I like to read medical fiction, and believe that medical students probably do as well (although they have little time to do so). So today a new category has been added to the EBM & Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC category list: Medical Humanities.
The first post with that tag is about the literary works of writer-physician Dr. Terrence Holt, who has taken an unusual career path to practicing medicine, as he taught literature and writing at Rutgers University and Swarthmore College for a decade before attending medical school. He recently published a collection of short stories entitled In the Valley of Kings.
Published in the online literary journal, Granta, Dr. Holt’s short story, “A Sign of Weakness” is pitch-perfect.
Happy Birthday to Sesame Street which this week celebrates its 40th season on PBS! Here’s a video by beatboxing flutist Greg Patillo playing the theme song:
Video Credit: Courtesy of YouTube.com and Greg Patillo – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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Sesame Street is full of interesting characters. The Yip Yips (Martian visitors) are two of my favorites. Here’s a classic segment as they discover what a Radio does:
Video Credit: Courtesy of Sesame Street – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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Finally… with multiple exams looming for the first-year medical students, it seems an apt moment to link to a classic medical student video called “Pancakes Every Day“:
This is an interactive visualization… choose the style of music, and click any pair of hands to create (or lessen) a full sound. Each set of hands adds its’ own unique contribution to the ’symphony’.
At the bottom of this page on the AHA website, there is a 1.3 minute video showing a demonstration of how to initiate and continue hands-only CPR while awaiting medical assistance.
Well-done public service announcement, American Heart Association!
Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, which is really fine, it means that party-goers won’t be forced to drag themselves to the lecture hall at 8:00am the next day. And, even better, October 31 is the start of Daylight Savings Time in the U.S. which means one added hour to sleep in!
First off: If a party is in your plans for Friday or Saturday night, you might want to bookmark this link: EtOH calculator.
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.Next, innovative ways to kill a pumpkin:
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This group of good-looking skeletons inhabit the exhibit on Extreme Art (x-rays) by British photographer Nick Veasey (found on Newsday (Oct 6 2009).
Produced by American Medical Association editors and publisher McGraw Hill, content from the digital textbook is also available for mobile applications.
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Research Consortium) is the organizer of Open Access Week. Information about SPARC Europe is here.
The concept of open-access journals distributed on computer networks worldwide (at no cost to users) when I was earning a MLS degree (in 1991) would’ve seemed not only unlikely to ever happen in this world, but might have caused one’s graduate school peers and instructors to wonder if you needed to visit a psychiatrist – and soon!
But that world which might have seemed fantastical in the early-1990’s has indeed come to fruition through the determined efforts of many hundreds of librarians, scientists, researchers, administrators and volunteers worldwide. It is an exciting time to be an information professional.
A long-time advocate of open-access scholarly publications,Peter Suber has written an overview about the meaning and purpose ofOpen Access (OA), and has described this international project well.
Celebrate Open Access Week 2009 by visiting these wonderful sites:
OIASterwhich provides 23,090,000 articles from 1,500 sources.
Created for Open Access Week 2008, and sponsored by PLoS, watch a brief video of Dr. Ida Sim, faculty at UCSF, discussing the value of scientific research published in open access journals.
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Want to learn more about metadata? First, what is NISO? Here is an excerpt from their “About” page:
” NISO, a non-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), identifies, develops, maintains, and publishes technical standards to manage information in our changing and ever-more digital environment. NISO standards apply both traditional and new technologies to the full range of information-related needs, including retrieval, re-purposing, storage, metadata, and preservation. “
In an effort to briefly describe the process of indexing and organizing open-access documents from a myriad of global sources, I refer to the Dublin Metadata Initiative created by OCLC(Online Computer Library Center). The final NISO document, “Dublin Core of Elements” * was approved in 2007 by a consortium of library and technical folks assembled by OCLC.
(My librarian-colleague has assured me today that this is all anyone will want to know about this topic. Be pithy for heaven sakes!)
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* Note: The Dublin Core refers to the city of Dublin, Ohio where OCLC corporate headquarters are located (not Dublin, Ireland). Development of core standards originated during a1995 invitational workshop at OCLC; “core” because its descriptive elements are broad and generic, intended for use to describe a diverse range of actual or virtual resources.
The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set(NISO Standard Z39.98-007) is a vocabulary of fifteen properties used by indexers to describe individual items before adding these records to shared digital catalog files. Standard elements to describe an individual work or item would include (for example) title of the resource, creator of the resource, subject or topic of the resource, format of the resource, etc.
Here’s the Friday Post #39 for Oct 16 2009. It snowed in Connecticut yesterday. It was a mucho-early start to the cold weather season. Let’s hope for no more snow for another few weeks.
Nice to learn that Graham Walker is still in fine form! He used to blog as a Medical Student on the Over My Med Body blog (which is still available to read but will have no new postings after June 22, 2008).
Dr. Walker is now a resident in Emergency Medicine in NYC. His current blog is The Central Line where he recently posted a list of indicators which will indicate just how sick you are (tongue in cheek of course). Read his post entitled “Non-Clinical Prognostic Indicators“.
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Next: An interesting scientific project from MIT called theChameleon Guitar, described by its’ creators as a “physical heart in a digital instrument”. Here is an excerpt from the About page:
“ The Chameleon Guitar, developed at the MIT Media Lab, presents a unique combination of traditional acoustic values and digital abilities. This is a real hybrid machine; a computer reads acoustic information from a wooden heart (resonator) to create new sound experience. This is an academic research project, and not a commercial one; hopefully it will influence others to explore what lies between our physical world and computers.“
Source Credit: YouTube.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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My kid the college-student sent me this video link which, while amusing, could also be viewed as a live demonstration of the perils of poly-substance abuse. He can hardly get up off the floor but, by golly, his grip on that carton of beer never slips.
Video credit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s_40rM_L0s – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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That’s the Friday Post #39 for Oct 16 2009
Have a great weekend.
* The first chameleon video I put in this post looked too photo-shopped… so I found a better rendition of what a real chameleonlooks like.
One aspect of participating in problem-based learning is that by the end of the semester, every student in the group has taken their turn at the group tasks involved, which are:
The Reader narrates the case as it is made available online. The written case with any supporting visual materials such as radiology or histology about the patient are posted on Blackboard and are no longer distributed in paper handouts.
The Scribe is the person with the marker who listens to the groups’ discussion and synthesis of the pertinent data about the patient such as chief complaint, presentation, past medical history, current labs values, medications, tests to be ordered, treatments to begin, etc. They are writing down the data, hypotheses, learning issues as they become available.
Before every student in the room brought a computer to class — which sounds like the olden days but it was less than 6 years ago — the Scribe may or may not have been the one creating hand-drawn concept maps of that week’s PBL work. Nowadays, concept maps are created not by drawing on the whiteboard but by using CMap, a free software program from IHMC (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition). This brings on a new role in the group: Concept Mapper.
The Facilitators mostly listen, occasionally asking clinically-oriented questions or providing a bit of background or narrative about a patient, a procedure or a disease without being “teacherly”.
Each week, one person bakes and brings in goodies for 9 people. That is an important function, too.
On a basic science or biomolecular level, concept mapscan get pretty complicated.
Recently I wrote down some of the medical terms, processes or conclusions which were heard during PBL, and made a Wordle map out of them. Here is what it looks like:
Try as I might, I couldn’t make this post pithy. Sorry.
Based on some in-depth questions I’ve heard at the Reference Desk this month, this is a short long post on the structure and organization of medical information developed by U.S. agencies which collect, organize, share and otherwise distribute biological information for the purposes of basic science, clinical or translational research.
Graduate medical, dental or PhD students already search MEDLINE and other literature sources fromNational Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) but the purpose of this post is to illustrate ways to search these resources more effectively, or at least more time-efficiently. If the first part of the post is too basic for you, please shoot down to the second section.
“… develop new information technologies to aid in the understanding of fundamental molecular and genetic processes that control health and disease. More specifically, the NCBI has been charged with creating automated systems for storing and analyzing knowledge about molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics; facilitating the use of such databases and software by the research and medical community; coordinating efforts to gather biotechnology information both nationally and internationally; and performing research into advanced methods of computer-based information processing for analyzing the structure and function of biologically important molecules “.
Click here and here to see the collections of information resources accessible via the NCBI website.
Please takea look at this nice visualization of digitally- interconnected resources available from NCBI servers.
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Entrez – also called the “life sciences search engine” – was designed by NCBI staff as a means to enable users to search across multipledatabases or indexes to retrieve integrated search results from sequence, mapping, taxonomy and structural data for both human and non-human subjects.
Below is screenshot showing results from a search done recently on Entrez for data from NCBI servers on Protein 53, a human transcription factor:
Wow – That search retrieved almost too much information! What if your search requirements don’t include the need for data about genomics or DNA sequencing?
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Then consider the list of open-access Literature Databasesavailable from NCBI. A few of the best are highlighted here:
NCBI Bookshelf is a growing collection of more than 100 free, open-access digital biomedical books that can be searched directly on the site. Here is one real-life example: I went to Gene Tests to get to Gene Reviews to look up basic factual information about two genetic diseases, Friedreich Ataxia and Glycogen Storage Disease Type I. There is also an online glossary, great for looking up quick definitions in PBL… such as this entry for allele.
Open access journals can be read or downloaded by anyone using PubMedCentral (PMC), NIH’s free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. PMC is a great site to get to know (and bookmark). For a FAQ sheet on PMC, click here.
Library User responds: “Do you mean search PubMed?“
MEDLINE, another NCBI database, is a major component of PubMed* but there is more there than just that database. Happily, librarians from NLM have written a good MEDLINE FAQ page that explains those details.
MEDLINE is a medical literature index containing 19,000,000 records indexing articles from 5,200 international biomedical journals (in 28 languages), and covering the time period of 1948 through 2009. Each year, approximately 600,000 new records are added to the database. In other words, it’s a big database to search–but not as big as Scopus, a real Godzilla of a database, weighing in at 38,000,000 records. The printed precursor to MEDLINE was Index Medicus, which is no longer being produced.
