Friday Fun: Library Phantom Returns

A friend of mine posted the link to this story and I thought it would be perfect for a little Friday Fun. 

Edinburgh, Scotland has a library phantom sculptor who has been leaving beautiful paper sculptures made from books  in libraries and museums in the area. 

NPR first reported on the library phantom sculptor in late October describing how librarian, Julie Johnstone, found a sculpture of a tree made of twisted paper on a book with a broken gold leafed eggshell filled with strips of paper from the poem, “A Trace of Wings.”

Photo by: Chris Scott/flickr

 

It didn’t end with the tree.  The sculptures kept coming. A coffin, topped by a large gramophone showed up suddenly at The National Library of Scotland.  A local art film theater found a book carved with warriors leaping off a movie screen  into the audience.  Then came a little dragon peeking out of an egg at The Scottish Storytelling Centre.  The gifts kept coming, and it became quite a mystery as to who the very talented person could be.  BBC, Scotland TV, and The Guardian all reported on the story. Who was this mysterious person? 

Well it seems we will never know because even though there are a few suspects (a former music librarian thought he recognized the style from a paper sculpture he bought from an artist) it seems the public wants to keep the mystery alive and doesn’t want to know the artist’s identity.  The mystery artist remains a mystery and sadly as the latest NPR story says, the gifts have come to an end this November. 

Let me just tell the mystery artist, if she is ever in the United States, I am sure there are quite a few libraries that would love to get such a beautiful and unique gift.  Why not make the mystery international?!

MeSH 2012: Implications for LocatorPlus, NLM Catalog and NLM Classification

The National Library of Medicine adopted the 2012 MeSH for cataloging.  Therefore MeSH heading in LocatorPlus have been changed to reflect the new 2012 vocabulary.

NLM will publish an article soon “What’s New for 2012 MeSH and MEDLINE Data Changes for 2012” (will provide link as soon as NLM provides it).  However the Technical Bulletin did mention a few of the changes.

Medical Technology vs. Biomedical Technology: The specialty term Technology, Medical changed to Medical Laboratory Science so that it was less ambiguous.  “In examining the cataloging records assigned the heading Technology, Medical, we determined that it was better to change the MeSH heading to Biomedical Technology, rather than Medical Laboratory Science because, in the majority of the cases, this is the heading that better reflects the topic of these works. About 400 records where Medical Laboratory Science is more appropriate have been identified programmatically and will be changed after YEP.”

Publications Types: Addresses can now be used for PT.

New MeSH descriptors: “Cataloging does not use MeSH terms that represent corporate names or uniform titles that reside in the national authority file. Therefore, HapMap Project has the annotation: CATALOG: use NAF entry. Catalogers should use the NAF heading: International HapMap Project.”

For more information about the changes go to the NLM Technical Bulletin.

RIM to Offer Security Software for iPhones and Androids

The dead car has been replaced.  Thanksgiving is over, and sick kids are healthy (cross my fingers and knock on wood). So I am back and blogging again at a more regular interval. 

Yesterday RIM announced it will be releasing Mobile Fusion (in late March) to work on corporate iPhones and Androids. Mobile Fusion is software that will allow companies the option of linking employees’ personal iPhones and Androids to the corporate BlackBerry network without compromising security. 

So what does this mean for hospitals?  Well I hope it is just another step in the process for IT to accept iPhones and Androids as more than consumer devices.  (Crossing fingers, toes, eyes, and anything else that might help.)  According to Reuters. “many workers no prefer using their own Apple and Android powered devices to access corporate emails, raising security questions for corporations.”  RIM hopes to address these concerns with the new software.  Until now these concerns were being addressed by smaller niche companies that were offering security software or management systems for non-BlackBerry phones. 

While  Fusion will hopefully be a new revenue source for RIM, it doesn’t address the drop in sales of BlackBerrys.  According to Reuters, “RIM’s slice of the lucrative U.S. smartphone market fell to 9 percent in the third quarter, down from 24 percent a year earlier.”  IT departments that don’t use Fusion and still insist on BlackBerrys will have users with institutional devices that are quickly becoming a minority platform.  Why is that a big deal, after all everything will be secure?  Well a minority platform will have less work related apps meaning it will become increasingly less relevant  and more employees will be double carrying (using both a BlackBerry and an iPhone or Android) which doesn’t help with security. 

Hopefully this Spring and Summer, some of you hospital librarians will be able to use your Apple devices thanks to your IT department and Fusion.

AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint by the Numbers

Every other commercial on TV is about whose service is faster, better, clearer, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.  AT&T says you can surf and talk on their phone at the same time.  Verizon says they have the most coverage. Sprint brags about how it is the only nation wide network with unlimited data. 

