A blog for medical students, faculty and librarians about their use of evidence based medicine, clinical literature, Web 2.0, sources and search strategies
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.
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):
They Didn’t Study. I loathe math and never was any good at it. From an early age decided to have a career in which mathematics played no role. So luckily, I became a librarian!
But most of us can sympathize with exam-takers who simply have no clue as to how to solve certain math problems. This page – They Didn’t Study found onScribd – gets it just right. Here is an example of a creative way to solve a math problem:.
Want to design your own virtual game? Go to MIT’sScratchsite. What is Scratch about? from their About page: “Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web. Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design. “
If Son of String Art (from Scratch) had been available when I studied Geometry, it might have helped me get an A! This one is totallyaddictive: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Paddle2See/89023
De-Noted, a blog showing many ways to humorously deface pieces of currency from around the globe.
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Finally… the cartoonist xkcd provides two cartoons for this Friday:
An important election is coming up on Nov 4 2008 in the United States, and while this blog is certainly not a political blog, as there are fewer than 50 days to go before this long-anticipated event, it seems proper to have one Friday Post #17 devoted to the political “silly season“.
Much has changed about publicly-available knowledge in the past ten years with the advent of the Information Age. The media has become so much more important (and ubiquitous) than it was for previous generations of voters. Anyone with a teenager knows that in the era of instant text-messaging, far fewer secrets can be kept – because any newsworthy item will be texted within 30 seconds to friends scattered far and wide. Many grown-ups are just as connected to their Blackberries…
I decided to collect some alternative information sources for those interested in following the progress of the 2008 Election with a different editorial spin than the major U.S. broadcasting networks. Here they are, in the spirit of Free Speech:
Two somewhat impartial sites (U.K.) reporting news in the United States: The Economist (UK) provides a synopsis website at their Backgroundersite or their U.S. Daily News Synopsis
Accuracy in Media (AIM) is the place to check after some prominent public persons have made well-broadcast gaffes, misstatements, had their e-mail account hacked or otherwise said (or done) some downright stupid things. For example, here’s a link from Accuracy in Media entitled Global Warming Follies. AIM also links to a sister site, Accuracy in Academia.
Two from Wikipedia: Definition of Opposition Researchand alsoElectoral Dirty Tricks. I did a search for blogs representing both political parties and their various tactics but could not find any blogs devoted to Democrats Dirty Tricks. So regarding these following two blogs: Republican Dirty Tricks 2008and GOP Dirty Tricks… if you know of any representing views on Democrats’ dirty tricks, please post them in comments and I’ll add them, in fairness to both parties.
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Finally: Electoral Vote.com offers up a striking and colorful map portraying each U.S. state’s current lean toward particular candidates, see screenshot below. (Note: The map shown below was recorded on Sept 3 2008 and isn’t current):
And folks, no matter whether you are of the Republican and Democrat persuasion, please exercise your civic right to Vote onElection Day – Tuesday, Nov 4 2008.
The slogan on the frontpage of Omgili states “Find out what people are saying“, by checking their forums (“boards”) where participants share opinions, offer recommendations, answer technological/troubleshooting advice, and provide consumer reviews (somewhat like epinion.com – which has been around a lot longer). It’s yet another brand of Web 2.0 search engine/combo. Search Engine News writer Terri Wells calls it a “search engine for the subjective” (link to her 6-2-2008 review) and awarded Omgili a 4-star rating (on a scale of 1-5).
Launched Jun 18 2008, Zoomii Books calls itself A “Real” Online Bookstore, opening with a brief tutorial on how to use the site. Zoomii currently has one employee: Canadian Chris Thiessen, who invented it. Or take the tour of how to use Zoomii on YouTube (link here).
Still in beta, navigating through the Viewzi search site takes a bit of practice. Type in a search term or terms(s) and after the search has processed, you can slide your mouse along the top of the screen to select the areas of digital information you’re interested in viewing. Viewzi search sections include MP3 files, Weather around the world, News, results from Four Sources (Yahoo, Google, Ask and MSN are shown under their assigned colors), Simple Text Search, Food Recipes, Tech Crunch, Celebrity Photos, Videos, Photos or 3-D Photo Cloud.