A key concept to remember when searching MEDLINE is that the database is indexed using what librarians call a “controlled vocabulary” – officially called the Medical Subject Headings List(or MeSH), a standardized thesaurus of 300,000+ terms used to electronically index each new article.
How does these tags get into MEDLINE? Actual (i.e., human) medical librarians working at the National Library of Medicine read and digitally assign appropriate MeSH terms to describe the contents and scope of individual journal articles. These information scientists are trained indexers and generally have other advanced degrees in biology, molecular genetics and so on which enable them to “parse” the mechanics of what the published article is about.
The majority of MEDLINE citations are tagged with 8 to 12 MeSH terms**.Because of those hand-crafted tags attached electronically to each journal article, when we search for a specific MeSH term, those records are retrieved into our citation list. It is a scientific way to search. It is definitely not Googling.
A different way of constructing a precise search statement is to select MeSH terms in combination with the list of clinical subheadings which combine with MeSH terms to narrow a search in an elegant way. Clinical qualifiers are defined by NLM as:
” … 83 topical qualifiers used for indexing and cataloging in conjunction with [MeSH] descriptors. Qualifiers afford a convenient means of grouping together those citations which are concerned with a particular aspect of a subject. Not every qualifier is suitable for use with every subject heading…. Subheadings are linked to the full record in the MeSH Browser.”
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Following is a screenshot of the MeSH page showing the list of qualifiers which can be combined with the MeSH term “Pancreatic Neoplasms“:
Sailors in old Hollywood movies sometimes were heard to yell,“Land Ho!”
That is what I thought after scanning the 201o New MeSH Headings List recently released, and seeing a few new terms that medical librarians really like – such as this one:
Finally, please note that there are many more resources on the NCBI server than those explained above. Gene libraries, DNA, RNA, proteins analysis or sequencing are very much out of the scope of my expertise.
One example is the link shown below – for DNA & RNA Resources – as one place to start exploration of genes, protein and sequence analysis (screenshot below):
*PubMed has undergone recent design changes this month, although the “old” and the “new” PubMed versionswill co-exist for the present.
** MEDLINE is a database comprised of 19,000,000 individual records. Indexing a new citation requires careful attention to detail; tagging (indexing) for MEDLINE is never done by bots to create links based on the number of hits of a given term. Each record is considered and evaluated by hand, which accounts for the indexing backlog (i.e., the difference between the moment when a new journal citation is delivered from the publisher to NLM and is put into the database, versus the period of time that it takes for that individual citation to show up in MEDLINE with a complete set of tags). The whole indexing process generally is completed at NLM within 45-60 days.
” Despite progress in many areas over the last 25 years, the disparities in people’s well-being in rich and poor countries continue to be unacceptably wide, according to the Human Development Index (HDI) released today as part of the United Nation’s 2009 Human Development Report (HDR). This year’s HDI, a summary indicator of people’s well-being—combining measures of life expectancy, literacy, school enrollment and GDP per capita—was calculated for 182 countries and territories, the most extensive coverage ever. “
The latest Human Development Report by the United Nations was released on Oct 5 2009, presenting data gathered in 2007 from countries around the world. Begun in 1990, the series provides analysis of health, economic, demographic and quality of life indicators globally. The current 229-page report is available for anyone to read or download, at no cost, at this link.
For a list of related or archival HDR publications from the United Nations, click here.
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A couple of news stories of the day illustrate some of the background issues that may be contributing to the declining quality of life scores in the U.S.
Veteran family physician Deb Richter wrote a brief article entitled “Lack of Universal Health Care is a Mass Killer“, about the serious health consequences suffered by uninsured patients seen in her Vermont practice. It was posted on The Progressive website on Oct 4 2009.
An article from the Oct 6 2009 New York Times provides a brief description of how health care cost subsidies on a sliding scale for an estimated 46,000,000 people currently uninsured in the U.S. might operate.
This is the 300th post on the EBM & Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC blog. Woot… please drop me a line and let me know how I’m doing!
Medical and dental students have one more exam to complete, and then will have a few well-deserved weeks of vacation. They may even have time to read for pleasure.
A brief article entitled “Textbook Death Watch“posted on Tech & Learning (May 1 2009) caught my eye, and that prompted a search-expedition for open access libraries of digital works available to anyone to use. The list below is not meant to be inclusive… only representative.
A related article on the Wired section (free to all) from the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 13 2009) discusses the migration from ‘real’ books to digital archives at University of Oklahoma: at this link. An article published in the Washington Post (May 19 2009) about the scope, reach and legal considerations of Google Books is worth a read.
A classic and long-lived source for E-Books: the Project Guttenberg website where 28,000 online books are available at no cost.
WOWIO is a site for free texts, comics and graphics novels. Their About page states that it is “…the only source where readers can legally access high-quality copyrighted ebooks from leading publishers for free. Readers have access to a wide range of offerings, including works of classic literature, college textbooks, comic books, and popular fiction and non-fiction titles. “
Planet E-Book provides online access to over 60 classic books.
Bartleby.com is a true E-reference site, stocking many diverse works from writing guides, fiction, non-fiction, encyclopedias, verse and poetry, quotations – even Emily Post’s Etiquette.
University of VirginiaEText Center: Collections provides access to 2,100 works. There is also a Subject Collections page, such as a collection of Early American Fiction or the works of Shakespeare.
Faculty atCarnegie Mellon University have played an integral part in the creation of the Universal Digital Library which provides access to over 1,000,000 open-access books in a dozen languages, with mirror sites in China, Egypt and India.
A list of “Life Changing Books” recommended by readers came from OpenCulture (published Aug 19 2007). Note: The titles are linked to Amazon but some of these titles on the list are in the public domain and available through several of the E-book sites shown above (i.e., open access).
Good Reads is a valuable website – type in a book title or author, and the site will “suggest” similar works. For example, here is a list of novels about “Magical Realism” novels suggested by readers.
Dreaming Methods describes itself as “a fusion of writing and atmospheric new media that explores digital storytelling, imaginary memories and dream-inspired states“. And their List of Links to other literary sites is worth visiting.
We Tell Stories(digital fiction from Penguin Books UK) is part novel, part Google Maps.
Yearning to write your own novel? Visit National Novel Writing Month if you think you can write 50,000 words in 30 days.
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Finally, two sites not for enjoying literature as much as for savoring historical images.
Image Credit: http://www.lifeinwesternpa.org – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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Calisphere (a digital library project for the State of California, hosted by the University of California-Berkeley), which is where I found this beautiful image (circa 1945):
Librarians at Lyman Maynard Stowe Library purchased a subscription to a course management system called LibGuides in August 2008. It has proven to be a good investment. Each of the librarians or instructors on the system can share – although we are geographically distant – in building on each others’ work, much like sharing of bookmark collections is enabled by Delicious.com.
LibGuides is an easy (user-friendly) system to learn. Reference librarians here are using it exclusively for all their online course syllabi. We have now gone officially “paperless” – no more piles of handouts for instructional sessions! If you’d like to view individual UCHC Libguides, click here.
Access to individual subject pages is open to both subscribers and non-subscribers for the system; anyone in the world can search and view a LibGuide subject pageprovided that the author(s) of that guide have elected to make the page “public”. According to Springshare, the owner of LibGuides, there are now 5oo libraries which subscribe.
This month I’ve been working on a LibGuide for 2nd year year medical and dental students who recently began a new segment in their curriculum called Human Mechanisms of Disease-Oncology and it is (finally) complete.
The page is a collection of oncology/cancer information resources, e-textbooks, clinical guidelines, atlases, cancer genetics, National Cancer Institute or American Cancer Society, cancer trials registry info, etc. (Link is here). There’s also a set of bookmarks on Delicious (called “Onc2009“) which I gathered to complement what is on the LibGuide and includes information for patients.
Earlier this week, while scanning through recently updated pages on LibGuides, I found a page on Pathology & Laboratory Medicine written by a health science librarian from Dana Medical Library at the University of Vermont. Her page gave me links to several oncology textbooks to add to my Oncology list – because both institutions have subscription access to books via R2Library. In order words, our shared resources I might have missed adding these clinical textbooks to my page but because of Web 2.0 and sharing of information, I was able to see what other medical librarians have done thus making shared content that much more thorough and inclusive. (Thank you, Ms. Delwich!).
P.S. If you have comments or suggestions about other Oncology resources for clinicians to add to the pages, I would enjoy your feedback.
Tradition has it that bad things might happen on Friday the 13th. So here’s the Friday (the 13th) Post #27 for Feb 13 2009:
Find a variety of unusual Old English insults on the website Shakespearean Insulter, where all quotes are taken from the collected works of William Shakespeare, such as: ” Thou warped rude-growing jolt-head!” or “Were I like thee I’d throw away myself.” Thanks for the link, Kham!
Friday the 13th decisions result in cautionary tales. A list about bad behavior online fr0m Switched relates this example from “Most Embarassing Online Mishaps“. A bank intern called to say he wouldn’t be in to work that day due to a “family emergency”. As it happened, he went to a party that day… and (dumbly) posted the photos of his party-attire on Facebook, where his boss saw them. Yeah, so which one of us have never clicked the “Send” key by mistake?
Did you know that there are over a dozen movies in the Friday the 13th series… and another one was released this week? Are you embarrassed to admit you’ve seen most of them? Eeek! If you’re a cheesy horror movie fan, it is always difficult choosing between Jason and Freddy. Anyway, here’s a feature article about a group of movie stars who acted in previous “Friday the 13th” films – from the New York Daily Post (Feb 13 2009).
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And that’s the Friday the 13th Post! Take care and stay safe over a long weekend.
The purpose of his site is described as: “… to gather educational resources targeted to health professionals that are freely available on the web, for a better understanding of pharmacology. These resources include: animations and videos that illustrate mechanism of action of drugs (some of them developed by Dr. Guzman); definitions and concepts from reliable sources about the general principles of pharmacology; press releases and drug reviews from official agencies (FDA, EMEA, NHS, and many others).”
These direct-marketing campaigns, which are aired relentlessly at 630 pm every night in the U.S. while folks are sitting down to dinner… drive me crazy, because who wants to hear a TV ad for mens’ urinary urgency, indigestion or an ad for Viagra when you’re eating with your family – yuck!
