I frequently forget to post about those topics. My Tweetdeck has become a standard application. So I need to find a better way to collect and implement all the things that are being discussed at Twitter into this blog. I want to start 2009 off with a completely irr...