Below is a screenshot of the 3-D photo cloud from Viewzi for a sample search on “yellow roses”:
Image source: Viewzi.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2008
While I wouldn’t use Viewzi for a medical search, the results are interesting for a just plain old Basic Question, of which reference librarians are asked in this library occasionally.
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Next: The much-touted Cuil search engine debuted on Monday Jul 28 2008, stating that it indexes 120 billion pages. Performance expectations for the site are high. Give it a chance to get up to speed… it will. Their server crashed on the first day, but it is working again.
Image source/credit: http://www.cuil.com/ – All rights reserved – Copyright 2008
Rivers of digital ink are pouring out about rivalry between Cuil and Google, with all the elements in place for a grudge match… former Google employees, highly proprietary technologies, lucrative and competitive markets. Tech writers at CrunchBase.com provide some basic information about the company:
” Cuil is a stealth search engine startup which claims that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google. Cuil has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google’s, based on new search architectures and relevance methods… Cuil was founded by highly respected search experts. Husband and wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson were joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are ex-Google search experts. Costello was the founder of Xift.
Librarians have a standard tool to use when testing about a new search engine: Use your own name to search on. This exercise actually works well because you are the best authority of the accuracy or links from varied sourced indexed and tagged within the Google or Cuil brain.
Try a search using Cuil on your own name then compare those results to what you get from doing an identical search using Google. And since we all live and dwell in a real-life community with digital or virtual counterparts – it is practical to learn where or how your name is listed in major search engines.
I plan on using Cuil, and will watch with interest on how it develops its brand… but this librarian isn’t giving up searching Google just yet.
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Lastly: Ask Metafilter‘s slogan is ”Querying the Hive Mind“. There is a one-time charge of $5.00 (U.S.) to sign up for an Ask Metafilter account. You must log in in order to post questions or comments, but any guest user can surf the site to see what types of questions or groups are available. OK!
After spending 10 minutes looking around on this site, I had difficulty understanding how the archives are arranged. Postings show up by larger Category and then by date order. How are individual topics and chats organized or indexed beyond that?
Maybe this site doesn’t make sense to me because I’m not a digital native? Here’s a sample post found on AskMetafilter’s Human Relations section. Question: Why give away that much personal, identifying information? Possible Answer: There is no delete key on the internet, Avi. Take care what you share online.
Keep those comments coming… Your kind words Make a Blogger’s Day
Image credit: Courtesy of Imagechef.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2008
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When this blog got started on Jul 25 2007, there were a few things I hadn’t anticipated about jumping with both feet into the Social Media ocean. I would like to thank publicly and recognize some real life folks who have answered questions, patiently explained things and told me I could do this Web 2.0 stuff, over the past 12 months: Bertalan Mesko (his blog is Scienceroll), David Rothman (his blog), Steve Chan, radiologist and chief RadRounds blogger and Surfactant whose beautiful images have inspired me to post ever more radiology and Emerging Technologies Librarian and educator par excellence, P. F. Anderson. Your advice has meant a great deal to a newbie.
So… 18,949 hits, 212 posts, 26 categories, 108 comments and 14,142 spams later here are a few things I think I learned:
~ Pre-Blog: Del.icio.us is a what ? Now: Many people are much better at meta-tagging than I am, and all of us can view their hand-picked sites. (I am KerC on del.icio.us). Thank you for sharing all that work.
~ Pre-Blog: Didn’t use RSS readers such as Bloglines or Google Reader to ‘collect’ blogs of professional or personal interest. Now: It is a most convenient way to see what others are buzzing about online, check out trends, read about who is covering what. Visit the account weekly.
~ Pre-Blog: YouTube is a source of entertainment. Now: Recognize that it is an essential reference source. Where else could I find all those medical student videos?
~ Pre-Blog: Little use or interest in virtual environments such as Second Life. Now: Realize that a great deal of quality learning and instruction can take place in virtual environments, which represent a democratic, efficient, equalized way to distribute information or share knowledge regardless of physical location, geography, socioeconomic status, level of education or physical limitations.
Your online avatar can be studious, a hottie, alien-like or otherwordly. Flying as a means of transportation is highly recommended. A medical student in California can participate in the same real-time Second Life learning forum as others in Hungary, Korea or Iceland. Participation in Second Life can be free, or for a nominal charge in Linden dollars, or you can spend bundles of money buying land or dressing up. Second Life opens your eyes to possibilities not possible in an analog world. Now how cool is that!?