Sorry for the considerable absence of blogging lately – it’s the end of the academic year and things have been piling up.
Here’s the Friday Post #33 for May 29, 2009. And if it doesn’t stop raining every day here in Connecticut (and soon), more than a few of us are going to start to yell and scream!
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Part literary magazine/part interesting blog written by students from Northwestern University, here is an excerpt from a recent article on NorthbyNorthwestern, commenting on the precarious state of the current economy:
“ It comes as a huge surprise, then, that in the single most severe financial plunge since the Great Depression we, myself included, are more familiar with Facebook’s layout changes than with the principal events that truly affect our lives. It might not seem to matter to us just yet, but there will come a time when our own ignorance is going to bite us in the ass…. “
An excellent, tongue-in-cheek essay about budget crises, managing cuts, faculty and finding alternative solutions was written by John Lombardi for the Inside Higher Ed blog on “Reality Check“ (Jan 8 2009). His fictional ‘fable’ does a good job at describing the many competing groups and forces operating within a large academic community.
This has been a difficult year for academic institutions. Buffeted by declining endowment income, scarcer donations from alumni, budget reduction (or rescission) requests from administrators, decreasing state tax revenues and a bleak long-term investment outlook face off against increasing pressure on college enrollments, recruitment (and retention) of talented faculty, expanding class size or teaching loads.
University of Connecticut, like other large state-supported universities, is experiencing these types of market influences. Following is an excerpt from the weekly digital newspaper, UConn Advanceabout cost saving initiatives, written by Karen Grava:
“ The University implemented an across-the-board 3.5 percent assessment in the fall – including a rescission of 3 percent and a 0.5 percent reallocation – and achieved substantial savings by placing strict limits on out-of-state travel and implementing a freeze on hiring, except for the most critical positions. “
As an academic librarian working with groups of recent college graduates now enrolled in medical or dental school, as an employee of the university and as a parent of a high school senior, I’d say I hold a variety of differing views of the current economic and enrollment challenges that colleges and universities in the U.S. are experiencing.
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One of the students I have known throughout four years of medical school, a former PBL student, recently told me about her meeting with the financial-aid counselor. She’ll be graduating in May with $190,000 in student loans (which represents a combination of undergraduate and medical school expenses). These loans turn out to be an “average amount” of U.S. medical or dental student debt, currently. The counselor worked out a ten-year repayment plan for her to think about. The monthly cost? $2,200. For a lot of folks, that figure is higher than the monthly mortgage payment on their home. That’s a scary way to begin a career. On the other hand, being an anesthesiologist pays well. Eventually.
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For an undergraduate viewpoint, this recent article outlining undergraduate college demographics, written by Lisa Foderaro for the New York Times (Mar 1 2009), gets to the heart of the question. Melissa Korn on the Wall Street Journal writes about how “dream schools” may be affected for the 2009-2010 academic year (Mar 2 2009).
Finally, my other perspective is as parent of a senior in high school. Recently I spoke with several local high school guidance counselors about college admissions this year. Each counselor in this group described 2009 as “… a very weird year for college applicants“. Following are several of their direct quotes:
“Seniors who I would have thought would be likely to be admitted to top-tier private schools in other years either aren’t getting in, or if they are accepted, offers of scholarship money or financial aid hasn’t met their expectations [in 2009].”
“Most students this year have applied to top-tier state universities in addition to private colleges… the average list of ’safety schools’ is longer this year. Several kids haven’t been accepted at any of the schools they’ve heard from, so far. There’s also a great deal of wait-listing.”
“More than a few parents [of our seniors] have lost their jobs or been laid-off recently. Some whose parents can’t help them out financially simply won’t go to college next year or will sit out to work for one or two years. All in all – it’s been a very difficult year to predict who will go where.”
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Photo credit/source: C. Smith – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
I’m profoundly grateful to report that my kid was admitted to the college of his choice recently. What a relief it was the day that long-awaited letter showed up in the mailbox!
Now if the greater economy would please get going again…
Biochemistry Questions Site is a teaching-and-learning blog whose author, Dr. H.D. Urquiza Hernandez, is a professor of biochemistry and holds a PhD in biological sciences.
This is a multi-layered Q & A site which could be useful for medical students who are immersed in micro human biochemistry, or preparing to take the USMLE. The site is free and open to anyone to use.
Photo Credit/Source: http://AAMC.org – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) in January 2009 sponsored the first annual video contest for Aspiring Docs. Ten awards were made to undergraduate students who “… revealed their dreams of a career in medicine and were rewarded with financial assistance from the AAMC to help cover the costs of preparing for and applying to medical school. “
Here is a link to one of them: Chanel Fischetti, a junior at University of Southern California, who learned American Sign Language in anticipation of caring for hearing-impaired patients, describing (and signing) why she wants to become a physician:
One of the ten finalists is an undergraduate from University of Connecticut,Benjamin Gruenbaum.
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Note: Today I found a link to a great teaching-learning site for American Sign Language, with many demonstration videos of words being signed, at ASL University.com.
Heard of GigaPan?Here’s an excerpt from the About page:
” GigaPan is a collaborative project of Google, Carnegie Mellon University and NASA Ames Intelligent Systems Division’s Robotics Group. It is a robotic platform that attaches to a digital camera and some computer software. The robotic platform allows a user to take a photograph, then it will re-aim the camera with great precision, to take another photograph. After taking many photos, the software stitches all the pictures into a gigapixel image. Public beta-testing of a consumer version of the robotic platform and software has begun. Beta-testing and product platform development is being carried out by GigaPan Systems, who will eventually offer the unit for public sale.“
“GigaPan is an open website – anyone can upload photographs to it, and anyone can place comments on those photographs. Authors have no editorial control over the comments which are placed on their photographs. “
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Below is a screenshot of a GigaPan photo taken on Jan 20 2009 in Washington DC at the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States. Photographer David Bergman created this 1,474-megapixel image of President Barack Obama’s inauguration: .
Please set aside your notions about Librarians wearing sensible shoes and shushing people, because most of us do not Shush and have many stylish pairs of shoes in our closets!! Where’s the evidence? Right here on the Flickr group: Librarian Shoes, where this superb photograph was recently posted:
Photo Source: http://www.flickr.com/groups/librarianshoes/ – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
Graphic evidence of why many Americans really need to take Lipitor can be viewed on the blog This is Why You’re Fat… and while horrifying vegetarians daily, no doubt! Be prepared for wretched excess and lots of bacon. Here’s one recent artistic composition, made with elk meat, called Thunderdome (and submitted by a librarian):
This is Part 2 of a 3-part post about managing and maintaining a core Reference collection, and the people who use resources available from University of Connecticut Health Center.
As a state-funded public institution, and the only medical library in Connecticut open to the general public, Lyman Maynard Stowe Library is staffed 94-hours per week and provides an open-door policy to anyone, with free access to the university’s collection of subscription databases and health science collection.
Reference librarians and public services staff assist many different types of information seeking folks who come in to use the library: college or graduate students from other area institutions, student nurses, nursing faculty or other allied health professionals, hospital patients or out-patients, family members, high school students, trial attorneys, paralegals, medical writers (and anyone else). Workstations are available for searching subscription databases, journals, e-textbooks, software, etc. or to access the large online collections and databases from UConn’s Homer Babbidge Library (the main library in Storrs, CT).
There are only a few caveats: users must be on-site in order to access the collections (i.e., no remote access with a current UConn ID), and doing medical research (i.e., not playing computer games for hours using a UCHC workstation). Printing out full-text articles costs seven cents per page.
Some of the people who visit do so without asking for assistance from staff for finding specific information; some do ask for brief instructions on choosing what to search and how to “best” search it.
Other visitors are very motivated to learn the mechanics of searching Medline (PubMed) effectively from a library professional, which is great… generally in 40 minutes we can demonstrate and teach just about anyone how to search effectively, or introduce them to MedlinePlus.gov.
And there are a few who just won’t touch a computer to find the medical information they’re seeking. There are varied reasons for this: they may not have computing skills, or have physical impairments such as limited vision or hearing, or low-mobility. Some would be better served in another language than English. And some just don’t want to spend the time to learn how to search online. A few have just received a bad medical diagnosis and are visibly upset… not a good time to start working on a medical research project. So the print Reference collection is a resource that they can use (without help, if that is their choice).
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A different divide for our general library users is temporal in nature. Because the library is open seven days per week from 700am to 1100pm during the week, a “day” staff and a “evening/night” staff is required. How do we best serve those who come here in the daytime hours (when professional staff is here) versus those who use the collections and physical building during evening, night or during weekend hours (when one evening reference librarian is available)? Recently I asked our evening librarian (whose name is John) for input on updating the Reference collection; his response was: “There are plenty of people use the library between 600pm and 10 pm”. They typically are UConn MPH graduate students, patients or family members and anyone who has to visit after their workday is over.
He also noted that many of the after-500pm crowd “goes straight to the Reference books… not to the computer“.
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There are standard (anticipated) sets of questions which librarians are accustomed to be asked at Reference. First to be considered: is this user trying to connect while on-campus…as in there in real-life - or are they connecting digitally? In other words, did they walk through the (real) front door of the UCHC building on their own two feet, or did they use their mouse to click into the library home page?
Does it matter to them? Does it matter to the librarians? Sure! There are more than 4,000 people working in the building every day. We (i.e. the librarians) aim to serve many different research needs seven days per week.
Here is a list of “composite Reference questions” which public services staff do hear, and answer, on a frequent basis:
How do I know if you have it? Users who haven’t visited a library in a long time will find the old card catalog long gone… and may not know about – or embrace the utility of – an online catalog. Many graduate students in the MPH or MSN programs are returning adult learners who haven’t been actively using an academic library in decades. Some of the faculty are still mourning the disappearance of the card catalog. Knowing how to look, as well as where to look is crucial.
