News, Libraries, Librarianship: Medlib’s Round Carnival Edition 2.5!

This is the June 2010 edition of Medlib’s Round Carnival.

This collection of links have been submitted by a (worldwide) group of dedicated bloggers… veteran medical librarians along with a new health science librarian, physicians and scientists contributing to the mix!

The broad  topic of this Carnival is about service. Librarians talk a lot among themselves about providing quality information services and library collections for their core users.   We are great believers in training our library visitors to recognize quality information sources, showing them what to search,  how to search and how to appraise those sources effectively; we also spend considerable time, effort and money to create digital or physical library collections that meet the information needs of our users.  Doing these things well is (actually) more difficult than it appears…  not as difficult as climbing the summit of Mount Everest but definitely made more challenging in an era of rapidly rising costs, disappearing personnel and shrinking budgets.

So without further ado, here is the Medlib’s Round Blog Carnival 2.5.

Jacqueline, blogger at Laika‘s MedLibLog recently wrote:  “It is so important that you know the pros and cons of databases and that you think before you even start searching“. Read her evidence-based discussion here:  “PubMed versus Google Scholar for Retrieving Evidence” (Jun 6 2010).

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Medical Library Association holds an annual conference, which this year was held May 21-26 in Washington, DC.  Krafty Librarian blogger Michelle Kraft was a conference speaker and official blogger at MLA.  She wrote MLA ’10 Week in Review, an excellent summary and set of links to presentations and other conference activities on her blog – especially valuable to those of us who weren’t able to attend the meeting.

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” As a library student, you don’t get many chances to really dig your teeth into searching databases, unless you’re working on a thesis or have a really extraordinary work opportunity. Basic reference as a student usually involves basic searches for patrons, maybe some instruction, more than a little help given to new or remedial library users. This is why my experience with a systematic search team will be so memorable as a learning experience as I begin to launch my career as a health librarian. “

So wrote recent MLS graduate, Daniel Hooker, who blogs about Health Libraries, Medicine and the Web in a recent post about performing his First Systematic Search using the OvidSP search platform.  Check out the vintage librarian cartoon – what a laugh!

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Psychiatrist Walter van den Broek, who blogs at Dr. Shock, wrote an interesting post for the Carnival entitled “What’s Wrong with the Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest?” (Jun 6 2010).

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Relying on donations, librarian-volunteers collect and ship medical textbooks to American military personnel stationed in war zones throughout the world.  Their service mission is described on the blog Operation Medical Libraries:

” The mission of Operation Medical Libraries is to collect and distribute current medical textbooks and journals to war-torn countries through a partnership with American medical schools, hospitals, and physicians and the United States military… and

“… to foster the creation of permanent medical libraries and support the expansion of existing collections in conflict regions where health care education and the practice of medicine are suffering “.

Text Source: http://operationmedicallibraries.blogspot.com/ – All rights reserved – Copyright 2010

This post on the OML blog is about books sent to Afghanistan in 2009 and the photo below shows a happy library user in that facility:

Photo source: http://operationmedicallibraries.blogspot.com/2009/05/oml-library-in-bagram-af-provides.html – All rights reserved – copyright 2010

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Patients or family members are a common sight in the medical library, seeking current, credible medical information, or advice on where to find those patient education materials.  Technologist-librarian PF Anderson contributes two items to this Carnival on those topics:

• A friend’s request for help in finding information on breast cancer is described in her post, “Asking a Question is Just the Beginning” (Jun 6 2010).  Sadly, her friend died of that disease in 2001.  The publication she refers to is a 3-volume reference set published by the Medical Library Association in 2004.  Excerpts from the print edition can be found on her website at:  “Medical Library Association Encyclopedic Guide to Searching and Finding Health Information on the Web“.

• Staying with PF Anderson: a link to a presentation she gave in March 2009 entitled “Who, Why, How We Serve: The Evolution of Collaborative Librarianship through Social Media“, which I recommend to you:

Video Source: http://www.youtube.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2010

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• Thanks to David Rothman who tipped many of us off to a classic post written by Ryan Deschamps entitled “Ten Reasons Why Professional Librarian is an Oxymoron” (Apr 30 2010).

• Found on Confessions of a Science Librarian (May 12 2010), John Dupois, an academic librarian and blogger, posted about the “The Inherent Insularity of Library Culture“.

• Bloggers at Offbeat Earth wrote about one very small Library in Somerset, England.

• BitesizeBio, a blog written by and for lab biologists, offers practical advice on giving, receiving, qualifying and implementing advice in the Apr 26 2010 post, “The Art of Giving of Advice“.

• Female Science Professor wrote about a Friday night visit to her academic library in “Night at the Library“, and was impressed by the activity and sense of community that she found there.

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And that’s Medlib’s Round Blog Carnival Edition 2.5, folks!  Hope you enjoyed reading it. To all those who sent in submissions, I am grateful and send you heartfelt thanks!

The next edition of MedLib’s Round (July 2010) will be hosted at Laika‘s MedLibLog.

If you have material to submit for that edition, please use this form.  To subscribe to an RSS feed for Medlib’s Round, click here here.