Category: Uncategorized

The NN/LM SCR’s monthly webinar will be “Review of the MedlinePlus Redesign.”  The webinar session will be Wednesday July 21, 2010 from 10:30-11:30am CDT.  The webinar is free, for more information on how to login go to http://nnlm.gov/scr/training/webmeeting.html

Sorry for my late notice about this webinar, but if you are busy and just can’t make it don’t worry, they post the archives of their webinars for people to view at their convenience.  They have past webinars dating back to November 2008, so if this topic isn’t up your alley, I bet they have something else that you might be interested in.

If you have not seen Old Spice guy commericals you must be living in a cave without Internet or TV.  Since you are reading this post, I assume you have ventured out of your subterranean dwelling and I recommend watching a few of them for laughs. 

The Old Spice guy and his commercials are prime example of something going viral on the Internet.  The Old Spice guy has both a Facebook page and a Twitter account, but its not the fact that he has them it is the way he (and Old Spice) use them that has taken their popular Super Bowl Commercial which was hugely popular and taken it to another level that has people buzzing, interacting, and creating parodies.  

Earlier this week Old Spice guy went on his Twitter page and Facebook page soliciting and answering questions via custom video (all while in a towel from his bathroom) from almost anybody who posted.  Everything from, “If you went back in time how do you think a dinosaur would react to the manly scent of Old Spice?”  to marriage proposals, and even a shout out to Andy Woodworth (@wawoodworth)  about libraries. Wawoodworth Public Library.  Frankly the Old Spice guy gets my admiration for just saying wawoodworth several times without tripping over his tongue.

You would think the wawoodworth Public library shout out is all that I have related to libraries and the Old Spice guy, but you would be wrong.  Yesterday the librarian Twitterverse alerted me to a hilarious spoof of the Old Spice guy’s commercials by Harold B. Lee Library at Bringham Young University.  In it “New Spice” guy asks “Do you want to be a scholar? Then study at the Harold B. Lee Library. Do your research here, study here, and be a scholar!” 

Wow they knocked it out of the park, true to the original commercials with clothes flying off, walls falling down, and things dropping from the sky this was an extremely well done parody.  I think if the Old Spice guy were still commenting via custom video he would say “Well done Harold B. Lee Library, well done.”

Buisness, advertising and social media pundits are all talking about how great a campaign this has been and how well Old Spice leveraged social media tools to get brand recognition and people talking about their product.  Now we all can’t have the Old Spice marketing agency  Wieden + Kennedy to come up with advertisements for us, nor do many of us have the creativity and the skills to do a great parody like Harold B. Lee Library.  But there is something we can learn about this campaign.  Check out the Huffington Post’s article, What Political Campaigns and Candidates Can Learn from the Old Spice Campaign, while it is intended for politics, librarians can learn a lot from it too. 

It is not just about being on Twitter and Facebook, it is what you do with it.

*note thanks to Abigail who cleared up my confusion about wawoodworth. I have made edits in the above text to fix the error.

MedlinePlus has updated the look and feel to their website and I have decided to try and test out their mobile version. My earlier worry that the mobile site link was at the bottom of the page is frustratingly accurate. NLM does not have any way to recognize that you are using a mobile device so you are automatically directed to the full Internet site where you have to scroll to and enlarge to click on the tiny link to the mobile site at the bottom of the page.
Mobile web devices are not new, more and more people are using their phones to access the web. As Susanna Fox mentions in her post, Mobile, Social Health at the National Library of Medicine, “84% of 18-29 year olds no go online wirelessly. and 20% of wireless Internet users go online exclusively on a cell phone.” That is a big chunk of people and my unofficial guess is those numbers aren’t shrinking.
So for any people designing web pages that might be used on mobile browsers, please put the mobile link at the top of the of the full page AND put the link for the full Internet site at the top of the mobile page.  Both of these links are extremely important to mobile web users and SHOULD NOT be at the bottom of the page.

I looked at the mobile site while also looking at the full website on my computer.  The reason I did this was I wanted to see what was on the mobile site and what wasn’t.  Due to screen space, scrolling, and other things, a mobile site should never be an exact duplicate of the full site.  Some things do better on the mobile and some things do better on the full site (hence the reason we need the links to switch back and forth between the two sometimes). 

Overall the mobile site is a nice scaled down version of the full site.  The mobile site does a great job in providing access to the top three things that I believe a mobile user would need/want from MedlinePlus, Search Box, Health Topics and Drugs.  Topics are displayed nicely in the mobile form and images are downsized as thumbnails.  Clicking on images the gives a bigger (but not too big for the screen) image. 

The one downer is that none of videos or interactive tutorials on MedlinePlus are available on the mobile platform.  Why?  Because they are in Flash.  Flash does not work on mobile phones and will never (if Steve Jobs has his way) be on the iPhone which is one of the most popular devices.  I think the videos are extremely helpful to people who want to know more about their disease, surgery, or anatomy.  It is too bad they don’t have them prominently on YouTube. 

