Do you like to write? Do you like technology? Do you yearn for a public outlet from which you can espouse the glories of the MLA conference 2010 in Washington DC?
Then why not apply to be an official blogger for MLA ‘10? Official conference bloggers earn 3 AHIP points and may have access to free wireless services for the duration of the conference.
The application will be open until April 20th, 2010. Official bloggers will be announced April 30th, 2010.
Because how else are you going to share your Obama photo with the world’s premier league of health sciences information professionals?
Last year we had a wonderful group of bloggers and as the BIC (Blogger in Charge) of the 2009 conference blog I can say that it was great experience. It was a great opportunity to meet other MLA members and stay in touch with what was going on at the conference. I also did a survey of the official bloggers, and they all had such positive responses about blogging the conference. So, I wasn’t the only one who enjoyed the experience, the bloggers did too.
Not a blog author? Don’t worry! You don’t need to be current author of a blog to be an official blogger, you just to have some experience with blogging software such as WordPress.
Have laptop but don’t have wifi? Don’t worry, apply to be an official “wireless” blogger and MLA will provide you with a wireless card. You don’t have a laptop or you aren’t bringing a laptop? Don’t worry, you can still be an official blogger.
If you are going to the meeting in D.C. and you are interested in blogging apply and submit it by Tuesday, April 20, 2010. Official Bloggers will be notified by Friday, April 30, 2010.
It is about one week before the Medlib Blog Carnival submission deadline and we need some librarian blog entries. So far all of submissions sent to the have been from spammers. I need some of you librarian bloggers out there to help me fight the spam and submit a post that you have written within the last week. It is best if you submit it using the submission form, but if you would rather email me directly with a link, that is fine too.
A few months ago Facebook added some privacy setting that allow you to have multiple friend groups. For me this is helpful and it might be helpful to others who different types of “friends” following you on Facebook.
Mashable has a great “how to” guide on creating friends lists and sending updates to a select group of friends.
It is a great way to keep everybody updated with information you want them to see or they want to see. For example my family and non-librarians friends have no interest in proxy servers and license agreements. Just as my librarian friends probably don’t want to hear me waxing poetically about my kids (mis)adventures or my house renovations.
In the past I have talked about linking your Twitter and blog accounts to your Facebook pages. If you are running a library site or your Facebook page is purely professional I still recommend doing that. But if you have a diverse group of friends and have created different lists then you might want to test how your Twitter and blog updates are shared. I am not sure how customizable all of these outside tools are with Facebook are, I am in the process of testing them to see if anything is possible.
Those of you with iPhones or other touch screen phones all know by now that gloves and touch screen technology are a problem. In snowy Cleveland my outdoor phone conversations are always very quick and I do a lot of call screening to determine if I really want to take my glove off, take the call and let my hand freeze.
No more frigid fingers! Dots Gloves have come to the rescue.
Heavy duty Dots Gloves featuring conductive yarn dots on fingure tips.
The gloves range from $15-$25 and allow you to perform basic iPhone functions such as answering a call, dialing, activating the iPod, etc. The first gloves had little metal conductive dots on three fingers, but the new design features dots on the figures made from conductive yarn.
Older version of Dots Gloves with metal dots on finger tips.
In an interview with the Daily News, Jeremy Horwitz, editor of iLounge, says a bare hand is still better than a Dots glove. (Krafty thought: “Well Duh!”) He says “These tips are able to activate the key icon-sized features of the iPhone and iPod touch -turning on music, changing tracks, and adjusting volume – but offer too little precision for typing.”
Who freaking cares!? I will update my Facebook and text when I am inside and warm, I just want to answer the phone without taking my glove off and freezing a hand. Too bad they are pretty much sold out of every style and size. I will just have add them to my mailing list or follow them on Twitter or Facebook because they say the new line is coming out February 2010 (hopefully that means it will be out any day now).
I would add another component on to Stephen’s question, what does this mean for library vendors as well? How does the public’s unwillingness to buy something online effect us and does that drive what we buy from vendors?
The bar graph while pretty doesn’t give a lot of detail. Missing from the blog post and the report is consumers’ willingness to buy books online which is large emerging area. At first glance most of the resources measured (theatrical movies, music, games, magazines, newspapers, etc.) are not exactly high on the list of medical library online collections.