The TUAW reported on a performance study done by Metrico Wireless that compared the carriers to determine who has the fastest and most reliable network. According to the study, AT&T has the fastest network for downloading data. Verizon is better with calls because it has the fewest call failures.  Sprint was the worst in both download speeds and dropped calls.

However this study only looked at the download times and dropped calls for the iPhone 4S.  Even though that is a very popular phone, there are a lot of other phones out there in the market.  Isn’t the network speed and call dropping issue also dependent on the phone as well as the carrier?  I am not sure about network speed but I know certain phones drop calls more than others.  Could another phone like a specific Android device get better download speeds on Sprint than AT&T?  I don’t know, but I am curious.  Maybe somebody with more knowledge can answer that for me.

Computerworld’s Matt Hamblen, wrote an interesting response to Metrico’s study on his blog post “Smartphone speed tests and weighing network performance.”  Matt praises the testing firm and notes that the information is interesting, he also says it will have more relevance to the providers than the customers.  Why?  First, customers are creatures of habit, they tend not to switch carriers.  Second, consumers pick carriers for many reasons besides just network performance.  They look at cost, phone selection, coverage in their area, etc.  However for those that value data speeds over voice, or voice over data, having that information might tip their decision.

 

IT Security and Leaking Dam

I just saw this really good article on iMedicalApps, “How to Use DropBox in Medicine.”  It explained in very easy terms what DropBox is and how it can replace your USB drive.  Bascially, you can download PDFs, docs, emails, etc. into DropBox on your computer and it allows you to access them anywhere using your smart phone.  You can also take something from your smart phone and save it to your DropBox using the smart phone app.  DropBox items can also be shared with people, you create an individual link to any document in a particular Dropbox folder, then share the link with anyone.  So if you read a really great article you can download the PDF to DropBox then share the link to your friend so they can read the article.  It is kind of like having your office on the go.

While DropBox can be used for all sorts of things, the article on iMedicalApps describes how it can be used in Medicine.  Of course the first thing I think of is security and patient data.  To be fair iMedicalApps does not mention storing patient data on DropBox and I think they would be against that idea.  As iMedicalApps mentions, the downfalls with DropBox and other cloud storage options are reliability and security.  DropBox is probably perfectly secure for somebody wanting to store PDFs of articles and non-patient data.  But you know that somewhere along the line somebody is going to start using the cloud to store something with patient data.  So I have go to ask, is the IT department facing a losing battle when it comes to restricting access to only certain devices?

Many hospital IT departments have a strict policy on “approved” computer devices.  In our institution the only approved smart phone device is an institutionally supported blackberry device.  The iPhone, iPad, Androids, are all “consumer” devices” and doctors who use those devices cannot get those devices on the network.  While I understand  IT is rightly concerned about the security of data, but has technologies like DropBox made it so that IT should start re-thinking their stance.  Should they be less concerned with device security and more concerned overall security?  As ITs focus on specific devices (approved or not approved)  are they kind of like the little kid with his finger in the leaking dam? 

Overall patient data security has always been a concern.  Before the cloud there is/was USB drives, before USB drives, there were burnable CD/DVDs, before burnable CD/DVDs there were floppy discs, before floppy discs there were (and still is) the photocopier.

Few Posts This Week and Next

Yesterday our old Honda CR-V finally died.  It was 9 years old, had a 150k miles on it, and it lost the a/c 3 years ago. It wasn’t a huge surprise that it finally went, but still I had hoped to get at least 1-2 more years out of it.  So what does this have to do with library blogging?  Well right now all of my free time is now spent looking for a new car so that leaves little time for blogging.  Even when I do have time to blog, unfortunately my head is not in the right place because every 5 minutes my brain starts to obsess about the car situation. 

Next week is Thanksgiving week and not only is it a busy personal time, but there tends not to be a lot of earth shattering medical library news coming out either.  So I just wanted to let you all know that I will be posting, but for the next two weeks the posts may be few and far between.

Using Social Media to Enhance Your Research

Daniel Hooker posted some nice slides on Using Social Media to Advance Your Research that he presented to a group of PhDs and post-docs at the UBC Faculty of Medicine.  I gave a similar presentation to World Health Interest Group at Case Western Reserve University.  I spoke about using blogs, Twitter, wikis, etc. in scientific research. 

During my presentation some of the attendees got hung up on the tools and technologies as toys and the idea of communicating was lost.  Social media is just one method people can use to communicate, share ideas, protocols, methods, lab notes, etc. In the very broadest of terms, email is sort of social media.  You can email many people who can then pass that discussion along to others. Listservs are a perfect example of this.  But email has been around with us for such a long time that there is no real discussion about its communication potential.  Yet, email was once a new fangled communication toy. 

Read this abstract from Science 1982. 12;215(4534):843-52.

