Krafty Librarian – Page 33 – Things of interest to a medical librarian.

Libraries Loaning iPads

This morning I posted on iMedicalApps.com the article, “Don’t have an iPad, go to the medical library and borrow one.” There are lots of medical libraries loaning iPads out to their patrons and this post was a way to highlight to physicians some of the ways libraries are helping them get connected using iPads.

In my research I discovered that there are A LOT of medical libraries doing this, too many to list in the actual article. So in order to have a more comprehensive list of libraries loaning iPads I thought it would be a good idea to create a comprehensive list of libraries who loan them and post it on the iMedicalApps forum. So if you library loans iPads, list it on the forum with your basic rules and some of the popular apps loaded. Remember keep it short and sweet with not to much library geek jargon, we want it to be easy for docs and medical professionals to scan through and look at it.

Interested in the geeky library details? Don’t worry, I will posting in the next few days the librarian version of the iMedicalApps article. This will have the information that librarians interested in starting their own iPad loaning project will want to know about.

Tour the Gates Foundation

The NPC tried to get Melinda Gates to be a speaker and it didn’t work out, but a unique opportunity is available for MLA meeting attendees to tour the new campus of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The location of the new campus is adjacent to Seattle Center. Join other MLA members on Monday May 21 at 7:30am for a one hour tour. Registration is first come, first served and is capped at 25 people. We must provide the Gates Foundation with a final number of tour attendees by the end of April!

Read more about the tour specifics and register by completing this very brief SurveyMonkey form

NLM at MLA

If you are going to the annual meeting in Seattle you will want to check out the NLM exhibit booth to not only meet staff but also to see the demos and tutorials featured at NLM Theater at the booth. NLM will also several meetings such as the NLM Online Users’ Meeting “Sunrise Seminar,” NLM Update, and the Docline Users Group Meeting.

For more information including CE classes at MLA and the NLM Theater Schedule go to:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/ma12/ma12_mla_invite.html

Webcast: Leveraging Mobile Technologies for Health Sciences Libraries

Interested in learning more about how mobile technologies can be used in the medical library? If so, register for the Medical Library Association (MLA) continuing education webcast Leveraging Mobile Technologies for Health Sciences Libraries on Wednesday, April 18, 2012 1:00-2:30 (central time)

More information about the webcast (from MLA.net)

Program Goals:
The goal of this webcast is to familiarize information professionals with current practical applications of mobile technologies in clinical and curricular support settings. Topics will highlight innovative uses of mobile technologies, address technology challenges, and provide best practice guidance for applying in viewers local environments.

Program Objectives

Define how mobile technologies can be used in clinical settings
Define how mobile technologies can be integrated into curricula
Identify challenges faced when using mobile technologies in different settings
Explain challenges faced in clinical and curricular settings that mobile technologies can help solve
Demonstrate how mobile technologies can be used in your own setting
Plan how to work with vendors and IT support to enable use of mobile technologies
Identify opportunities for library resources via mobile technologies in multiple settings
Compare different mobile technologies and choose which might be appropriate for your own setting

Go to the MLA Webcast site to learn more about presenters Colleen Cuddy, Heather Holmes, Molly Knapp, Kimberley Barker, and Alisha Miles.

There are two ways to register for this webcast, individual or site. Individual Earlybird Registration Fee: $75 (nonmember, $150.00). Earlybird Site Registration is $395 (nonmember $495).

Keep your eyes and ears open for sites near you that have registered for the program.

For example:

Pacific Northwest Region (PNR) will host the webcast at two sites.
GMR has several sites sponsored in states through out their region.
The Middle Atlantic Region is sponsoring it at the University of Pittsburgh.

For more information about the webinar or to register go to:
http://www.mlanet.org/education/distance_ed/techtrends/index.html

What is a disaster and what are your plans?

I think we all can agree that something like fire, tornado, flood, earthquake are all disasters and hopefully libraries have some sort of contingency plans when those events happen. But what about those “other” disasters. I say other because they may not meet the standard definition of a disaster, but when they happen all work stops or something majorly impacts your productivity.

Marie Kennedy posted “Disaster planning for e-resources” on Organization Monkey about her library’s recent problems when EBSCO’s databases went down earlier this month. “From a library perspective, when a major content provider goes down, it is a legitimate disaster. For electronic resources librarians, all the usual work stops and crisis management mode takes over.” This is true for us as well. Even if a major journal goes down we start getting calls right away from doctor’s wondering what happened. If our linking system goes down or a major database goes down, then all *blank* hits the fan.

Our operations are so dependent on certain programs that when they go down our access to information also goes down. It may not be a disaster in the traditional sense of the word, but it is still a disaster for information retrieval.

Marie describes the procedures her library use to inform library personnel and library users of situation. She also mentions how frustrating it was for her and her library’s staff to go through this “without the help of EBSCO.” In fact most librarians were reaching out through MEDLIB-L, Twitter, and other local listservs, to try and figure out why CINAHL, Discovery, and other resources were DOA.

EBSCO is just the latest resource, but this sort of things has happened with Ovid, PubMed and other databases or online journals. It also won’t be the last resource to experience a “temporary outage.” So what are your library procedures for dealing with these events? How do you notify your customers and does that vary according to the resource?

Join MIS and Come to Our Section Meeting at MLA

If you haven’t already paid your MLA dues this year I would like to strongly encourage you to do so and also encourage you to be a member of MIS.

The section is 333 members strong and proud of our accomplishments:

Created a MIS LinkedIn group for members to discuss items of interest.
Planned the Top Technology Trends for the 2012 meeting in its own time slot
MIS member MLA Zombie Hunt mixing both networking and fun
MLA travel scholarship to help support MIS member to attend MLA

If you are a MIS member and you are attending MLA in Seattle I want to invite you to join us at the MIS Business meeting Sunday 5/20 3:30-4:30.

