Month: March 2010

Yesterday two interesting articles crossed my path, one was from Gobbledygook on Nature.com and the other was from Highwire Press. 

How do researchers use online journals?was a post on Gobbledygook from Martin Fenner about a presentation by Ian Rowlands on how researchers find and use electronic journals (Ian’s research is available as podcast and PDF). 

Some of the take home thoughts are:

• One third of Oxford Journals and 25% of ScienceDirect journals were accessed outside of business hours (9am-5pm)
• Approximately 40% of journals sessions originate from Google
• Finding and using ejournals varies according to discipline
• “Historians search for and use e-journals in ways very different from their scientific and social science colleagues.  Compared, for instance, with life scientists, historians are more likely to access e-journals via Google, and to use search tools, especially menus, once they are inside the publisher’s platform.”  They also report that Google Scholar gets little use (4%) and that most of the Google searching is with regular Google.
• “The most successful research institutions tend to use gateways more often and this is reflected in much shorter sessions on the publisher’s platform.”  Gateways would be considered PubMed not Google. 

Important for librarians is to know that there is a lot of “off hours” research being done.  Therefore it is crucial to have off campus access to your library resources.

So now that we have a brief snapshot of how patrons use electronic journals, lets look at Highwire Press 2009 Librarian eBook Survey.  The survey, conducted September-October 2009,  looks at how librarians find a purchase ebooks.

Some take home thoughts on this survey are:

• Ebooks only account for 11% or less of the acquisition budget for many libraries. 
• Publishers, vendors and inclusion in content packages were the most significant method source for librarians finding ebook information.
• Several libraries “emphasized the importance of consortia discovery and acquisition of ebooks.  Consortia are important in acquisition of ejournals and clearly librarians want to extend this familiar model to the less familiar format of ebooks.”
• PDF is the preferred format for ebooks.  Only 3% of the librarians indicated that “users prefer ebooks optimized for dedicated ebook devices or other mobile devices.” 
• It seems that librarians feel that DRM restrictions and poor site design are the two biggest factors hindering the use of ebooks.
• Finally, like almost everything in libraries, usage drives purchasing decisions.  Unfortunately the survey did not address whether usage of previous print version drives purchasing, usage statistics by subject or publisher, or by usage statistics of specific title held online.  (The survey does acknowledge this is an area of the survey that would need further questions to address how usage drives purchasing.)

I recommend looking the full report from both Ian Rowlands and Highwire.  They offer a snapshot of what is happening in electronic resources.  It is helpful to both librarians and publishers.  Both groups need to know how users are accessing and using the material.  Publishers need to understand why librarians are or aren’t buying their ebooks.  Publishers and librarians also need to know how library users are finding and accessing their articles.

To those of you who aren’t on the Docline discussion list or may have missed the post on Medlib-l, if you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 you need to upgrade ASAP. 

Docline does not support Internet Explorer 6. (They stopped August 31, 2009.) They can no longer offer customer support of issues reported with that browser.  If you are still using Explorer 6 you are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 or 8 or Firefox 3.5. 

If you have been limping by on Internet Explorer 6 and everything has been good so far, you might be interested to know that next release of Docline is coming shortly.  So if you are running IE6 right now, you won’t get any support from NLM if things go wonky with the next release.

It is Monday March 8, 2010 and is time for the monthly Medlib Blog Carnival hosted at the Krafty Librarian.  Next month will be hosted at EagleDawg so if you missed this month’s deadline please consider submitting your post to next month’s carnival.

So without further ado, let’s get this party started.

Laika’s MedLibLog starts us off with the book review Searching Skills Toolkit. Finding the Evidence [Book Review].

“Most books on Evidence Based Medicine give little attention to the first two steps of EBM: asking focused answerable questions and searching the evidence. Being able to appraise an article, but not being able to find the best evidence may be challenging and frustrating to the busy clinicians.”

Vivo project blogger and Bioinformatic Specialist at Becker Medical Library Kristi Holmes blogs about Libraries: perfect partners for research.

“There’s no doubt about it – we’re in the age of interdisciplinary science and it seems like everyone is looking to build innovative research teams. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to discover collaborators and make meaningful connections within one’s own building – let alone across campus or beyond.”

Medical and health librarians who like to pair some of their outreach and marketing efforts around various health observance days, months, etc. might be interested to read the post  The National Health Observances Toolkit by Walter Jessen.

In Dr. Shock’s post Read It Later, he discusses using the product Read It Later as a better alternative to Evernote and Google Notebook (of which Google dropped the development).

Nikki Detmar author of the EagleDawg blog (and next month’s Carnival Hosts) sets the bar for next month by submitting two of her interesting posts and recommending another post from Dean Giustini.

Nikki’s two posts Joint Commission: Transparency Obscured? and Ben Goldacre explains the placebo effect are great and Dean’s Top (20) Semantic Search Tools 2010 for those interested in a semantic search engines is a must read.

In the post, More Women Get Heart Disease Information from *the Newspaper* Than the Internet? Rachel Walden finds it odd that in this day and age when Pew Internet says more people are looking at the Internet to answer their health questions that still more women get their information about heart disease from newspapers.

Finally, Alisha Miles provides her insights on Rounding: A solo medical librarian’s perspective and also thoughts on the possibilities of ‘Beam’ing medical videos.

I hope there was something here that interested you and helped you think of things a little differently.  Additionally if you planned on submitting this month but it slipped your mind you still have the opportunity to submit a post for next month to be hosted at EagleDawg  just submitting your post.

Microbe Magazine has an interesting article and an audio interview about two ways people are using mobile devices and social networking to help monitor hand washing compliance and track infectious diseases.   

The first method they describe is an iPhone app called iScrub (free and available on iTunes App Store) which was developed to “automate the monitoring of hand-hygiene practices in health care settings.”  Originally developed for hospital settings, the article states the app could be as a “stealth app” to be used in other non-hospital environments where hand hygiene is important such as food handling. 

The second method they describe is using Twitter to track infectious diseases.  The article states Alessio Signoroni and Philip Polgreen used the 2009 H1N1 outbreak to test Twitter as method for tracking disease outbreaks.  They started in April 2009 and by June they had collected 950,000 tweets containing terms such as H1N1, swine, flu, or influenza. 

And you thought iPhone apps and Twitter were just for fun and had no real world value?  While I know there are practical applications for these tools, I have to admit I would have never thought about creating a hand washing app or tracking tweets.  It will be interesting to see how these and other things like them pan out.

In an effort to connect to more members MLA is experimenting with meeting based social network site called CrowdVine.  Connie Schardt wrote a nice little piece about it on Medlib-l. MLA has created a customized CrowdVine site for the 2010 meeting to help participants interact “before, during and and after the meeting.” 

The CrowdVine site links has links to the official meeting page, official blog, and allows members to set up RSS feeds into the site (blog posts, photo streams, social bookmarking, etc.)  As Connie mentions, “the real power of the service is its ability to identify participants that share common interests that they can seek out and meet, in person, at the conference.”

Hop on CrowdVine look around and if you are interested sign up and start adding some of your information or join in a discussion.  If you are more of the lurking type, sign up and just watch what happens, who knows maybe you might go from lurker to occasional contributer.