Computer networks are an integral part of the rapid expansion of computing. Their emergence depends both on evolving communication technologies, such as packet-switching and satellites, and on diverse experiments and innovations in the software tools that exploit communications. The tools provide computer users with facilities such as electronic mail, access to remote computers, and electronic bulletin boards. Scientists can both adapt and extend tools to meet the communication needs of their work, and several networks are developing to serve particular scientific communities.

Funny how with very minor editing that same paragraph could be used to describe blogs, wikis, Twitter, or other social media programs.  I am also fairly certain back in 1982 there were a few people out there who thought email was more a toy than a tool and more of a time waster than a time saver. 

As I mentioned so many people get hung up on the technology, they have a hard time seeing how it can help them advance their research as Daniel would say or enhance their research as I would say.  Tomato…tomahto.

The big thing to impress upon people is that they don’t have to try all of these things all at once.  That would be a little like jumping in the pool and trying to swim a 400 IM all at once with no experience and no warm up.  If you do that, the experience is gonna suck…trust me. You can’t jump into the pool of social media and swim all of the strokes at once, nor do you have to.  Take some lessons, try it out, figure out what works for you and your schedule. Daniel mentioned Social Media University, Global (SMUG) by produced by Lee Aase, Mayo Clinic director of social media, as a good place to learn. 

 Social media applications are meant to save you time in the long run, not take more time out of your day/week/month.  You don’t have to be the Michael Phelps of social media, using it every day, several times a day.  Recreational social media swimming is totally fine too, logging into your feeds once or twice a week for 30 minutes.  If you think you don’t have the time to devote 30 minutes twice a week to using social media to advance your research you’re lying to yourself.  Considering the average American watched more than 154 hours of TV per month (State of the Media. Nielsen 2010), four hours a month looking through your RSS feeds to stay up to date on research in your area isn’t a lot.

I think the biggest challenge isn’t necessarily finding the time it is understanding how it can be useful to you.  Unfortunately that is somewhat up to you.  I can suggest some blogs, wikis, and Twitter feeds to follow.

Blog examples:

  • Useful Chemistry  -Chronicles research involving the synthesis of novel anti-malarial compounds. Closely tied to Useful Chemistry wiki
  • Cold Spring Harbor Protocols –Discusses current events in biology with emphasis on lab techniques, protocols are highlighted & discussed in detail
  • HUGO Matters  –Discusses topics relevant to human genetics and genomics

Lab Notes blogs:

 Wiki examples:
  • UsefulChem wiki –Synthesis of novel anti-malarial compounds, including experiments. It is completely open.
  • OBF wiki –Open Bioinformatics Foundation focused on supporting open source programming in bioinformatics
  • OpenWetWare –Promotes sharing of information, know-how and wisdom among researchers & groups working in biology & biological engineering. It is partially open.
  • WikiPathways –Dedicated to the curation of biological pathways
  • Yeast Genome wiki –Everything yeast including protocols, methods, reagents, strains
 
Lab or Research Group wikis:
  • –DNA unzipping data analysis. It is semi public.
  • Rosania Research Group wiki –All lab notebooks of Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at University of Michigan College of Pharmacy
 Twitter feeds:

Lists of scientists and researchers on Twitter:

The easiest way to have a rich and informative Twitter feed is to follow the people the leaders in your field are following and branch off from there.  By the way, Twitter’s site is ok for learning, but it really stinks for following any sort of conversation AND you always have to refresh the page (annoying). I highly recommend using Hootsuite or TweetDeck to monitor your Twitter feeds.  The thing I like about TweetDeck is that a little message pops up in the corner of my computer screen with the tweet. I can read it quickly and decide whether I want to ignore it, comment, or click on their link. Using Twitter on TweetDeck this way is very similar to how I use email because my email pops messages to my main screen too.

Really you need to sit down and figure out what your information needs are and the leaders in your field to follow.  This might be hard, but I bet there might be somebody in your field who is already doing it, so ask them, build off of what they are doing and tweek it to fit your needs.

Vote Now!

Yesterday was voting day for many Americans.  Hopefully those of you who had issues on the ballot were able to get out and have your voice heard through your vote.

MLA members also have a chance to have their voice heard through their vote.  All members with emails on file at MLA should have received an email with information on voting for a new MLA incoming President, 2 new Board Members, and 9 Nominating Committee Members. 

Obviously voting for the incomming MLA President is a way to help choose the direction and priorities of the organization, but the Board and the Nominating Committee are just as important too.  The MLA President does not operate in a vaccuum, as liasions the Board Members work with sections, committees, and other groups and help the MLA President.  The Nominating Committee is a crucial group of people who look at the MLA membership and recommend and debate over who to nominate for each year’s election. 

