News, Open Access, Scholarly Communications, Academic Publishing: This is Open Access Week

October 19 through 23 is…

Photo credit – Courtesy of http://www.openaccessweek.org/ – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009

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 of Open Access (OA), and has described this international project well.

Celebrate Open Access Week 2009 by visiting these wonderful sites:

• OIASter which provides 23,090,000 articles from 1,500 sources.

• BioMedCentral offers 202 journals on its website.

• Public Library of Science (PLoS) publishes seven peer-reviewed journals.

• PubMedCentral, an open access journal archive.

• JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee ), National Library of Medicine and the Wellcome Foundation are collaborating on the Medical Journals Backfile Digitisation Project.  A list of journals being planned for digitisation is here.
  

• OpenDOAR: Directory of Open Access Repositories (a digital directory of international archival sites).

• DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals

• Hindawi Publishing - See their list of Open Access journals in Medicine.

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Here are other links to Open Access sites from around the world:

• Open Archives Initiative
• OASIS: Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook
• Open Access Directory (hosted on the Simmons College server) provides a link to Periodicals which frequently publish about Open Access
• SPARC Open Access Newsletter
• DSpace
• Registry of  Open Access Repositories (ROAR) which currently lists 1,509 members.  See a list of the registered institutions at ROAR MAP.
• FAQ Sheet: What Librarians Can do to Promote Open Access
• 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. “

Text excerpted from: http://www.niso.org/about

NISO staff have published a group of freely available reports about metadata.  The following two reports are brief and useful: one, a  20-page report about metadata (2004), and “Metadata Demystified: A Guide for Publishers” (2003).  Because somebody has to organize all this stuff!

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 a 1995 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.

Medical Literature, Data Architecture & Organization: Idioms, Lexicons and Acronyms of Medicine? NIH, NCBI, MeSH, PubMed and Entrez

Image Credit/Source: http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/pithy – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009

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 from National 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.

National Library of Medicine (NLM) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) are the U.S. agencies responsible for managing and administrating the NCBI, whose stated mission is to: 

“… 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 “.

Text source: http://preview.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/About/glance/ourmission.html

• Click here and here to see the collections of information resources accessible via the NCBI website.

• Please take a 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 multiple databases 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:

Image Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/gquery – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009

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 Databases available from NCBI.  A few of the best are highlighted here:

• OMIM (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man) is a searchable literature index that indexes data on 12,000 human genes and genetic disorders.  OMIM is updated daily.

• 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.

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Pithy Librarian says:  “Try searching MEDLINE first.”

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.

Think of MeSH terms as “tags“… similar to tagging your photos in Flickr.

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“:

Image Source: http://preview.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=mesh – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009

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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:

Image Source: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/cgi/mesh/2010/MB_cgi?mode=&index=25567&field=all&HM=&II=&PA=&form=&input= – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009

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The list of new MeSH Descriptors is always interesting to browse.  National Library of Medicine states that currently there are 25,186 descriptors in the 2009 MeSH List.   Read the Introduction to 2010 MeSH List here.

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Many excellent handouts and links to tutorials about using information resources from NCBI can be viewed at this link, and thanks to the librarians at the National Networks of Libraries of Medicine-Greater Midwest Region for creating this page.

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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):

Image Source: http://preview.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/guide/dna-rna/ – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009

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* PubMed has undergone recent design changes this month, although the “old” and the “new” PubMed versions will 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.

News, E-Books, Scientific Research, Tools: The AMA Manual of Style Online

As the new and returning medical, dental, MPH and PhD students get settled into their academic routines, including researching learning issues for PBL, there is a new E-book subscription from UCHC Library which may help them: The AMA Manual of Style: A guide for authors and editors (2009 – E-edition)*.  

Editors of this work are Dr.  Catherine D. DeAngelis, editor of JAMA and editor-in-chief of AMA Scientific Publications & Multimedia Applications, JAMA & Archives Journals, and the AMA Manual of Style committee, chaired by Cheryl Iverson.

Writing for science-technology-medicine audiences for inclusion in peer-reviewed journals has changed so much since (let’s say) 1995.  Scientific writing, presenting and summarizing original research (which may have taken years of the authors’ lives, time and focus) is challenging work, made more complex in 2009 by a shared global internet, cross-referenced publishing platforms, instant dissemination of minute-by-minute scientific news, evolving ideas of digital rights, acceptance and legitimization of open access journals, electronic archives or repository sites… each of these innovations has created effects seen by both consumers of – and publishers of – STM scholarly publishing.  (Not to mention digital journalists, loosey-goosey bloggers, micro-blogging, and 24-hours a day media/reporting frenzies.)

Will a digital edition of the AMA Manual of Style make writing for STM audiences easier?  Actually, it might.

After browsing through the print version of the AMA Manual of Style (10th edition – 2007) from the Reference collection and then using the electronic version, in my humble opinion the digital version is easier to use and quicker to ” find”.

To get an overview of how the work is organized, link to the Table of Contents which reveals the organization of the five Sections, which are:

• Section 1.  Preparing an Article for Publication

• Section 2.  Style

• Section 3. Terminology.  As an example:  Someone learning about oncology could refer to this section of the Manual to verify standard references for cancer stage-tumor grading nomenclature (found in Section 3 – Chapter 15.2.).  While the Manual isn’t the only source for such oncology information,  it is easy to find it online and read via remote access.

• Section 4:  Measurement & Quantitation.  Below is a screenshot of Section 4 – Chapters 18 through 20 which is about  “Study Design and Statistics”:

The Glossary of Statistical Terms from Section 4 would be a good source for students learning biostatistics or epidemiological methods.