One of the most common questions that reference staff answers daily is: I think the library owns this journal or textbook, but where is it? It could be online, or on the shelf depending on the date of the publication, the choices of the producer of the information, the budget which was available to the library at the time of publication, or it could be available by request from another library (interlibrary-loan). Digital availability is a decision made by publishers who determine what sources to make available electronically as well as basing their fees on market demand, institutional (versus individual) usage and electronic access charges. It is a fallacy to think that because a journal or book has gone online, it represents a cost-savings for the library. Many times, the electronic version is more costly than buying a print edition due to hardware management, storage requirements, staff to manage collections and administer systems… none of these are “free”.
For Those who do not Compute. It is no longer possible to actually walk into the journals-stacks area to find the volume and issue that is needed, because in many cases, those current issues are now only available digitally. But there are still plenty of people who do just that. These users need the librarians’ help to make that leap, and a major concern is that generations of library users are missing essential information because they’ve not learned to effectively employ the tools of the digital library. These users may not know how to search online. They may be unaware of the deep investment of digital resources made available to them online. Some do know about the electronic collections, but don’t possess the technical skills or knowledge base (or confidence) to effectively search online for them. They are traditional users who still need real books and book-stacks to browse in. This isn’t meant to be “age-discriminatory” because there are many library users who are over 50+ years of age who’ve fully made that leap from in-print to digital format, the so-called “early adopters”.
The Digital Natives. Having said the above, I’ve yet to meet and work with any 23-year old student who can’t or just won’t use the digital resources of an academic library. They grew up with a PC and a mouse in their hands. Their concern is more likely to be, “If it’s not online, I don’t need it“. Fair enough – we’ll try to supply it online for you.
Those who do compute but are not searching expertly. Here’s a scene playing out in the library lately: Users who are technologically-savvy but whose first choice (sometimes their only choice) is to use Google or Google Scholar to search our collectionswhile standing in the real library. Eek! Google-only searchers end up bypassing our integrated collections of databases and limiting their research retrievals to what they can “google” because they are not searching in the “best” places. Consequently they miss out on accessing a huge body of clinical information. They would be better served by searching Medline or Scopus or other subscription resources that they are literally standing right next to in this building.
Call me. Librarians are generally user-friendly, customer service oriented people whose main goal at work is to connect the user to the information which they require, delivered in an efficient and timely way. When this model doesn’t work, users can and should initiate a conversation to ask for assistance… this could be via telephone, email, in-person at the Reference desk. How can we (librarians) help library users – either in the building or off-campus – when they don’t find what they need but then also do not ask for assistance on how to search or which sources are best to answer their research questions?
Digital Migration. A journal or textbook may go out of print at any time in favor of digital access only. As an example, this library pays for access to roughly 1,100 electronic textbooks currently. It is an individual decision by the collection management librarians as to whether to continue to purchase a paper textbook if the digital version is available. Some core medical textbooks – such as Nelson’s Pediatrics, Hurst’s The Heart and especially, Harrison’s Principals of Internal Medicine – are heavily used in both formats. It is a judgement call to be made by the librarians, weighing cost versus availability versus expected usage. Hint: Networked version of standard medical textbooks generally get funding.
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Here are a few other things librarians ruminate over.
Library users researching topics outside the scope of health sciences and medicine should search the resources assembled by our main library. Access is only a few mouse-clicks away, including 240+ academic subject databases and a vast journal collection available online. How many times have I said to someone, “Just go to Storrs”. The response sometimes is “I don’t want to drive there!”. (Um. There’s no need to drive there in a car to access these resources if you are affiliated or are on-site.)
A declining gate count doesn’t mean people are using the library less. We as librarians need to provide better statistical reporting and become more effective at explaining and promoting library services to senior managers in a time of budget stressors. Do university or hospital administrators understand that the number of times that people actually walk in the front door into the real library (what librarians call the ‘gate count’) declines as we become more successful at providing virtual access to periodicals, textbooks, databases and teaching materials?
Information literacy is a concern because some of our users coming in the door may not speak or read in the English language well enough to understand what medical information is available here. But lbrarians have found online sources for patient-education materials in Spanish, Polish or other languages… but if those users didn’t ask Reference staff for assistance, it isn’t likely they could find those sources on their own.
We never see you anymore.How do library staff measure users’ satisfaction (or lack of satisfaction) with our collections and services, if we aren’t in the same building to interact face-to-face? How do our remote users ask for help with searching or finding, if they are sitting at their home or office 20 miles from the reference librarians? Or if they working at 1:oo am, when there’s no staff in the library but they are searching? What are quantifiable, credible ways to measure the results of remote library users that we don’t get to interact with face-to-face? This is a long-term issue for library managers. There are statistics about hits on subscription journal titles or databases, quantified by date and time, but that data is only a part of the answer.
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If you’ve read this far… thank you for hanging in there to read what has unexpectedly become something of an essay! The last and final part of the Musings on Reference will appear next week, with a list of open-access documents or reports which I found while looking up “other stuff” for the 2009 Reference collection update.
Here’s an example of what I’ve been looking at all week . month:
Photo credit/Source: http://www.oclc.org/us/en/default.htm – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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March is the month to turn towards the annual task of updating the Reference collection in the library (which is my responsibility). The graduate students have their Spring Break this week, so it’s a good time to tackle this project.
When you were a little kid, did you hang around in the library, looking at books with no particular plan for researching anything specific? Maybe only born researchers or born librarians do that!
Now as a grown up librarian, it is still amazing to me the diversity of information that one can stumble over while on the way to looking something else entirely unrelated. Browsing and serendipity can play a part in pursuing research whether you’re surfing the net or standing in the book stacks, holding an actual book.
Librarians do hear this phrase occasionally: “If it’s not online, I don’t want it.“ A recent observation (in my problem-based learning class) is that this generation of Milleniums much prefer their research information online… and who are reluctant to walk into the “bricks and mortar” library to find a textbook in print.
As collection managers and archivists, one of our major responsibilities is to deliver current library materials and services in the manner in which our patrons best like to “consume” them. The shift from print to digital access does impact how librarians select (and store) their core collections.
A complex mix of collection management decisions weigh format and availability versus price and expected (potential or future) usage which also roughly indexes the librarians’ expectation about the longevity or lasting value of the material.
Thrown into these choices: Collection budgets (which are shrinking), and what our students, clinicians, pharmacists and the general library users prefer to use (print or online). Luckily, in this library there are librarians with decades of experience to muse with these decisions… and thanks for the advice, AD!
In other words, does it make better sense to buy one (physical, paper) textbook produced in 2009 for $450 (for example) when you could, as as alternative, purchase an electronic, perpetual version of the work for $1,000 which can be read simultaneously by up to five online readers and whose clinical content is updated monthly? Collection management, a bit like the practice of medicine, is both an art and a science.
The goal is to select the most cost-effective means to provide the essential resources needed by your particular community. As the migration of library collections continues away from print to digital access (i.e., always on, never checked out, 24 x 7 x 365 days per week… provided that the network is up and running), the next post in this series will explore concerns and decisions that academic-medical librarians in 2009 need to balance in order to offer the most complete collections available.
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I would like to welcome our newest reference librarian -JK-to the health science library this week.
Today – Thursday, Mar 19 2009 – is Match Day 2009! Good luck and God speed to every medical student in the Class of 2009!
At 1:00pm (ET), fourth-year medical students will find out – simultaneously – where in the U.S. they will be spending the next year of their life as residents. This is a nervous phase of medical education, as these near-doctors wait to learn if they must make plans to move across the country (or across the street). Match Day is a day to look forward to for faculty and staff at UConn Health Center, as we stand by and witness our graduating seniors as they stand at the crux of a new life. This is their day of celebration, exhilaration, profound relief… and possibly for those few who didn’t get their first choices, some tears.
Having been hunkered down in my cubicle for the past month updating the library’s Reference Collection, I am now ready to step back into the light and offer up Part #3 of Reference Ruminations (if you missed the first two postings, here’s part 1 and part 2).
Digging around looking for new or updated titles is part of the fun of collection management. Less fun is staying within one’s $$ budget while keeping a current health science reference collection to a constant size. Migration from print to online format continues at a fast pace in 2009.
“Trolling” or “trawling” (if these are the correct terms) describes the specialized peripheral vision belonging to librarians (or scientists) that requires one to never pass up examining a new book, journal article or website (or whatever else looks interesting – the shoe section at Marshalls also qualifies) even though we weren’t specifically looking for that type of information.
An eclectic list follows… they represent sites that I wasn’t exactly looking for – but turned out to offer timely, focused reporting on a variety of health-related data, policy or statistical information that I couldn’t ignore. The publishers or data-gatherers linked below include nonprofit organizations, academies, public or social policy institutions, government agencies, charitable foundations and others. Most (but not all) of this content is freely distributed.
It is my hope that you will find information of value to your research from the links below.
Research efforts conducted or sponsored by NAP’s Institute of Medicine (IOM) is organized into “seventeen health topic areas: mental health, child health, food and nutrition, aging, women’s health, education, public policy, health care and quality, diseases, global health, workplace, military and veterans, health sciences, environment, treatment, public health and prevention, minority health.” Link to IOM topic pages here. Many of their publications are available online at no cost.
The LeapFrog Group has provided data on hospital safety ratings by state on their website, openly available at this link.MD-Consult had this to say about the data, published Apr 15 2008: “Hospitals are barely meeting quality and efficiency standards, according to a survey issued on April 15 by the Leapfrog Group, an organization made up of some of America’s largest employers.”
Epidemiologists and MPH students use the longitudinal reports, surveys and other data compiled by the staff at National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). Researchers can register with NCHS to download actual datasets for research purposes at no charge; see CDC Wonder for more information about these files.
A major charitable organization for promoting health and social justice worldwide, The MacArthur Foundation website could take hours to examine. One place to begin for those interested in demography or epidemiology is their domestic Research Networks page.
The Childrens’ Defense Fund has an extensive digital library of data, statistics and policy synthesis reports on American children, their health, families and communities. In December 2008, CDF published a 80-page report on “The State of America’s Children“, available online (link to the 80-page PDF).
A particularly useful site for recent data and policy reports on American families at risk is the Knowledge Center from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is “helping vulnerable kids and families succeed”. As an example, the Kids Count page allows one to search for demographic or health information using standardized key indicators (such as access to housing, poverty, birth outcomes, access to early childhood education, uninsured families and other community and socioeconomic factors) across states.