So MLA members get out there and vote.  It is easy, you don’t even have to find your polling place, present your ID, or even provide a signature.  (One draw back, to online voting, you don’t get an I Voted sticker.)   All you just have to click on the link that MLA sent you in the email.   Voting is one of the easiest but important ways you can get involved with MLA.

Apps for Libraries Challenge Winners

It seems there are quite a few medical and library app contests out there, or maybe it is an issue of timing.  Recently I wrote about the Apps for Library Idea Challenge.  Over 40 submissions were narrowed down to 10 finalists for librarians comment and vote on in October and the winners would be announced in early November.

Well it is early November and the winners have been announced.  Congratulations to:

  • Journal/Conferences @ Your Fingertips – Grand Prize winner Judges Choice
  • JTOCs 2 Go – Grand Prize winner Community Choice

So now what?  Elsevier will explore developing the winning applications subject to the “Challenge conditions.”  I really hope something comes about with JTOCs.  That was my personal favorite.  Why?  Because there is no good application (web, RSS, mobile, etc.) that provides the table of contents to journals and allows users to access the article (from the TOC) using institutional subscriptions. 

In a very easy world, an institution subscribes to a journal through its main publishing website.  The user gets the TOCs via RSS or email and then clicks on the hyperlinks to the article (of course while on campus) to read the full text article.  However libraries and library user do not exist in easy worlds.  Librarians have so many consortia and package access to journals that often we are not linking to the publisher’s website.  We are linking to full text databases, Ovid, EBSCO, MDConsult, or our own repositories like OhioLINK.  So getting the TOC from the journal website won’t help connect users to the articles if the library accesses the article via other means.  You can sort of hodge podge something together with PubMed but PubMed is NOT a table of contents provider.  Not all things in the TOC of a journal (even fully indexed) makes it into PubMed. 

A product like this would allow us to provide high touch customized services to our users.  I can see that if we had something that was easy to set up, easy to maintain, our users would love it.  Alas there is nothing out there that can do this….AND please DO NOT tell me ticTocs can do it. It can’t.  It is a nice personal subscription aid, but it fails to deal with common institutional issues.  For example the journal Spine is an LWW product.  Institutions cannot access LWW titles through [email protected] but it goes there when it (along with all institutional LWW titles) should go through Ovid.  Because it doesn’t allow users to choose where their access comes from (Ovid for LWW titles, MDConsult for some Elsevier titles, etc.) it is a poor tool for library users who rely on access to journal articles through a myriad of sources.

If you have been reading my blog for a while you will know that this sort of thing is on my radar and I blog about the inability to provide an easy online TOC service with institutional full text linking.  I can only hope that this problem will be solved by this app if it is made.  If it isn’t made then I just hope something comes along to solve the problem.

Make Your Own QR Code and Mobile Website

Last week was a busy week for me.  Monday I attended a great class, “Information Anywhere: Mobile Technology, Libraries and Health,” taught by Technology Coordinator of the Greater Midwest Region, Max Anderson.  It was very interesting, we learned about various apps and devices used in the medical and health science workplace.  We also got a chance to create our own mobile friendly website using Google Site.  Google Site might be the perfect resource to create a quick and simple mobile website, but it would work in a pinch for most places that don’t have a lot of tech people who can easily create a whole new mobile website for the library.  The big thing to consider when beginning to create a mobile website is to remember that the mobile site is not a mini version of the full website.  It is a unique site that is used differently because of the size of smartphone screens AND the way/why we use our smartphone to access a resources. 

Another interesting part of the class was the discussion of QR codes.  I have been seeing these square codes everywhere, from grave markers, party busses, hotels, in the back of a book, and out on the street.  While have seen them  in a lot of places, and I have been thinking of the various ways they could be used in a meaningful way in libraries.  During the class we learned how we could not only create a QR code but also brand the code by adding our logo. Max slides showed a blue one with NLM in the middle, I couldn’t find that online but here here are some other examples of QR codes with logos. We also did some brain storming on how QR codes could be used in the library.  One example that really resonated with me was posting the QR code on the book shelves letting people to scan the code to learn about online textbooks that aren’t on the shelves.  Our library just discussed this problem last week in a staff meeting.  As we buy more and more online texts and even online reference texts how to we guide people to the updated books that aren’t on the shelf.  There are an awful lot of people who still do a lot of shelf browsing and don’t use the catalog to find books.  Perhapswe could add the QR code in an obvious area  on the shelves and have link to that stack’s subject area to online text books.  It is a thought.  I’m not sure how it effective it will be but if you could figure out how to measure usage of those codes that could be one way to measure if people are clicking on them. 

Is your library using QR codes, if so how?  Perhaps you aren’t using QR codes but you have an idea on how they can be used, leave a comment so we all can learn.