So why is the mobile web thing so important anyway for a clearly established public health medical site like NLM anyway?  Well what do you think people do in the waiting room, in the doctor’s office or in the ER when they are waiting to see the doctor?  They aren’t reading last year’s issue of Field and Stream.  If they have a phone that they can surf the Internet they are surfing the Internet looking up information.  Example:  A few months ago we were in the ER with one of my sons for an injury that was serious enough for the ER but not life or death.  The ER is busy, it is a lot of hurry up and wait.  You see the doctor and they answer your questions at the time, then they leave to take care of other patients.  Often it is during these long times between the doctor or nurse poking their head in that you begin to think of other questions and want to know more about what the doctor said.  So, I whipped out my iPhone and started surfing looking for information. 

As EagleDawg and Susanna both mentioned, NLM is starting to get more than just their toes into social media,  (I think they now have maybe one foot in the water) but they still have a long way to go with a lot of opportunities.  Social media is one way to reach out to people interested in public health information.  Many people have reported how poor iTunes and other sites are at organizing medical podcasts and apps.  Amazon.com is just as bad at organizing medical texts for the Kindel.  There are very few authorative entities taking an active role in collecting, organizing, promoting, and vetting medical and public health in social media.  Perhaps it is because I am a librarian but this seems like an area that is right up the alley of something like the NIH and the National Library of Medicine.  Not only organizing and vetting said information but also releasing and spreading medical information.  Fox says in her post about NLM,

“Two-thirds of those who look online for health information usually talk about it with someone else. The Pew Internet Project will focus on research questions about the who, what, where & when of  those health conversations in an upcoming survey. But the questions are pertinent to the NLM’s mission, too: What are people saying? Is the NLM helping to seed the conversation? How are you (NLM) contributing to the spread of facts, the spread of science, the spread of evidence?”

“Behavior – both good and bad – can be catching. How can the NLM seed conversations happening online and offline, to spread good information and good behaviors?”

The mobile web is just one part of social medicine.  NLM has done a fairly good job with MedlinePlus mobile, but that is just one small piece of the larger pie.

I took a bit of a blogging vacation last week so I am a bit late posting this, sorry.

Inspec is Ovid’s July Resource of the Month and contains over 11 million abstracts to journal articles, conference proceedings, technical reports and other literature in the fields of physics, electronics, computing, biomedical technology and biophysics from over 4000 journals dating back to 1969.

Inspec is free for the month of July through Ovid, however you have to register each time you use try it.

Wednesday, July 14th, MedlinePlus will look different. They have redesigned the site, and created a new look, logo, color schemes, features and enhancements. The National Library of Medicine has a preview for you to look at and to read about the changes.

Some of the new features will be:

Different color pages for Spanish and English pages.
Simplified navigation to Health Topics, Drugs & Supplements, and Videos & Cool Tools.
Spotlight on popular features such as the Medical Dictionary, Popular Searches, and useful NIH databases.
Quick links to the mobile version and email updates, RSS, and Twitter. (Hmm shouldn’t they also be thinking about a Facebook? linking icon too?).
They will have a share button to post a Health Topic Page(s) to your social network of choice.
Redesign of the Drugs and Supplements Page to make it easier to choose between durgs and supplements.

It is hard to review the new site since all we can see are images of the redesign, we can’t get into the preview site and actually “test drive it.” I like their ideas and a lot of the things behind their update but the proof will be in the pudding on July 14th. One thing I did notice that I am concerned about is their link to their mobile site is at the bottom of their full Internet site. I hope they have servers that recognize somebody is accessing their site from a mobile device and it automatically sends the device to the mobile friendly site. If they don’t, mobile users will be quickly annoyed with scrolling to the bottom of the full site to get to the mobile version.

What does a aeorspace, defence, and security company have to do with Twitter or even medical libraries?  Well not much at first glance, but then take a look at this article from The Philadelphia Inquirer and you begin to see the connection a little bit. 

Lockheed Martin is tracking posts on Twitter and YouTube during disasters and conflicts to find how social media is used and its effectiveness when communication is difficult but also essential.  The article describes how social media relief workers have used social media to help track where assistance is more needed.

It is an interesting little article and it makes you start to think how it these resources could be used for world medical organizations, medical relief aid, etc.

This year LITA’s Top Tech Trends panel included John Blyberg, Lorcan Dempsey, Jason Griffey, Monique Sendze, Cindi Trainor, and Joan Frye Williams.  They presented on current, imminent and long range trends. 

For those of you interested in watching the video of the program visit ustream.  Unfortunately the video is in Flash format so those of you trying to circumvent your institution’s video blocking by watching it on an iPhone on 3G are out of luck. 

I will watch tonight at home, take notes, and post about it tomorrow.

Yesterday the NLM Technical Bulletin reported that the PubMed Clinical Queries page will soon be redesigned to allow filtering by Clinical Study Categories, Systematic Reviews, and Medical Genetics.  The Bulletin has a picture of this redesign showing the three columns showing the first five citations results for those filter categories. 

For more information and to see what it will look like, go to the Technical Bulletin.