The Connecticut State Library has created an archival Digital Collections page. As one example, this 2007 report entitled “Inmates and Mental Health“… useful to know because UCHC clinicians provide a full range of medical and dental care for inmates held in correctional facilities throughout Connecticut.
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Since I was taking photos anyway, below are a few more views of the library. The main floor of the library had a major renovation, completed in 2005. In 2008, some areas of the 2nd floor were renovated.
These are the so-called Barney Chairs (as in, plush, overstuffed and really purple), positioned next to the Reference stacks for those who like to sit comfortably by the windows to read:
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The 2nd floor of the library is a popular quiet study space.
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A library plant, Crown of Thorns(euphorbia milii), flowered this week.
All Photos: Courtesy of UCHC – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
” The life of a sick person can be shortened not only by the acts, but
also by the words or the manner, of a physician. It is therefore a
sacred duty to guard himself carefully in this respect. ”
—American Medical Association, Code of Medical Ethics, 1847
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Physicians are trained to seek a cure for their patients, to deliver treatments, to act promptly yet with deliberation; much less time is spent during graduate medical education on how to deliver bad news to a patient or their family.
Unfortunately, communications about treatment failure, impending death or options for end-of-life care – including emotional or psychosocial issues – can be delivered by the physician in an incomplete, ambiguous or unintentionally insensitive manner.
Poorly chosen words complicate an already emotional and anxiety-charged scenario for the patient or their loved ones. Counseling family members after an unexpected or traumatic death is even more difficult for the care provider.
UCSF physician Stephen Z. Pantilat wrote a practical, thoughtful essay about doctor-patient communications at end of life, entitled “Communicating with Seriously Ill Patients: Better Words to Say“. It was published in JAMA on Mar 25 2009 (Vol. 301, Issue 12, page 1279-1281). (Note: Subscription necessary to view the text.)
Following is an excerpt from Dr. Pantilat’s article:
” Words matter. What clinicians say and how they say it hugely affects patients. Communicating about emotionally and medically complex topics such as advance care planning, preferences for care, prognosis or death and dying is challenging. Doing so requires clinicians to attend to their own and the patient’s cognitive reactions, tone, affect and nonverbal cues… Although poor communication may harm patients by leading to unwanted invasive procedures, generating unnecessary anxiety, or creating feelings of abandonment, good communication can improve outcomes for patients and their families by promoting shared decision making and addressing patient concerns”.
Excerpt from: “Communicating with Seriously Ill Patients: Better Words to Say” – JAMA, Vol. 301, Issue 12 (Mar 25 2009) – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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This 3-page article should be required reading for every third-year medical student before the beginning of their clinical clerkship year.
Over the next few weeks, I will post a brief series on learning to care for dying patients’ physical and emotional needs.
” MedEdPORTAL is a free online publication service… designed to promote educational collaboration by facilitating the open exchange of teaching resources such as clinical tutorials, virtual patients, simulation cases, tutorials, lab guides, videos, podcasts, assessment tools, etc. While MedEdPORTAL’s primary audiences include health educators and learners around the globe, it is open and available for free to the general public. Users can access quality, peer-reviewed teaching material and assessment tools in both the basic and clinical sciences in medicine and in oral health “.
An upgrade to the content and searchability of the page was announced on Apr 7 2009 by AAMC, and the name is now MedEdPORTAL 2.0.
This is an important archive of peer-reviewed teaching and training tools for students, residents (and librarians). The architecture of the site has been made more functional, with the addition of subject/content links like this one:
An example of featured content, added Mar 4 2009 by a faculty in Emergency Medicine from University of Minnesota, is entitled “Stab to Neck” (two screenshots from this video/tutorial):
I like this site – it is created by physicians – for physicians (and students) in all disciplines. The brainpower and clinical experience of manyare shared on MedEdPORTAL.
AAMC and ADEA have created a fine, free example of the power of cooperative resource-sharing distributed on an open-access platform. It should be on your list of teaching-and-training bookmarks.
Librarians like to network (and socialize) and one of their major professional associations to consider joining is Special Libraries Association. SLA is a non-profit organization representing the interests of librarians and knowledge managers working for commercial corporations, law firms, governmental agencies, non-profit organizations, biomedical, technical or academic institutions, museums, law firms, etc.
SLA sponsors a section called Division of BioMedical & Life Sciences (or DBIO), which is described on their blog as a “community for biomedical and life science librarians and information professionals“.
A poll of almost 700 DBIO members was conducted electronically in late 2008 and early 2009, asking them to identify the “100 most influential journals of Biology & Medicine over the last one hundred years“. Every section member was eligible to vote.
The stated goal was for the final vote “ to yield a balanced assortment of 33 or 34 journals in three areas: Clinical Medicine & Allied Health, Molecular & Cell Biology and Natural History “.
The 12-page summary report was written by Tony Stankus, Life Sciences Librarian and Science Liaison at University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, who recruited the expert teams, arbitrated disputes about disciplinary boundaries, and served as final editor.
This venerable list, “The DBIO 1oo“, was made public in January 2009, and is available – free, online – at this link (note: PDF). The list of journals is also shown on the March 2009 SLA press release about the project.
The SLA DBIO section will hold an award ceremonies for publishers and editors of this special group of journals, scheduled to be held during the 2009 SLA National Conference, June 14-17, Washington, D.C.
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The official DBIO blog is an interesting information source, too.
First: A funny collection of One Hundred 404 Error Screens from the blog of Francesco Mugnai. I especially liked the guy with the long ponytail in the red cowboy bikini and the thigh-high leather boots (you know, the one holding the .357 magnum). In fact I think it may be Sean Connery.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of BoingBoing.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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Do Not Sulk or Cry
” Students who answer incorrectly shouldnot become overly discouraged. Attendings rarely remember studentswho give wrong answers (especially to difficult questions);they often remember those who lose their composure. “
Excerpt from “The Art of Pimping” by Alan Detsky, MD – published in JAMA, Vol. 301 – issue 13, p. 1379-1381 (April 1 2009)
DB’s MedRants - and many other physician-bloggers – have already blogged about this article. Life in the Fast Lane wrote a multi-part post about pimping. Funny and cruel.
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Exams are finally wrapped up for awhile (after ten difficult days for the students), so get jiggy with Will Smith for a minute because 3.7 million views on YouTube can’t be wrong, and besides, those Egyptians are very handsome :
National Library Week? (Oh… totally missed it because I spent all last week trying to get Twitter figured out and am making some progress with that).
Today (Apr 22 2009), Google informed me, is Earth Day. In an approximate way, a recent campaign by the non-profit group Adbusters.org is similar.
On their “About” page, Adbusters.org, a non-profit organization based in Vancouver, states: “We are a global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society.”
The overarching message fromAdbusters.org suggests some or all of the following: turning off your TV, unplugging your electronic devices, adopting a skeptical outlook about the culture of continual consumption. Their content fosters an attitude of anti-big business, anti-advertising, anti-obesity, staying off the grid, and in general advocates for using less stuff – both for the health of individual people, and for the greater good of the planet.
An example: the group declared November 28, 2008 as “Buy Nothing Day” and urged readers to cut up their credit cards, get out of debt, shop and spend less. (Many thousands of Americans did not do this.)
This week, Adbusters.org has declared Digital Detox Week (Apr 21-26, 2009) which urges readers to “go off-line for seven brain-restoring days” by unplugging all their digital devices. (Many thousands of Americans will not be doing this.)
Following is a screenshot of their campaign-logo, urging folks to get off the grid:
After looking around on their website (and chuckling over their SpoofAds), I came across the link to ABTV (AdbustersTV)and found this 2008 video called Information Deformation, which raises some enduring talking points about manipulation (or management) of our global attention-spans in this Digital Age:
Public health concerns dominate the news headlines this week, as evidence continues to unfold of a global outbreak of a novel strain ofswine influenza A/H1N1.
Thanks to an active international group of Medical Bloggers and Librarians connected through social networking sites such as FriendFeed or Twitter, as I arrive at work on Monday morning, this connectedness becomes a great advantage for those of us in the United States, as our European colleagues have already scanned and posted many news or website links on items of vital concern, as emerging news continues to pour in from many places around the world.
Following are a brief set of links to global health information, disease-tracking and interactive-maps for the spread of Swine Influenza A/H1N1 (reported as of Monday, Apr 27 2009):
The International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID) produces ProMed-Mail, described as“the global electronic reporting system for outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases & toxins, open to all sources“. Subscription to ProMed-Mail is available to anyone, free of charge; updates can be set up for daily or weekly email alerts.
UCHC Library subscribes to GIDEON(Global Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology Online Network), which is a specialized database for epidemiologists used for “… diagnosis and reference in the fields of tropical and infectious diseases, epidemiology, microbiology and antimicrobial chemotherapy. GIDEON currently tracks 337 diseases, 224 countries, 1,147 microbial taxa and 306 antibacterial (-fungal, -parasitic, -viral) agents and vaccines, including over 10,000 notes outlining the status of specific infections within each country and over 20,000 images, graphs, interactive maps and references“. GIDEON is updated daily.
I’d like to acknowledge the cooperative work of many European scientists and medical librarians – and in particular, bloggers Laikas, Berci and DigiCMB – who are always 6-8 hours ahead of me, both literally speaking in the real world and in many Web 2.0 innovations, who have posted scientific links and news about swine flu and steered me to several links for this post today. Thank you to these talented, and generous, colleagues.
Scientists, clinicians and students who need to read continually in their specialty fields to stay current frequently express frustration over the amount of time and efforts needed to keep up each month.
Our collection management librarian at UCHC recently told me about this great site: ticTOCs where one can… “find 12,415 scholarly journal Table of Contents (TOCs) from 436 publishers “.
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TicTocs
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ticTOCs is a journal-alerting, table of contents service based in the UK. This service is free; registration with the site is required to set up individual alerting preferences.