~ Pre-Blog: Never had to fight with my family members over who is using the Mac at home. Now: We use a lottery system… and then fight over whose turn it is to use the computer.
~ Pre-Blog: Friends are people you see often, talk on the phone with, go over to their house. Now: Have never met (in the face-to-face sense) people with whom I communicate often about technical blogging issues, ideas, conferences, subject/content for clinical use, etc. We may never be together in one room… but we’re still friends!
~ Pre-Blog: Had one email account, one password and checked it daily. Now: Bought a binder to keep all those various online accounts, emails and passwords up to date. Online persona is multiplying. If this account/passwords binder ever went astray… total meltdown.
~ Pre-Blog: Writing a Blog? Piece of cake! A no-brainer. Now: Everything looks simple from far away (to paraphrase a song). Being a gatherer of facts, a writer, an editor, a fact-checker, a punctuation-ist, primitive HTML-coder, digital illustrator and self critic is actually quite a daily challenge – but also highly educational. It forces one to become a critical analyzer of the information overload. If you’ve read this far, I hope you (the reader) would agree that I’ve learned something about assembling, packaging and presenting material for others’ intellectual “consumption” over the past 12 months. Some of those early posts look primitive.
~ Pre-Blog: Blogging is easy. Now: Nope, blogging is not easy. It is time-consuming. Staring at a screen for hours daily wears on your vision. People who blog begin to look at events and habits in their professional or personal life as potential material for blogging about and that is scary. Have wireless at work, now need wireless at home. Cat gets lonely, gardens neglected. And Forget about cooking.
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Thank you for reading this blog.
And to finish up…when you’re a Blogger,every day is aBrand New Day !
After library orientation sessions for new residents and fellows in July and finishing up the MPH Health Informatics course, the reference librarians begin to gear up for instructional sessions for incoming medical and dental students and greet 400+ returning students. There are many questions from individuals about using or downloading PDA based information; our academic computing specialists field those questions. And when all the good parking spaces suddenly disappear, summer is over and a new Academic year has begun around here!
During Fall semester, I teach a searching/training session for groups of third year medical students who are rotating through their ‘home’ institution (i.e. UCHC). These week-long rotations are collectively called Home Week; there are seven sessions spaced throughout the academic year.
Home Week searching/training sessions are a logical time to describe and demonstrate evidence-based medicine sources such as the Cochrane Library or advanced techniques for searching Medline using Medical Subject Headings, clinical subheadings and Clinical Queries for this group. Examples of comparisons of treatments found in ACP Journal Club or BMJ Clinical Evidence are given. Another function for the class is to provide updates on new database subscriptions or those which they may have used previously but which have been revamped – such as Essential Evidence (previously known as InfoRetriever). The biostatistical analyses and critical appraisal of clinical trials (BMJ “how to read a paper” stuff) is covered by a PhD later the same morning.
Insight for instructing the Home Week evidence based literature session is grounded by my participation in problem-based learning (PBL) as a facilitator for first or second-year groups. PBL classes meet once per week for three hours; there are eight students and two facilitators in each group. The majority of facilitators are physicians. A PBL case-study runs for two weeks, and there are 8-10 hypothetical patient/case studies per semester.
This shared small group experience has been a real-life learning lab for me… hearing directly from students as to how they begin to use scientific literature sources to solve diagnosis, medical problem-solving and treatment options presented by each hypothetical patient. Besides their textbooks, the students’ all-purpose “Big Three” clinical sources – used heavily during the first two years – tend to be Access Medicine, including Harrisons’ Principals of Internal Medicine, Up to Date and frequent searches of Medline to locate original research studies or clinical reviews.
The students also hear about accessing the Big Five journals (JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, BMJ, Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine) from everybody (lecturers, clinical preceptors, librarians). Yes, the running joke is that while we all use Wikipedia… please try searching Medline too, OK?
The information requirements of third year students’ are not static either.
These digital natives were required to purchase a new laptop prior to beginning their first semester at medical school. Their laptops are configured once they arrive onsite to serve as their wireless docking station, course notebook and the instrument by which they take all exams. A new requirement for the incoming Class of 2012 is to arrive with both a new laptop and PDA.