As the Chair Elect of the MIS Section I am also the Programming Chair for the section for the next annual meeting.  While I have held positions within local library organizations and served in other ways within MLA and MLA sections, this is the first time I have been the section planner.  It was a little daunting to me.  Thankfully Rikke Ogawa, Julie Esparza, Ysabel Bertolucci, Jan Cox and Gale Dutcher worked to provide this year’s planners with a guide detailing the process.

As I reported on the 2010 MLA Blog (Section Planning from a Newbie’s Perspective and Section Planning Part 2) I plan to write several blog posts about the process so that others who are thinking of getting involved might see what it is like and to help demystify the process of planning the annual meeting. 

In my Part 2 post I mentioned that all of the Section and SIG program planners gathered in a big room and presented our ideas for programs.  People swapped business cards, chatted with each other on common interests and took notes.  After that meeting Rikke gathered up the notes from the section program meeting and made a giant spreadsheet listing everybody’s ideas and section information.  We went through that information and narrowed down the ideas and the programs.  Certain programming ideas were similar to others and those were easily merged with each other.  Some programming ideas did not pan out very well and were dropped.  Section and SIG programming chairs emailed each other back and forth finalizing who would be a primary sponsor and who would be the co-sponsors. 

Once that information was determined the person representing the primary program sponsor  had to write up and submit information about the intended program. 

That information included:

Session Title:
Primary Sponsoring Section:
Co-sponsoring Sections/SIGs:
Type of Program:  [panel, invited papers, contributed papers, etc.]
Program description: [no more the 150 words describing your program]

Hopefully this is not done in a void.  The programs that I was a part of had active people emailing each other with their thoughts on the title, type of program and description.  The idea is that the primary sponsor, collects the ideas from the co-sponsors, writes them up, checks back with the co-sponsors to see if everything is kosher, then sends it to the Section Council Liaison (this year it is Rikke). 

Once that is done the Section Council Liaison will put it all together for final review, this the time where we have the opportunity to make any last minute changes to errors or omissions.  Once it is approved the next steps will be more public for MLA members to see because in late July MLA staff will post all of the 2011 session program information on MLAnet and in August the formal call for papers and submissions to these programs will be made.

Around the same time as the posting of the session programs and the call for papers, the program planners will be emailing their Section and SIG members asking for volunteers to help review submitted papers and to serve as moderators for the session(s).  If you are member of a section or SIG keep your eyes open for our call for volunteers because your help is an important part of the annual meeting programming process. 

So that sums up the process so far.  If I wasn’t clear or you have any questions feel free to comment and I can try and answer them or shed any more light on the process.  In the next few months I will write another post on detailing the next steps to planning 2011 MLA session programs.

I often get asked by people in the library about the best medical apps for their phone.  That is a little bit like asking me what car they should buy.  It all depends on the individuals needs and the type of phone they have.  The first step, is the phone.  Most people who ask me about apps have already made their phone decision.  But if  they haven’t bought a specific phone or they are looking to upgrade, the number and type of apps available play an important part of the decision (Blackberry App World only lists 276 in Health & Wellness, they don’t have a medical category).  In addition to apps there are a lot of other factors in the phone selection process such as carrier, institutional access/support, and whether you live in a rural area all important things to consider. 

I found the article at iMedicalApps.com, “Should medical progressionals get an iPhone, Blackberry or Android phone? It’s complicated,” to be helpful when deciding on a type of phone.  They also have good reviews on various medical apps, so if you or somebody you know has already purchased an iPhone or Android they can browse through the blog and read about the apps.

The blog is written by several people who either already have their MD or are MD/MPH students who are all interested in technology (a given considering this blog) and are practicing in specialties. 

While the blog reviews various apps from the Android it tends to be very iPhone heavy.  This could be due to the fact the iPhone has the most (by far) medical apps available on the smartphone market but it could also be that most of the authors tend to be iPhone users and the site was formally http://www.iphonemedicalappreview.com. (Given that old URL I would expect it to be iPhone centric.)  However I did I noticed one person listed as an author who specifically writes about the Android. 

In order to read the reviews simply click on the Medical App Reviews tab and all of the reviews of medical apps are listed.  Unfortunately it often requires some browsing and skimming through the posts to see what apps are available on what devices.  It would be more helpful if they applied more consistent tagging (Example: High Performing Apps Enter the Android Market post does not have Android as a tag.) and displayed the tags on the sidebar of the blog so readers could easily just click on iPhone or Android and read only about apps for their phones. 

MedicalSmartphones.com is another site that looks at apps, they even have a post soliciting guest reviews on apps.   But in general there just aren’t a lot of good sites specifically dedicated to reviewing medical apps for phones.  Most sites are general like this one from PCWorld and throw everything health related into a medical genre,  are the are general medical MobiHealthNews.com and focus on multiple mobile issues like heart monitoring devices, tablet PCs, as well as apps. 

So if you are looking for reviews on apps (especially if you have something other than an iPhone) it is going to take some digging around on the Internet.  It also helps if you have the specific name like epocrates or type of app like lab values.  However it still looks like a majority of a person’s recommendations/reviews are going to be word of mouth from peers.  As librarians we are in the unique position of seeing many different people over the course of the day, so keep your ears and eyes open as they discuss apps and their smartphones because you might be able to pass that information along to another person.