Also in Section 4 is a clinical calculator:  Table 2.   Selected Laboratory Tests, With Reference Ranges and Conversion Factors that allows specific patient data to be entered and calculated against stored normal reference ranges (for adults only, no infant or child values are available).

I like that. First year students might like this tool also!  Here’s a screenshot of Table 2:

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A different way to search the Manual is by simple (or advanced) keyword.  Following is a screenshot of results from a search for “laboratory values“  that retrieved 16 hits with the Section and Chapter shown:

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Section 5 of the Manual is entitled Technical Information.  This is where an author could read descriptions of typography, manuscript editing or proofreading practice,  or find links to websites of specific medical associations, databases or global organizations.  There is a Glossary of Publishing Terms in Section 5.

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Finally, there are selected tutorials available through the digital version of the Manual.  One is the Learning Resources section which links to groups of interactive quizzes taken from sections of the E-book.  Students or clinicians can test their knowledge using the Stylebook Quizzes such as “Jargon” or “Correct and Preferred Usage”, “Numbers”, “Grammar” or “Capitalization”.  Items which are answered incorrectly allow a brief tutorial to pop up.

Another teaching-learning-tool is Tip of the Month. An entry from July 2009 about Digital Object Identifiers is shown below:

Credits:  All Images – courtesy of AMA Manual of Style (2009) – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009

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After reading this, you may be asking yourself, “What if I have no plans to publish a research article in JAMA?  How will this manual help me? “.

Graduate students, researchers and faculty in a variety of academic disciplines are required to write a fair amount including grant proposals, patient summaries, journal club presentations, articles for their professional associations, selective project descriptions and of course, required theses or dissertations.

Use this e-book created by medical editors as the working reference source it was designed to be… and because clarity is always in style.

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* Note:  Use of this e-book is by subscription only.  UConn Libraries allows access to this source for UConn or UCHC faculty, staff and students only; if off-site, log in using your proxy account number.  There are 5 simultaneous users allowed, please remember to click log-out when finished using the AMA Manual of Style.

News: A Change in Address for LibraryNews@UCHC

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

Online Search Tools: Stump the Librarian? Maybe Not

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?”

It was none of those NASHes.  NASH is not a medical subject heading in PubMed, either.

Thanks to the folks from Text to Knowledge (Text2K), who made my day when I discovered a link to their Acronym Finder.

Here is an example: a search on the term NASH

resulted in this retrieval:

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 Finder on 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:

Definition	Synonym	Similar Word
Example	Antonym	Related Word

Image credit:  Courtesy of http://new.wordsmyth.net/ - All rights reserved – Copyright 2009

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 for Nash 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 Dictionary which 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“.

News, Announcements: Welcome, a new Library Blog for UConn

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!

Searching Technologies, Cultural Evolution, Web 2.0: Slight Nostalgia for Olden Days, and Don’t Diss Librarians

” 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

News, Medicine 2.0, Current Awareness: The debut of Clinical Reader

.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.

Following is an excerpt from their About page:

” 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.

Below is a screenshot from Virtual Reality Training for Surgeons (8 minute video), featured this week:

Video credit:  http://tinyurl.com/n7c4lu

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There is a page for medical students, medical education and dentisty/oral surgery (among many others).

And links to Del.icio.us, Connotea, Digg and (of course) Twitter.  Finally: a hand-picked list of fourteen Medical Blogs is included, which features a Canadian librarian-blogger, Dean Giustini and Scienceroll blogger, Bertalan Mesko ~ woot for that!

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).

And ask Clinical Reader folks to take a look at the Creative Commons site at http://creativecommons.org/ and the doctrine of fair use.

News, Searching the Medical Literature: Two Expert Opinions on Searching, or PubMed and Beyond

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.

Open Access, Digital Libraries, E-Archives: Virtual Classics, Textbooks and Other Gems

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.

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Digital Collections from Non-Academic Sources

• Many hours could be spent browsing through the collections from the Internet Archive website.  Here are a few links: Text Collection (1.4 million e-books),  Moving Images (links to 180,000 films, videos or movies), Maps of the States via the United States Geological Surveys, an archive of game videos and of course, the Wayback Machine which now contains “2 petabytes” of data!

• The Library of Congress has one of the largest archives in the world, and was an early adapter of digitization ~ here is a link to their Digital Collection & Programs website.

• 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. “
  

• The Internet Public Library (IPL): Online Texts
• ReadPrint.com
• 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.
• iBiblio.org
• Free E-Books.net
• Page by Page Books
• Online Books4Free

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A Collection of Digital or E-Text Collections hosted by Academic Institutions

• Librarians at the University of Texas Libraries have assembled an impressive list of online E-texts.

• University of Virginia EText 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.

• The Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania.

• Faculty at Carnegie 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.

• University of Michigan Libraries have recently put their 1,000,000 E-book online, a massive digitization project, in coordination with Google. For more information, link here.

• Duke University Libraries provides access to their digital collections here.

• Columbia University Libraries provides access to E-Books List (currently 617 titles available) and also through their larger Digital Collections page.

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A Few Audio Book-Sources

• Listen to Audio-Books in the public domain from LibriVox
• Open Culture: Audible Books and Podcasts
• The Spoken Alexandria Project
  

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Recommendations by Readers or Bloggers

• 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.

• Online Libraries: 25 Places to Read Books for Free

• ArtsLab: Nice E-Book Sites

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Hard to Describe Sites

• 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.

• An archive of photographs cataloging Life in Western Pennsylvania (1840-1970) which contains 800 photographs and 12 films about the region.  Here is a glorious image of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – taken in 1932 – f0und on this site:

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):

Image courtesy of http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/ – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009