However if you dig deeper into the report you come across a few interesting charts and bits of information (around pg 5). Most consumers believe if they already subscribe to a newspaper, magazine, or other service then they should be able to use the content for free…AND do with it however they want. Sixty two percent of the consumers polled believed that once they purchased something, it should be theirs to copy or share with whomever they want. (This makes me think that consumer’s minds on copyright and fair use may not be in line with the law due to their belief that they paid for it they can do whatever they want with it.)
Also interesting for online journal companies and book publishers, about half of those surveyed preferred micropayments for specific content. In other words they don’t want to pay for the whole book they when they just need the chapter.
Finally, while publishers and producers try to make a correlation between the quality of paid vs free online content, most consumers were pretty evenly split as to whether that is the case. They question whether online content would really suffer if companies could not charge for it.
As I mentioned, a lot of this information is directed at general news, information, and entertainment resources, so there aren’t any direct correlations to specifically medical resources and information. But this is a look into the consumer’s mind, and while there might be some adjustments here and there due to the unique resources and content in medical libraries, I would be willing to bet this willingness or willingness to pay for access follows through to some degree. So as the future shows us new ways to retrieve information, it shows us a new way society views entitlement.
Things will be a little different for MLA’s 2010 Annual Meeting and it all centers around keeping members connected.
MLA President Connie Schardt’s email to Medlib-l and her post on MLA Connections, discusses our Keynote Speaker, Daniel Pink author of “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.” She describes the book as a “ground breaking guide to surviving, thriving, and finding meaning in an outsourced, automated, upside down world.”
As Connie mentions, Pink is a little outside of the box for MLA Keynote speakers, because “for the first time, the National Program Committee has selected a common book.” Additionally, Pink wants to try to connect with us (the target audience for his keynote speech) before, during and after the meeting. Specifically he wants to hear from us BEFORE his talk so he can “frame his presentation within our context.” So take a few minutes and go to Dan Pink’s invitation to MLA ’10 and share what you would like to discussed at the conference. Several librarians have already shared ideas, and you can browse through them and share your own.
Another change to MLA is connectivity. This meeting will be more online allowing for more people to attend virtually and view things remotely. This is the first time the annual meeting will have an online conference community portal. According to Eric Schnell who will be helping out with coordinating the portal, “conference community is an online experience being built around MLA 2010 that allows attendees (both in person or virtual) to interact and share through various online social tools. Some of the content on the site will even be made available for association members that are not attending the conference.”
In the past we have used many of these online social tools but now MLA is pulling them together, adding new owns, and making them part of a cohesive conference community portal. One of the things that will be in the portal will be Daniel Pink’s presentation. It will be videotaped and available within 24 hours.
Several weeks AFTER the conference Pink will participate in a live Webcast to continue the discussion and reflect on how we might apply things in our libraries. (I am not sure if this will be in the portal or if we will link to it through the portal.)
What else is going to be in the portal? Well I am sure the MLA portal people (like Eric) and the NPC have ideas, but they are looking to hear from you to learn about what you think should be in the portal or what other neat online conference-ish things have been done elsewhere that might work in the MLA ’10 portal.
Some neat new firsts for MLA for the annual meeting. This is one giant leap toward connecting with members. Hopefully members will take the opportunity to connect with each other and with MLA because this the only way we can make the organization more relevant and work best for members. So reach out and connect.
Even though it is still snowing and are in a fluffy white deep freeze, March is just around the corner. March is not only the month of Spring and flowers but it is also when I will be hosting the Medlib Blog Carnival.
The Medlib Blog Carnival is a collection of blog posts on things pertaining to medical libraries. Each month a new collection of posts are hosted at a different blog site for others to read. March is my turn to host.
So all of you medical, health, and library bloggers out there, please consider submitting one of you posts to the carnival. Submissions must be made by March 6, 2010 to the . You don’t have to specifically be a medical librarian or a librarian to submit a post. The post just has to be related to medicine and libraries in some way. Some topic examples are: library technology, librarianship, Evidence Based Medicine (EBM), PubMed, bibliographic databases, information literacy, open access, print vs. online, medical apps, library apps, mobile technology, user education, etc.