Following is an excerpt from the ticTOCS “About” page:
” The ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents service makes it easy for academics, researchers, students and anyone else to keep up-to-date with newly published scholarly material by enabling them to find, display, store, combine and reuse thousands of journal tables of contents from multiple publishers. With ticTOCs, it only takes a or two to keep up to date.”
” The ticTOCs Consortium consists of: the University of Liverpool Library (lead), Heriot-Watt University, CrossRef, ProQuest, Emerald, RefWorks, MIMAS, Cranfield University, Institute of Physics, SAGE Publishers, Inderscience Publishers, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Open J-Gate, and Intute.”
Next, a screenshot of the link where one can register for the service, and then set preferences for receiving table of contents from individual journals:
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Today, I did a search for “hepatology” on ticTOCs; here is a photo of the results:
It’s been a big news week. Global health developments have occurred with such rapidity that reporting the news of this week gives additional meaning to the use of the term “viral” as in… tracking the global spread of a novel virus: A/H1N1 – swine influenza.
After writing this post, I then noticed that only one of items on the list below refers to materials which are in print (that of the journal Public Health Reports). It is online that we are.
DynaMed, an evidence based medicine resource which UCHC Library subscribes to, announced this week that an online section for current clinical information on Swine Influenza A/H1N1 will be available to anyone in the world at no cost – at this link. The database, produced by Ebsco, is updated daily.
Finally, the cartoonist-blogger XKCD drew a great comic this week, arguing against getting one’s news of the day from Twitter and re-tweets. Many other bloggers worldwide have featured this cartoon this week, but in case you missed it…
Sunday, May 3rd marked the birthday of an American original: musician, songwriter and dancer James Brown (1933-2006).
WoW… that man could dance. Here is the proof:
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Snowball is a sulphur-crested cockatoo (Cacatua galerita eleonora) who lives in Indiana with his bird rescuer Irena Schulz. The bird’s unique dancing and bopping-ability was featured on the ScienceNews blog (April 30 2009) which is where I first heard about him. A quick search on PubMed turned up the research report written by scientists Aniruddh Patel, John Iversen, Micah Bregman and Irena Schulz entitled “Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal” which published last week in the journal Current Biology 19 (May 14 2009).
Embedded in the article is a video of Snowball dancing to three segments of music with varying beats per minute (BPM): 106, 125 and 130 BPM, which you can watch at this link (media player popup).
YouTube.com offers two somewhat less officially scientific videos of Snowball grooving, the first to the music of Queen. Notice that he has to stop in the middle of the song and rest up a bit. But he really is sort of a cheerful Bird-Athlete, don’t you think?
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See another video of Snowball dancing to the Backstreet Boys here
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Finally, anyone who reads this blog knows that I love cephalopods. Do cephalopods dance? Dunno, but here’s a video of one clever Octopus filmed as she’s trying to get at a tasty treat which her human left for her in a sealed jar:
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And that’s the Friday Post for May 8 2009! Have a great weekend, folks.
” The alarm around this particular strain [A-H1N1] has a couple of roots. First is, it’s new… it’s novel. And new is always cause for some amount of concern. Second, it does appear to have just recently jumped from one species, pigs, to another, humans. And very commonly, in the whole world of viruses – not just influenzas – when they first make the jump from one species to another is when they’re really hot viruses, dangerous viruses. That certainly was the case with SARS, which had just made the jump from bats to civets, civets to humans. So we always worry when we see a recent jump. ”
Ms. Garrett, author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (1994), and The Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health (2000), is currently a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
How A/H1N1 influenza – identified in Mexico in March 2009 – continues to develop in human populations is still uncertain, as the virus spreads to every continent. The good news is that clinicians seem to think it is not as virulent as first feared; the bad news is that over time, the possibility still exists that we are witnessing a phenomena that every epidemiologist dreads in his or her lifetime: the emergence of an uncontainable virus in a human population who have little or no immunity against it.
While many people thought the media hype over this emerging virus was of hysterical proportions, and discounted the severity of the strain, a different way to view these events is as a sort of dress rehearsal which demonstrated that world-wide networks of disease surveillance, data-collection and cooperative intelligence sharing are functioning reasonably well. (But I’m not a virologist so maybe I know no more than the next guy on the street.)
If nothing else, it shows that swarm-intelligence and citizen-journalism is alive and well!
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You could say that some of my reactions to public health crises have been shaped in part by having lived in city of San Francisco in the early 1980’s, when a different public health crisis unfolded with the identification of a novel viral infection which came to be known as human immunodeficiency virus. If you haven’t already read And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts, who was a reporter at the time for the San Francisco Chronicle, it is truly worth the time. *
Let’s hear it for more dress rehearsals, and fewer real-life epidemics.
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Following are a few books or online resources for background information on epidemiological investigations, medical detective work and emerging infectious diseases, for your consideration:
“The Threat of Pandemic Influenza: Are We Ready?” A Workshop Summary, 2005 (free online full-text from National Academies Press site – link to PDF here).
Book: The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John Barry (Viking, 2004).
Book: When Germs Travel: Six major epidemics that have invaded America since 1900 and the fears they have unleashed by Howard Markel (Pantheon Books, 2004).
Book: Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection and Response by Mark Smolinski, Margaret Hamburg, Joshua Lederberg (National Academies Press, 2003).
Book: The Molecular Epidemiology of Human Viruses, by Thomas Leitner (Kluwer, 2002).
Book: The Invisible Enemy: A Nature History of Viruses, by Dorothy Crawford (Oxford University Press, 2000).
Online Book: Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching by Dr. Michael Greger (Human Society Press, 2006). Free fulltext book at this link.
United States Geological Service (USGS): Disease Maps
Book: Man and Microbes: Diseases & Plagues in History and Modern Times, by Arlo Karlen (Putnam Books, 1994).
Robert Preston is the author of two popular works, The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story (Random House, 2o02) and The Hot Zone: A terrifying true story (Random House, 1995).
Book: Emerging Viruses in Human Populations by Edward Tabor (Volume 17 of Perspectives in Medical Virology, Elsevier, 2007).
Book: Seasonal Patterns of Stress, Immune Function, and Disease by Randy Nelson (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Book: Human Virology: A Text for Students of Medicine, Dentistry and Microbiology by Leslie Collier (Oxford University Press, 2006).
My computer at work has been way, way out of service lately.
More postings to follow after it is feeling better!
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And in the interim: It’s been raining practically every day in the Northeast. We are actually becoming grateful for 4 or 5 minutes of sunshine daily! One day last week I drove into my driveway and saw a spotted salamander clinging to the house. They like to play dead when you hold them, but after five minutes they slide away into the brush after your attention has waned.
This spring (in New England) has been excellent weather to observevernal pool dwellers up close (like this site). It has also a great year for those who photograph mushrooms!
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That’s the Friday Post for Jun 19 2009! Stay dry, folks!
It is my blogo-versary (two years, 3 weeks of blogging, folks – send a comment, please), it’s the depths of summer, the students are on vacation, so let’s take poetic license to post whatever is at hand. Here they are:
A friend of mine is terrified of clowns in all forms. If you read the novel It by Stephen King, you might not ever walk past a clown (or street gutters) without wincing. The actor Tim Curry (who played Pennywise, the evil clown, in the film version of It) gives me the creeps, too.
Adam Bergin 2009 created a short film funded by Philips to promote their Cinema 21:9 LCD TV.Like a Dada film, one can start and stop watching Carousel – and then start it again – and it all makes about as much sense.
The fictional mayhem in this short film occurs in a hospital. It won an award at the 2009 Cannes Lions Festival. Dada-esque?
Photo credit: http://stinkdigital.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
Don’t laugh – I used to live in San Francisco and have eaten once or twice at Doggie Diner, where the food is cheap, fast and good — amusing for the fact that the cooks yell at you if you don’t give your order quick and then move along. No holding up the customer line!
Photo credit: http://laughingsquid.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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“Hibi no Neiro” (Tone of everyday)is a music-video by Japanese band SOUR, used to promote the group’s first mini-album, Water Flavor EP. The 3.5 minute video was created by Masashi Kawamura, Hal Kirkland, Magico Nakamura and Masayoshi Nakamura in June 2009.
It is interesting to watch for both the music and the people (all fans of the band) who collectively filmed it worldwide. It is one of those videos where, every time you watch it you can see something new in it:
Image source: YouTube.com - All rights reserved – copyright 2009
Thanks to Michael Wesch for twittering about it.
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And that’s the Friday Post #36 for Aug 14 2009. Hurray – a new academic year begins next week!
A separate CDC website at HIVTest.org allows a person to type in their individual zip-code or city/state location which will then bring up a directory of local sites where testing services will be available on Saturday.
Another means of finding local test site information is to call this toll-free phone number: 1-800-CDC-INFO (or 1-800-232-4636).
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A recently publishedreport in MMWR – Vol. 58 (24);661-665 (June 26 2009) recaps the ill-effects of “Late HIV Testing in 34 States, 1996-2005″.
Here is an excerpt from that report – and one which represents a very sobering statistic for any epidemiologist:“Current estimates suggest that 21% of HIV infections in the United States are undiagnosed.”
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CDC sponsors a related consumer-health information source page called “Nine and A Half Minutes” (for the estimated frequency of new STD infections among Americans). Here is a screenshot of that site:
Photo credit: http://www.hivtest.org – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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A 14-page HIV Testing Fact Sheet (in English or Spanish language) is available from CDC at this link.
Finally, below is a short list of other statistical or factual sites for current sexual health information:
Image credit: http://medbloggercode.com/ – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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My thanks to the good folks at Healthcare Blogger Code of Ethics who recently added the EBM and Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC blog to their lengthy list of medical bloggers.
Here is the written Code of Ethics promoted by this non-profit, volunteer group.
Link here to view the newest additions of medicine bloggers, or patient bloggers, endorsed by HBCE (updated June 26 2009).
Today is a great day to highlight the recent posts of two fellow medical bloggers: the first is from Laika’s MedLibLog, written by a Dutch research-scientist/medical-librarian; the second post is from Life in the Fast Lane, a blog written collectively by a group of Australian physicians.
Each author has written definitive posts about the mechanics – and utility – of searching the medical literature, and evaluating what has been found.