As their clinical knowledge base expands, third year students’ choice of information sources widens. Their search strategies are affected by the types of patients that they have seen at their community preceptors’ medical practice, or where they may have volunteered in area health clinics, such as one UCHC runs each summer for migrant workers. As one of our core library user groups, students have considerable latitude to experiment and “grow through” various literature sources available to them from UCHC Library.
While they may never call it “evidence-based clinical reasoning”, this is an aspect of their education in which librarians and highly-knowledgeable curriculum support staff play a proactive role as “information consultants” for this group.
Many of the subscription databases are selected specifically because they offer both a web-based database with an accompanying PDA component. Examples: Lexi-Compand Micromedexare standard pharmaceutical reference sources; dosing, drug interactions, algorithms or potential adverse affects can all be loaded onto a PDA which travels with the student during their rotations or accessed through the wireless network.
Significant time and money has been expended in selecting comprehensive “clinical decision support tools” like DynaMed or FirstConsult. There are several free PDA tools of use for the students, such as Diagnosaurus, Archimedes andePocrates. While UCHC has access to Ovid, few students use the database so I no longer teach it for Home Week. Students are encouraged to pick and choose which source(s) to “specialize” in to answer their patient care questions, as any of these resources provide a specific utility and represent an “information niche”.
The hour in the Home Week session passes quickly. I do save the final ten minutes to discuss, demonstrate and convince this group of the utility and power of usingScopus for answering clinical questions. Why? Because the Scopus database represents (to me) an example of the future of searching.
Scopus does – and will – cover much of the literature needs required by clinicians, students and researchers for the next several years. Following is an excerpt from the Scopus “About” page:
” Updated daily, Scopus covers 29 million abstracts of over 15,000 peer-reviewed titles from more than 4,000 publishers, 265 million references and 265 million quality web pages through Scirus‘ web search to cover the scientific web. “
Scopus sets a new standard in contemporary clinical databases. Most students are already aware of how essential Medline is for their searches… what I enjoy describing for them is what access to the vast content in Scopus can mean for their clinical knowledge base and effective patient care.
And I am grateful that the clinical faculty give me 60-70 minutes to demonstrate these sources for the third year students, year after year.
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Note: Most of the sources mentioned above are subscription databases, available only onsite at UCHC, via proxy access for affiliates or at any other institution which subscribes to them.
Dr. Mosteller has created a very rare thing: a blog written by medical faculty, focusing on teaching and learning in medicine: http://rmostell.wordpress.com
Thank you, Dr. Mosteller! Your site has been adding to theblogroll at EBM & Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC.
Forensic investigations of centuries-old skeletons in London, dissection of a rare deep-sea giant squid in Australia, one news-making employee in California and a medical student video make up this Friday Post #12 for Jul 18 2008.
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” Over the last 30 years, [staff from] the Museum of London has excavated, examined and archived 17,000 human skeletons. Now, 26 of them are to go on display at the Wellcome Trust in London. They each have a story to tell about life in the capital hundreds of years ago “.
This week, BBC Science/Nature Page featured an lengthy article this week entitled, Tales from the Grave, describing an archaeology project undertaken by the Museum of London. Within the news article are three brief videos narrated by several of the scientists involved in the project. It’s fascinating medical detective work.
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Forensic medicine on a very different scale (and continent): one of the largest rare deep-sea cephalopods ever seen was accidentally caught and killed in a net from a commercial fishing boat in Australia recently. The giant squid was dissected by scientists in front of a live audience in Melbourne this week. Read about that story here from the Melbourne Herald-Sun. Here is a press release about it, and a link to Museum Victoria (July 17 2008 )
You can view the entire filmed dissection (90 minutes in length) accompanied by narrative from several of the scientists involved, including squid expert Dr. Mark Norman, at this link: streaming video (Jul 17 2008 ).
” Prosecutors say City employee Terry Childs, who works in the Department of Technology, tampered with the city’s new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials’ e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates’ bookings are stored. Childs created a password that granted him exclusive access to the system, authorities said. He initially gave pass codes to police, but they didn’t work. When pressed, Childs refused to divulge the real code even when threatened with arrest, they said. He was taken into custody Sunday.”