The business meeting is NOT just for MIS committee chair people, it is for ALL MIS MEMBERS!

This year MIS paid members (as of April 2012) who attend the business meeting at MLA are eligible to win an iPad. We will do the drawing at the conclusion of the meeting and you must be present to win.

MIS is a great group to join and I hope you will either continue your membership or join us as a member.

MLA Value Survey: One Day Left

Medical librarians if you haven’t taken the MLA Professional Association Value & Planning Survey then please take a few minutes and do so NOW. Your participation will help shape MLA’s future!

The MLA Board invites your participation in a new survey to help shape MLA’s strategic directions going forward and to identify aspects of professional association membership that are particularly of value to MLA members –as well as potential members. Here’s your chance to share your perspectives on membership benefits, program priorities, professional development, and other activities of the association. Findings from the survey will be shared in an Open Forum at the upcoming MLA 2012 annual meeting in Seattle. The survey can be accessed at http://umichlib.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_822PwXB5sqj9HJW and is open through March 30, 2012.

Upgrading iPads

I read an interesting article on the Cult of Mac the other day about upgrading from the iPad2 to the iPad3. The short answer is don’t bother. When the new iPad came out some people were disappointed that there wasn’t as big of a technology jump from the iPad2 to the iPad3. Similar to when the iPhone4S was released, people claimed the iPad3 was a failure for Apple because it didn’t make the iPad2 obsolete.

What I found interesting about this article is the author, Buster Heine, compares the iPad to the laptop and computer industry.

“People wishing for product obsolescence with every new iPad are being naive. This isn’t the way technology works, and it would piss people off if it was. We would be outraged if our brand new $1200 iMacs were rendered obsolete within a year by a newer model, yet for some reason many people seem disappointed that Apple hasn’t enacted planned obsolescence for the iPad.”

People tend to upgrade their phones about every 21 months, but Heines says that most people purchase a main computer and use it for 2-4 years or longer. According to Heine, the iPad is “leading the charge into the Post-PC Revolution,” and will one day replace your desktop. The iPad is not a big iPhone it is more of a portable Mac. Therefore, he reasons iPad buying habits should be more reflective of computer buying habits not cellphone buying habits.

Over the years the Mac has changed relatively little from year to year, but over multiple years the difference between an 2007 Mac and 2012 Mac is noticable. Heine speculates the iPad will show the same type incremental growth as the Mac. “The new iPad is only marginally better than the iPad2, just like last year’s iMacs were marginally better than the year before. You shouldn’t feel the need to upgrade, and you never should need to upgrade your iPad every year. The iPad has been magical the entire time, and the iPad you own will continue to stay relevant for 2-3 years. That’s the way it should be.”

Interesting…

I never really thought of it that way, but it makes sense.

Versioning in PubMed

I am really late with this news, my apologies. A colleague of mine brought this to my attention. According to the February 2012 Technology Bulletin, PubMed no supports versioned citations. “Revisions, scientific updates, and updates of reviews are examples of content that could be versioned. Versions are not intended for correcting specific errors in an article, for which published errata notices should continue to be used (see Fact Sheet). ”

As each article is updated the next version will be placed in PubMed with a label next to the journal title indicating the version. (Version 2, Version 3, etc.)

I guess the good news is that only the most recent version will be indexed and found in PubMed using normal methods (even Googly type searches that really normal people do). So you won’t be seeing multiple versions in a results list. Thank God.

You can search for older versions by using three different searching techniques (See Tech Bull for images).

Search via the PMID number for the specific version. Example 20029611.1
The .1 represents version 1.
Search via the PMID number for any version. Example 20029611.*
The * is the wildcard.
Search via topic and the click on Other Versions link at the bottom of the abstract.

It is important to know that authors do not cross versions. What I mean by that is if Michelle Kraft was an author in version 1 but not an author in version 2, you can’t do an author search and retrieve the version 1 citation. My version is lost if you search via my name. I predict this to be a bit of a problem. There are too many doctors and institutions that keep track of their publications and when you start telling them their article (no matter if it has been superseded) is not able to be seen by searching their name, it isn’t going to go well.

So if you don’t have the PMID number it is going to get clunky to find an older version. If you can’t find a citation you have to double check the citation (spelling, numbers, etc.) but now the possibility lies that you retrieved no results because it is an older version, NOT because the citation is incorrect.

There are also some funny things going on with date as well that people should be aware of. “PubMed will set the DateCreated for the new version to the date the citation is added to PubMed. We will retain the Entrez Date, which defines the display order in PubMed, as the original date unless the publisher supplies a new PublicationDate. If the PublicationDate on the new version is different, we will modify the Entrez Date so the citation will display at the top of the search results.”

I understand and like the idea of having different versions within PubMed, but I am not sure this done in the best way. I think you need to be able to find older versions other than just by knowing the stupid PMID number. How many people know the stupid PMID number. Usually we librarians are verifying the citation to GET the PMID number. I think you should be able to do an author search and retrieve the older version. Now there should be some serious marking on the citation indicating it is an older version and a new version exists (way more markings than NLM will slap on a citation). By not including the older version of an article when doing an author search, not only are they saying to the authors that their article has pretty much disappeared but it makes finding articles from a citation list a real pain in the butt as well. There are lots of researchers who look at the citations at the end of the article for their own research.

What do you think? I am not as big of a PubMed searcher as other librarians. I am an Ovid gal (thinking how this will effect searching Ovid MEDLINE hurts my brian too much) so there are others with much better PubMed searching skills and I would love to hear there thoughts.