These posts should be seen as instant classics – and required reading for new graduate students in medicine, dental medicine or biomedical research or just about anyone with an interest in finding more-pertinent clinical information (in less time).
Their descriptive clarity in explaining what to search, and how to search is pitch-perfect.
Thank you – Laika and SandNSurf – for writing them!
Next: Following are several quite different compilations of medical information resources written by librarians.
Elena Giglia, a medical librarian from Central Library of Medicine, University of Turin, Italy, wrote in 2007 an excellent overview of the medical literature entitled “Beyond PubMed: Other Free Biomedical Databases“. This 11-page article was published in the European Journal of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine (Europa Medicophysica) – Vol. 43(4):563-9 (Dec 2007). It is available online for anyone to read.
Finally: Librarians working in academic health science libraries offer a variety of digital training tutorials or subject lists for orienting their students, residents and faculty to the technical aspects of searching the literature of medicine.
.Photo credit: http://www.clinicalreader.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
Clinical Reader, introduced Jun 29 2009 in beta, is getting a lot of buzz* on Twitter, blogs and librarian discussion lists. Thanks to librarians posting about it on Medlib-L listserv and to Berci for blogging about it.
” Clinical Reader was brought to life in 2009 by a junior doctor and a small group of forward thinking young tech programmers spread across London and Toronto. The conceptualized idea was to manage clinical information overload and deliver relevant news from an authoritative source on a daily basis.… it is truly quality collection of accessible clinical, scientific and health literature aiming to filter the river of information presented to the online medical community.”
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I noticed that the creators of the site have constructed it using sets of criteria which include journal performance indicators; two of the criteria for inclusion in the site are shown in this screenshot of their FAQ page:
Photo credit: http://www.clinicalreader.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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There are currently about 3,000 readers who subscribe to the Clinical Reader newsletter. Anyone can use the site, at no cost.
This is a rich and multi-layered site targeted at medical and dental clinicians. It can be used to read daily health news, journal scans, searching links for training or educational videos, clinically-oriented podcasts and medical specialties. Site content is divided in three sections:News (links to UK-oriented news), Sections and Multimedia.
Photo credit: http://www.clinicalreader.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
Best wishes to the creators of Clinical Reader.com, who have rolled out a working website designed to meet the information needs of physicians, by physicians. I look forward to watching this site develop over time.
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* Edit: On July 15, after reading posts from other medical librarians (see EagleDawg blog and Steve Lawson (both dated Jul 13 2009), and other discussions who collectively remind administrators at Clinical Reader to proceed with caution in regard to commercial and copyright laws, to intellectual and graphical property, I think I’m going to retract what I wrote on Jul 9 2009 (above).
Being in the library/information business for more than a decade has taught me to take a long-term perspective about new companies or products (and possibly, a somewhat jaded outlook as well). What do I mean by this?
The technologies of Web 2.0/3.0 distribute your website, saves your comments on Twitter, immortalizes your blog-postings, shares your photos (for good or ill), exhibits your conference presentations or business plans, allows you to create an instant survey on Google Docs… each of these become instantly visible by those in your network, or worldwide. (As YouTube.com famously advises, “Broadcast Yourself”.) This connectivity has been described as ambient intimacy.
One of the first lessons a new blogger learns is how ridiculously easy it is to trip up online… when you make a mistake in a public and highly-distributed way, such an online event can make one very glad for the solitude of the workplace cubicle (while your face turns a deep, burning and lasting shade of red). But that’s also a shared experience. By joining up into the collective “we”, it is possible to be anonymous yet harder to be invisible. In digital life, these terms are elastic, relational, relative. And Google neverforgets.
Two recent examples of the downside of all that connectivity come to mind. In 2008, a PhD student/blogger wrote on her Nature Network blog LabNotes that “I hate PubMed. I hate it with a burning passion.“ As seen in the comments garnered by that post, she was given a mild dressing-down by a variety of scientists, bloggers and medical librarians. Some of us even offered to teach her how to search the database better.
Another more recent example involves the June 2009 roll-out of a clinically-oriented website named Clinical Reader.com, as medical librarian-blogger EagleDawg describes it, with additional commentary found at The Health Informationist blog.
These events have been Twittered about aplenty. One could take the view that the company’s response to the librarian was that of a newbie… turn the prism, see it as free publicity.
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By taking the long-range view, it’s not surprising to appraise commercial or non-commercial web sites as they come and go, in a literal sense*. Some sources stay the distance, some disappear quickly, some just can’t deliver a quality array of information, some sites are just plain ugly to use or to teach others to use, some crash frequently (thus losing your data), or are so difficult to navigate for results that users simply give up (and so then turn to Google Scholar).
For librarians, the perspective is a bit different than that of a researcher or medical student. We are highly concerned with the content, scope and utility of individual information sources for our unique clientele. That is why the mission of the librarians is to spend funds wisely, distribute the information efficiently along networks, assist those who have questions or problems with “digesting” the data, and to train our users to search well, collect and analyze their data.
Librarians aren’t the end-consumers of the information assembled by our subscriptions; we are more like information brokers and, to some extent, strive for impartiality.
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Talk to almost any librarian with decades of experience, and they will tell you how it was before Google. It was different.
The first library I worked in after graduate school was an academic library where the database subscriptions were delivered on CD-ROMs and loaded on an IBM server for distribution throughout the local area network. Each month a new CD-ROM arrived and the old one was either returned to the company or discarded.
If a faculty member or student needed a comprehensive literature search, a librarian would use a dial-up modem to connect to a commercial information services corporation, Dialog, which charged by the minute for connection time, and charged individual fees for seaching a database, displaying citations, and for downloading each and every item. Before even connecting to the site, the librarian had to check the so-called Dialog bluesheets to learn the scope and arrangement of fields for an individual database (or, which one of 300 individual databases were the best to search?). It was all too easy to spend $100 of the library’s money on a search which might take 8-10 minutes. And I still miss SilverPlatter.
Any student doing research had to physically be in the building in order to do any work. Once the search was completed, they then had to trek around the stacks to locate the individual article in the journal. They could read it in the building, or make a copy of it to take along for later reading. After typing up a finished copy, the students handed-in a copy to their professor at the end of the term. There was no TurnItIn then.
And truly, it is so great in 2009 to offer our users Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine online. What would our residents or students do without their ability to search and access medical information via Up to Date, PubMed or dozens of other sources?
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* To take a brief “time-capsule” look at just how far academic libraries and collections have evolved over a decade can be appreciated by reading this ERIC Digest from 1990.
Finally… getting back to the feeling-jaded comment? There are some who might feel a bit over-stressed by this always-on technological connecting. If that applies to you, then check out the 2009 Cultural Dictionary(2nd edition) created by the ad agency Cramer-Krasselt, where the following definition was recently found:
Reporter Jacob Goldstein on the Health Care Blog at the Wall Street Journal on Jul 9 2009 featured an article about Connecticut governor, Jodi Rell, who this week – citing costs and a looming deficit – vetoed health reform bills for the state, as also reported by the Hartford Courant (Jul 9 2009).
For more information on the Universal Health Care debate in the United States, click here.
So excited about going to see the fifth movie based on J.K. Rowling’s work, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which was released in the U.S. on July 15th at midnight. I’ve read every book in the series at least twice.
If you’re a big Harry Potter fan, you might want to check out which house in Hogwarts that the Sorting Hat would place you in, which you can do by clicking this link and filling out a 122-item questionnaire:
After taking the quiz, their assessment ranked my social networking skills as:Image credit: Anderson Analytics – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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Oh man. Their assessment of my SNS skills is encouraging, but it doesn’t seem to be too accurate. Because, although the blogging part is going well, in fact… I’m pretty sure I flunked Twitter.
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That’s the Friday Post for Jul 17 2009, folks. Have a nice weekend!
STM publishers Cell Press and Elsevier ratcheted up the technological ante this month with their announcement on Monday, Jul 20 2009, of a shared project called Article of the Future, which they are funding to provide:
“… an on-going collaboration with the scientific community to redefine how the scientific article is presented online. The project’s goal is to take full advantage of online capabilities, allowing readers individualized entry points and routes through the content, while using the latest advances in visualization techniques“.
Currently available are two “prototypical” articles which the companies have put up in order to solicit feedback about the page and suggestions from the worldwide scientific community about useability and function.
Here’s one nice feature of the demo: “Integrated audio and video [will] let authors present the context of their article via an interview or video presentation and allow animations to be displayed more effectively”.
Visitors to the Article of the Future page are encouraged to provide direct (anonymous) input about the site using a 10-item online survey.
Thanks to AD for telling me about this.
P.S.This news release was first read on Twitter – Cell Press News around 1oopm today – http://twitter.com/CellPressNews – but the funny thing is, neither of the companies have posted a press release on their official websites yet (as of 3:15pm EST – Jul 20 2009).
The EBM & Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC blog just got a brand-new “relative”, with the introduction this week of our LibraryNews@UCHC Blog (also on WordPress):
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Image credit: http://www.wordpress.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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This week and next, I’ll be teaching a class for my colleagues on how to use WordPress. Fun!
Anyone who works with geneticists and biomedical researchers already knows that learning the language of their science is daunting for a non-scientist to understand. This international community has developed dozens of highly specific databases, data-mining software and cooperative, collective digital libraries for their own use. In an approximate sense, one could even imagine the mapping of the human genome as one vast wiki. Clinical care follows the translational research of these investigators.
“…the seventh in a series of annual special issues dedicated to web-based software resources for analysis and visualization of molecular biology data. The present issue reports on 112 web servers with a special emphasis on metagenomics, molecular network and pathway analysis, and biological text mining”..
Full-text of the NAR-Supplement 2 is available open-access for anyone in the world to read, on PubMedCentral.
The six authors describe their project in this way:
“We have implemented the MedlineRanker webserver, which allows a flexible ranking of Medline for a topic of interest without expert knowledge. Given some abstracts related to a topic, the program deduces automatically the most discriminative words in comparison to a random selection. These words are used to score other abstracts, including those from not yet annotated recent publications, which can be then ranked by relevance. We show that our tool can be highly accurate and that it is able to process millions of abstracts in a practical amount of time. “
Please view the four Supplementary Data (note: these open as either Word or Excel documents) that describe search terms used to search PubMed using the MedlineRanker server.