Most of us don’t give a thought to how the internet actually functions. Walking over to a computer, utilizing a web browser such as Firefox or Opera to locate the information that you need – without knowing anything at all about how HTML code works – is quite a lot like getting into your car, turning on the ignition and driving away. You don’t really have to know how the engine works, you just use it. And with your computer, as long as the network and the electricity are flowing, all works well.
In the event that you would like to learn more about how these things work, the Norwegian software company, Opera.com, has recently put up a free online training course, entitled Web Standards Curriculum(WSC) about just that topic, announced in July 2008.
Chris Mills describes himself as an Opera “evangelist” and technical writer; he wrote the first article, and served as editor for the rest of the series. Currently there are 23 segments in the online course, and the company has plans to add classes to the series as they become available. Following is an excerpt from the first lesson of WSC:
“.. In this article I introduce to you the product of a lot of hard work over the last several months (by myself and a lot of other people)—the Web Standards Curriculum, a course designed to give anyone a solid grounding in web design/development, no matter who they are—it is completely free to use, accessible, and assumes no previous knowledge. I am mainly aiming this at universities, as I believe the standards of education in web standards to be somewhat lacking at many universities “.
This series by Opera looks to be a useful learning tool for anyone interested in the past development of Web-based programming and the architecture of information systems. I first learned of this course from reading a brief article about it in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Jul 8 2008 ).
Being a novice user of SecondLife, it was with interest that I returned from vacation this week to read about many bloggers providing commentary or reviews on Google‘s release on July 8 2008 of their 3-D virtual environment application, Lively.
Below is a screenshot of the opening page of Lively:
I did download Lively today just to see how it might compare to SecondLife. It seemed easy and user-friendly to get started… although the graphics and visual details are poor in comparison to SL. You create an account, sign in and then begin by choosing an avatar and dressing it, select and name a “room” of your own, furnish it. There are several different means of finding out what is in this virtual environment. You can search “all rooms” to see which rooms in Livelyhave the most occupants (or those with no occupants), which rooms have the most traffic, etc.
As an example, today I searched “All Rooms” and found a room for Westerns and Cowboys (screenshot below):
Here’s where my experience using Livelyends. I cannot comment about what was happening on the Western & Cowboy room because after downloading Lively it ran for all of 15 minutes then the software locked up and crashed my PC so… I removed the program. As it currently isn’t configured to run on a Mac, I can’t test it on my laptop.
To read a collection of news items, blogger opinions or reviews about Lively, click here. Writer Matt Vella weighs in briefly with this article from Business Week dated July 9 2008.
Then there is the whole notion of reasonable privacy and online tracking of what sites and when a user visits while running many Google programs. Lively requires a user to log-in using a Google account. While you don’t necessarily need to supply a real name, you do need to provide a verifiable email address and account name (which you choose) in order to connect.
So, this librarian’s point is: please consider the context and eventual use by Google of the information being collected about users, as illustrated by a screenshot, shown below, taken from the Google Privacywebsite:
RT @highwirepress: Today is HighWire's 18th Birthday: May 22, 1995, we launched JBC Online @JBiolChem at EB1995, changing the scholarly pub… 18 hours ago
MD-Consult
The Friday Post #17: Our Political Silly Season… Election Data, Demographics and Political News
An important election is coming up on Nov 4 2008 in the United States, and while this blog is certainly not a political blog, as there are fewer than 50 days to go before this long-anticipated event, it seems proper to have one Friday Post #17 devoted to the political “silly season“.
Much has changed about publicly-available knowledge in the past ten years with the advent of the Information Age. The media has become so much more important (and ubiquitous) than it was for previous generations of voters. Anyone with a teenager knows that in the era of instant text-messaging, far fewer secrets can be kept – because any newsworthy item will be texted within 30 seconds to friends scattered far and wide. Many grown-ups are just as connected to their Blackberries…
I decided to collect some alternative information sources for those interested in following the progress of the 2008 Election with a different editorial spin than the major U.S. broadcasting networks. Here they are, in the spirit of Free Speech:
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Photo/Image Credit: http://www.electoral-vote.com/ – All rights reserved – Copyright 2008
And folks, no matter whether you are of the Republican and Democrat persuasion, please exercise your civic right to Vote on Election Day – Tuesday, Nov 4 2008.