I look forward to all of the submissions and will have them up for everybody to read March 9, 2010.
Foursquareis the latest geo-location app to hit the mobile market. Currently it is available for the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and the Palm. People who have other types of mobile phones that can get on the Internet can us the mobile website version. People load it on to their phone and “check-in” to places that they visit. A CNN article has says, “Next Year’s Twitter? It’s Foursquare.”
Some people have the app on their phone sync on their Facebook account so you might have seen something similar to Caroline McCarthy of cnet’s foursquare check-in within the Newsfeed of Facebook.
Example of foursquare within Facebook
Why would somebody want to tell people where they are and where they have been? I am not quite sure of all the reasons but one reason is the social sharing mania that you see with things like Facebook, Twitter, etc. and the other reason might be the perks. Yes, perks. People who check in to all sorts of places like Starbucks, restaurants, parks, offices, libraries, bars, stores, etc. Additionally people are adding information (Tips) about these places as they visit.
For example foursquare people who visited the Cleveland Clinic left these tips:
@Table 45 (*Krafty note: Table 45 is nice restaurant at the Cleveland Clinic)
Be Sure to check out happy hour between 4-6 pm. Free appetizers.
@The Cleveland Clinic
The Clinic may be a hospital, but it also has a new shopping area: bookstore, clothes, au bon pain, and a sushi bare are all new. If you need to find something ask one of the “red coats.”
The tips are most often used at restaurants (like: Harvest Salad is great but get dressing on the side because they drench it on.) and stores with coupons or specials (like: Sign up for their newsletter and get $5 off).
Foursquare has already struck several deals with large companies such as Pepsi and Zagat. Small local businesses are getting into the foursquare fever, marketing deals to mayors (the person who has checked-in the most out of anyone at a specific location) and regular foursquare users. TechCrunch noted, “Not only does the mayor of the venue Marsh (local bar performance space) get free drinks, but everyone who checks into the venue on Foursquare and shows proof (on your iPhone or other mobile device) gets $2 off a ticket to any performance that night.”
Some librarians are even talking about how they can get into the foursquare fury. If you look at the Technology Trends Webinar hashtag #TTWebinar and scroll down a bit, you will see where people are discussing the use of foursquare in libraries.
From @libkitty
“Looking at foursquare. It seems like libraries could create promos, special offers, without using a smart phone, or even a cell.”
Foursquare is fun. I have it loaded on my iPhone and I can definitely see where people would want to use it to get tips and discounts, because I love that feature. I am not quite sure of its practical use in libraries, although a lot of people on #TTWebinar had some interesting ideas. But one of my biggest problems with fourquare is privacy. Yes you heard it, me with a blog, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, and active member in MLA is worried about privacy. You can Google my name and everything about me is out there for all to see. But I kind of find foursquare a little too Big Brotherish. Granted it is self induced Big Brother. I’m just not sure if I really want people to know where I have been and where I am at. Caroline McCarthy described how your foursquare check-ins aren’t private on Facebook despite your security settings.
Another problem I have with foursquare is that I keep forgetting to check-in. I am no longer the mayor of the Cleveland Clinic Alumni Library (which is probably good because you would probably want your users to be mayors) and when I go to restaurants I am either 1. watching over children to ensure appropriate behavior or 2. too excited to have a dinner alone with my husband to remember to pull out my phone and check-in.
So while I am not sure of its use in libraries it is definitely a Friday Fun type of application that you might want to look at and play around with. I wouldn’t recommend syncing it with Twitter friends or Facebook friends unless you are ready for your check-ins to be visible to everyone on those applications.
That also most sounds like a looping question. In the real estate market a house is worth as much as somebody is willing to pay. But in media world a song may be worth millions but people are only willing to pay .99 cents for it. In the case of the house, you only have one buyer, but the song you have millions of buyers. Still with both products there is only so much a buyer is willing to pay for a product. Price something too low and you will get a lot of buyers but you lose out on potential profits, price something too high and you have less buyers, possibly losing more money than if you had just priced it a little cheaper. It is a tight rope walk.