The illustrations in the article look like a cross between a tag cloud and a Wordle picture.
Scientists: do you lay awake at night, thinking up how to Stump a Librarian with your latest inscrutable search queries?
Recently I had a reference question about a patient with NASH, and I thought: “Uh… Nash…. a stubby car produced by American Motors Corporation in the 1960’s? Nash, as in gnashing your teeth? Nash, as in John Nash who suffered from schizophrenia but was able to continue working as a mathematician and econ0mist? NaSH, as in the chemical symbol for Sodium Hydrosulfide?”
Image credit: Courtesy of Text2Knowledge - All rights reserved – Copyright 2009.
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NASH stands for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis which, as shown above, can be spelled in a number of different ways. Nice retrieval! There is also useful Gene Synonym Finderon the Text2Knowledge site.
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A search on an entirely different website, AcronymFinder.com, turned up seven definitions of NASH, one of which was non-alcohol steatohepatitis; another definition was from NASA, which defined NASH as “No Acronyms Spoken Here”.
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A search for NASH on the Wordsmyth.net resulted in many suggestions for synonyms, but non-alcoholic steatohepatitis wasn’t on their list. The search engine is fairly sophisticated, allowing a user to search within one or all of these fields:
Wordsymth.net also provides a page called Crossword Puzzle Solver… although crossword-purists would disdain using such a crutch.
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The Free Dictionary defines itself as “ the world’s m0st comprehensive dictionary, in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, Russian, Medical, Legal, and Financial Dictionaries, Thesaurus, Acronyms and Abbreviations, Idioms, Encyclopedia, a Literature Reference Library, and a Search Engine all in one! “ But there were no hits forNash or non-alcoholic steatohepatitis at the site. It did refer me to poet Ogden Nash, however.
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Finally, a less scientific glossary is the Australian Slang Dictionarywhich provides no explanation for Nash, but defines many unique Australian phrases, such as the word Wobbly :excitable behaviour, as in: “I complained about the food and the waiter threw a wobbly“.
Source/Credit: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1126 – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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Next: Professors may see you as a brain on a stick, but how does the Internet see you?
Personas, a specialized data-mining/visualization software program from designers at MIT, attempts to answer that question by scouring the web to collect groups of information on specific named person and then builds it into a graphical “fabric” constructed of the parts of that person’s online presence.
How does it work? Following is an excerpt from the PersonasAbout page:
It is fascinating to watch Personas work to build this collection of an individual’s online presence. It takes a few minutes. The timeline is beautifully-rendered.
However, having said that it’s beautiful to watch it work, I ask you to consider how the technology should alert one’s “caution” button. Meaning, lend some consideration about the depth of pertinent as well as random facts that Google and other search engines have collected about “you” over the years. If that information available in public domains about “you” is incorrect, or God forbid, you share the identical name with a notorius or criminal person, what recourse would “you” have to delete or rewrite that data? There is a long, long trail of information connected to “you”… one tool to evaluate that information is Personas.
Here’s a small question: How is the name of the site pronounced — as personas or Person As?
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Next: a Favorite Medical Student Video
Yes, I have posted about this before, but I enjoy seeing it from time to time. Bravo to a group of medical students (Class of 2010) from the University of Alberta who filmed Diagnosis Wenckebach:
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And that’s the Friday Post for Sept 18, 2009, folks. Enjoy your weekend!
As we in the library begin to see the newest groups of medical, dental and doctoral students arriving at UCHC, it may be beneficial and educational to read the 11th edition of the Mindset List, published in August 2009, by administrators from Beloit College, at this link: http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2013.php
Here’s a few of the 75 statements on the list:
“Tattoos have always been very chic and highly visible”.
“Everyone has always known what the evening news was before the Evening News came on”.
“They have never used the card catalog to find a book”. (Too too true!)
“There has always been Blue Jello”.
“Ozzy Osborne has always been coming back”.
Excerpts from the 2009 Mindset List - Courtesy of Beloit College – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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This librarian wonders why cell phones (as in, “There has always been cell phones“) and texting weren’t mentioned… ?
Congratulations to Dan Henderson, third year medical student at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, who was the national finalist in the first “Reach MD’s Next Top Doc” competition, held Aug 17 2009 in Washington, DC. Mr. Henderson competed with a group of medical students from across the U.S. in this quiz show-style contest, held over the last 15 weeks.
The other final competitor was Nina Resetkova, third year medical student and MBA candidate from Texas Tech University Health Sciences School of Medicine. As the winner, Dan was awarded a $5,000 educational scholarship, sponsored by ReachMD. He is currently spending the 2009-2010 school year at AMSA headquarters in Reston, VA, serving as an AMSA Health Justice Fellow and will return to Farmington in May 2010 to complete his fourth year of medical school.
The game-show style competition was created in 2009 by American Medical Student Association (AMSA) andReachMD, a satellite radio channel for health-care education and information. Next Top Doc was introduced at the March 2009 AMSA annual conference. ReachMD has broadcast each round of competition live.
Last month, I announced that a newsletter-blog for Lyman Maynard Stowe Library, previously entitled Update, has been refashioned into a library newsletter-blog now called Library News@UCHC. Originally the site started out on WordPress, and librarians have recently migrated the blog to an account on Movable Type.
If you had a bookmark for Library News@UCHC, please adjust your link so that it goes directly to the new permanent address – effective as of 8/25/09 – at: http://libraryweb.uchc.edu/update/
Here is a screen capture of the updated site:
Image Source and Credit: UConn Health Center – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
Last week, in anticipation of the beginning of ‘regular’ flu season in the Northern hemisphere and the public health concerns over the pandemic spread of H1N1 influenza worldwide, it seemed logical to add a news-feed to the EBM and Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC blog from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention for current news, advisories and practical information about Pandemic Flu (H1N1).
Flu.gov is open and available for anyone in the world to access at no cost, in English or Spanish language versions. The focus of the CDC website is on incidence of influenza among Americans, but there are also links to current information about H1N1 posted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and other sources.
A section of Flu.gov is dedicated to the information needs of clinical care providers (or medical students), and is titled “For Professionals“. Below is a screenshot of that page:
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Image/Photo Credit: http://pandemicflu.gov/index.html – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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Here are several links which might be of particular interest for professional (and amateur) epidemiologists. First: an excerpt of text found on the FluView page: ” Each week CDC analyzes information about influenza disease activity in the United States and publishes findings of key flu indicators in a report called FluView. “
Next: true news junkies will appreciate the many updates found on the CDC H1N1: What’s New? page.
Eurosurveillance is “an open-access peer-reviewed journal about infectious diseases surveillance prevention and control in Europe. Over 14,000 readers around the world subscribe to our weekly online edition, which is published every Thursday…. “.
The goal of HealthMap is to ” bring together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization) “
An entry from Wikipedia – “2009 Flu Pandemic by Country” – features many maps for reported incidences shown both by country and continent (but note: their data lags behind that reported by other international public health sites).
Can’t seem to learn much about who produces or updates Swine Flu Count but their News Clippings page is interesting.
Public Health Agency of Canada provides current links to the spread of the disease throughout the country; their FluWatch interactive maps are useful (screenshot shown below):
Finally, UCHC library users can search GIDEON, a subscription database (note: Proxy access required from off-campus). Why is GIDEON a unique resource for epidemiologists, researchers, students and public health administrators? Here is an excerpt from their “About” page:
September 11, 2001 is a day – in the memory of many Americans – that is similar to the day that President John F. Kennedy was shot… your mind instantly returns to that moment in time and geography where you first heard this horrific news.
Two members of my family survived that day in New York, running away from the collapsing buildings along with thousands of others. One of those young men stood in line later that morning at a hospital to give blood. Finally, after hours of waiting, a nurse came out and thanked them all for waiting patiently, and gently explained there was no need for blood donations that day.
CNN has posted a list of those who died on September 11, 2001 and the link is here.
Tips for preventing the spread of influenza – by systematic hand-washing, for example, or using an antiseptic hand cleanser – is the core message of a series of humor-with-a-purpose videos currently being promoted by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services for their 2009 Flu Prevention PSA Contest which concludes today, Wednesday Sept 16 2009.
Please watch the short videos and then vote for your favorite Fight the Flu video.
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Today, Dr. John D. Clarkes’Flu Rap won my vote
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The HHS agency, in a joint effort with producers ofSesame Street, also has developed this fall a series of flu-prevention public service announcements for young children featuring Elmo:
And finally (getting way off topic): Am I the only one confused by the Public Service Announcementacronym?
Prostate Specific Antigen, for example, is likely the first thing a clinician or medical librarian thinks of when seeing PSA.
However, a recent search on Google for “PSA” shows how a myriad of different interpretations. Following – among many available processes, agencies, ideas, associations or manufacturing methods – is a short and eclectic list about PSAs, including players of squash, the science of chickens, professional skaters, political science honor students, trainers of dogs, scuba diving enthusiasts, sociologists, philosophers, protein sequencing tools, a society for Polish actuarians, the science behind sticky tape and a lot of other stuff:
As a blog-administrator I get to filter all comments to the page before they are displayed publically. The majority of the spam is deleted by myself or caught by Askimet, the utility in WordPress that takes care of that function.
On Tuesday, Sept 29 there was a link in my Comments section referring to a post I’d written earlier this week about LigerCat, a new PubMed search tool. The in-coming link looked like this (screenshot shown below):
These videos come with a couple of caveats: Don’t try this at home. Some activities could result in serious bodily injury. Never jump off a roof, no matter what your friends say to you. In questionable taste.
Getting hit in the eye by a pair of flying sunglasses would be no laughing matter. These videos should remind us that there is, and will always be, a need for a new generation of Emergency Medicine physicians due in part to the poor coordination (or questionable judgment) of young people when it comes to acting like daredevils on (or with) sports equipment.
However, the young men in question have obviously practiced their sports often, are well-trained in them, and (admit it) it is creepily fascinating to observe their accuracy.
or two to keep up to date
