” Tis far better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. “

-Quote variously attributed to Benjamin Franklin, Galileo, Socrates and Abraham Lincoln

” You get the network that you deserve. “

-Written by Brian Morressey

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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 never forgets.

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.

Sounds like ancient history, doesn’t it?

It was an analog world.   Our digital natives wouldn’t recognize the place.

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:

Image credit: C-K Cultural Dictionary – Copyright 2009 – All rights reserved

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!

Please read:

• Laika’s MedLibLog: 10+1 PubMed Tips for Residents (and Their Instructors) (Jun 30 2009)

• Life in the Fast Lane: Medical Search for Physicians (Jun 16 2009).

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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.

Ms. Giglia is the author of a very recent article, “Medline/PubMed revisited: new, semantic tools to explore the biomedical literature“, published June 2009 in Eur J Phys Rehabil Med – Vol. 45(2):293-7 (subscription required).

Law librarian Gloria Miccioli wrote a summary of medical sources targeted for legal professionals, entitled  “Researching Medical Literature on the Web” (published Sept 22 2008), found on LLRX.com.

The LLRX website also offers a list of links for librarians (or others) doing legal research.

My own Home Week: Evidence Based Medicine Resources page on Libguides.com was created – and is updated annually – as a source-sheet for third-year medical students at UCHC as they rotate throug h their clinical clerkship year.

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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.

A quick search on Google for “tutorials searching medical literature” brings up an eclectic group of 968,000 retrievals.

The same search using Bing f0und 1,530,000 well-filtered retrievals.

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).

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 from Adbusters.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:

Photo credit: http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/digitaldetox – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009

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Here’s a list of recent tweets about the idea.

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:

Video Source: http://www.adbusters.org/abtv/adbusters – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009

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When my son was about seven years old, he asked me a number of important questions:

• “Mom, were there cars when you were growing up?“
• “Did you have television then?  What programs did you watch?” *
• “Well…. what did you do before there was the Internet?”
• Brief thoughtful silence.
• Then: <sigh>  “It sounds pretty boring when you were growing up, Mom.” (this final statement… with a pitying glance).

These are questions that only a digital native would ask, of course.

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Several medical bloggers posted items this week about Information Overload.  Here are two I enjoyed reading:

• Clinical Cases and Image Blog on Medical Blogging and Twitter
• Alisha764’sBlog on “Too Fast and Furious: Web 2.0 Overload“

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So, will you be unplugging your devices this week?

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* Scooby-Do, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Petticoat Junction, Hollywood Squares, and anything by The Three Stooges.