Last year music companies were able to set their prices on their songs with iTunes variable pricing. The variable pricing gave music lables the ability to set prices as low as .69 cents to as high as $1.29 for individual songs. So how did that pan out a year later?
Not so good, music sales are slower. Warner Music Group (WMG) announced that its unit sales growth (individual song sales, not album) on iTunes has slowed since the price increase. Sales at the $1.29 level were down and if it weren’t for the revenue generated by the .69 cent songs, they would never have made a net gain. The CEO of WMG acknowledged he was unsure as to whether it was the economy or the 30% price increase (or both) that was the cause. “It’s difficult to know, even today, if it is just consumer resistance to a higher price points or if taking a pricepoint of 30 percent more at such a fragile time (is to blame). I don’t think there’s been another company to have taken such a price increase in the 2009 period.”
So why is this a big deal for medical libraries and companies who provide content to them? The last 3 or 4 technology webinars and discussions I have sat in on have all talked about pay for access book and journal article content. Instead of libraries paying big bucks for ejournals and ebooks they can make them available to users by making them pay access at the user level. Right now I only hear academic libraries seriously discussing this but I can see it making its way into the cash strapped hospital world.
Pay for access is nothing new. Almost every journal publisher I can think of has their own pay for access public site where they charge unaffiliated (or sometimes unaware affiliated) users anywhere from $25-$40 for a copy of an article. Publishers have also experimented and used institutional pay access models, most of the models I have seen have been where the institution pays for the accessed material not the user. During the webinars more people spoke about models where the user pays for access. In some libraries this is a foreign concept, but in others such as academics where students have copy and printer accounts associated with their library accounts, this is not so radical an idea.
If more and more libraries begin to look at userd to pay for access, price will be a key factor in overall usage. The music iTunes model is an established model. The ebook purchasing model where people download a title to a handheld device is still fairly new. Yet they are already experimenting with price for buying electronic title access for handhelds. Amazon.com looks to return to providing Macmillan books at a higher price (Amazon.com’s usual top price was $9.99), and there is speculation that many other publishers will follow Macmillan’s lead. The industry is already predicting a short term slump in ebook revenues as customers resist price increases, but they are banking (literally) on the system to adjust and be to their benefit in the long run.
Really? Will that work? Granted there is only one year’s worth of data from the iTunes price change but I am willing to bet publishers are going to have a difficult path in more than just the short term and we haven’t even begun to discuss ejournals and paying per article to download to a handheld device. The world of popular literature is different than academic or medical literature, but these publishers also have be aware of the thin line where price is a burden to convenience. I just wonder with consumers balking at music content costing $1.29 whether they are willing to buy print materials (ejournal or ebook) at a considerably higher price. Or have we as a society been conditioned by iTunes to expect a .99 cent item? I am not saying that a whole book goes for .99 cents, after all a whole album goes for much more than that. But in the world of academia and medicine where people are using reference books and journals for that “one needed chapter” or that “one important article” are people going to want to pay full price for the entire ebook or $40 for the online article? Or are they going to start demanding ala cart pricing within the item level?
I have no idea, it is just something that has been bouncing around in my head the last few days. But one thing is for certain, as people become more and more used to getting things on their handheld devices, delivery, demand and pricing are going to change considerably.
There has been so much discussion about the changes happening with the new PubMed interface I think new about the subject subset strategies being updated kind of got lost in the noise.
Each year the subject subset search strategies are reviewed to determine if modifications are needed. These modifications can be something like changing MeSH, adding or deleting terms, or changing parts of the strategy to optimize retrieval. According to the NLM Technical Bulletin February 5, 2010 post, the Bioethics, Cancer, and Toxicology were revised. Complementary Medicine and Space Life Sciences are next on the list to be revised in the future. The PubMed Subset Strategies page has already been updated reflecting the changes to the three terms.
It is probably a good idea to check this page out anyway to make sure your search strategies for Aids, Complementary Medicine, Systematic Reviews, etc. are up to date and you are getting the most out of your search. Obviously these strategies aren’t for every search on Aids or Cancer but if you need to do a massive comprehensive search or if you are looking for ways to expand your search this is a great resource.
