Krafty Librarian

The folks over at Unshelved ran a few strips that made chuckle about the possibilty of ghosts in libraries.

So if you feel cold spots in the library, detect irregular electric fields, or notice that your office supplies disappear and books are rearranged, you might have ghosts.  Or you just might have a library with a wonky HVAC system, unstable wifi, and patrons who borrow pens and “re-shelve” books to be helpful.

However, if these occurances cannot be easily explained, you might want to see if Ghost Hunters would like to investigate.

Molly Knapp posted a request for feedback on the MLA ’10 Official Blog.  This information is important.  It will help the bloggers and future Annual Meeting organizers (the NPC, committees, MLA, etc) understand and improve communication about the meeting to members through the blog. 

The survey is short https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MNT8L22 and your responses will help create a better virtual experience for future conferences.  So take 2 minutes and fill it out.

Librarians may know him best from the 2010 Leiter Lecture, but John Halamka is also the Chief Information Officer of Beth Israel Medical Center, Chief Information Officer at Harvard Medical School, Chairman of the New England Healthcare Exchange Network, Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel, Co-Chair of the HIT Standards Committee, and oh yeah a practicing Emergency Physician.  In his spare time (God knows where he finds it) he blogs on Life as a Healthcare CIO. 

I like reading his posts, many of which are about the nitty gritty areas of health information technology, some of which are over my head.  Every Friday he writes a Cool Technology of the Week post. Last Friday his post was about the iPad and an “in the trenches experience by one of hospitalists and informaticians, Dr. Henry Feldman.”  It is an interesting day in the life of a medical professional and how the iPad was an extremely valuable and versatile tool for the hospital floor.  It wasn’t perfect, there was some bumps but overall it was very helpful to have. 

I read this post on Friday and wouldn’t you know it on Tuesday I was faced with my first iPad toting physician.  This doctor is the type of doctor that every hospital and patient would want.  He described how he takes his iPad on the floors with him while he is teaching EBM and doing patient rounds.  He demonstrated the various tools he used in his everyday practice and spoke about how he searches for the best evidence for patient care.  He mentioned how a patient had questions about their surgery and how he found the procedure on Medscape and played the video for the patient.  So why was this doctor here at the library talking to me about his iPad?  I would love to say it was because he wanted to show off his iPad.  But no, that wasn’t the case. 

Unfortunately, as the case in many hospital libraries, our IT department will not let his iPad onto the Intranet.  They issued him a hospital IT approved laptop, but that is too heavy and cumbersome to use compared the iPad.  Believe it or not but the battery on his laptop is worse than an iPhone, so he has to worry about keeping the power cord handy.  So he doesn’t use the laptop.  He prefers to use the lighter and more versatile iPad.  BUT in order to use it he must use the hospital free Internet wifi access.  This is great for free resources like Medscape, but for library resources he must constantly login as if he is off campus (because on campus access is via the Intranet).  So he was here at the library trying to find out how he could make his off campus login procedures (even though he is on campus) a little easier.  He also recently bought the PubMed on Tab app and he needed to know our ez proxy information so that he could access the full text articles.  Unfortunately we don’t use ez proxy, we use Innovative Interface’s Web Access Module (WAM) to provide off campus access to users, so he couldn’t take advantage of our full text journals through PubMed on Tap.  If he wanted full text articles or access to any of our online resources he would have to login as if he was off campus even though he is clearly on campus. 

It is an ugly work around that is not ideal at all.  It all could be eliminated if IT would allow the iPad access to the Intranet.  But no, IT told him the iPad is consumer device not a medical device.  So while I love reading John’s post on cool technology and cloud computing and the usage of so many interesting devices, I have to admit I get a little bit envious too.  It is not like some joe shmoe off the street (or me, the lowly librarian) is talking about the practicality of these devices, John has some seriously wicked smart credentials behind him.   I just wish the right IT people in other hospitals would read his blog and learn a thing or two about moving forward with technology of healthcare.

In case you haven’t heard there is a bit of struggle going on between Nature (NPG) and the UC Libraries.  It doesn’t matter if it is a big library system or a small one it is the same story across the library world, money.  Specifically the lack of money. 

I have refrained from commenting on this story because I really don’t know the specifics, there are others more knowledgeable who are commenting already.  Another reason I haven’t commented is because I believe in general the way business is conducted between libraries and online resources companies is unsustainable.  I am not saying that every agreement, every resource, every large or small vendor and library is broken.  There are instances where vendors and libraries have working arrangements that are mutually agreeable and beneficial.  However, stories like this are becoming more common in print, online, and in person.  I worry these stories are our canary in the tunnel. 

A lot has been written on the NPG and UC issue.  If you are interested in reading about it, John Dupuis has a great post, Librarians vs. Nature, where he links to the original story in The Chronicle and posts links to Nature’s and UC’s responses as well as commentary and recent posts. 

John also provides his opinions on the situation and one specific statement really resonated with me.  It was John’s statement, “The reason that I’m rooting for California is that it will make it much less likely that NPG will try the same trick on the rest of us. And that’s a good thing.”  His statement reminded me a lot of the tricks car salesmen use to try to get you to buy something like an extended warranty at an outrageous mark up just to squeeze in more profit for the dealership.  Perhaps I thought of this because we just bought a car about a month ago and I still carry the battle scars.  But when librarians think and believe that a company or an entire industry is trying to play tricks on them, is there really any trust or opportunity to move forward?

EBSCO has announce some new features to the CINAHL database.  These features are:

• Searchers can limit articles those “Written by a Nurse.”  They can limit to articles where the first author is a nurse, or they can limit articles where any author is a nurse. This limit is only good for articles 2009-forward and a nurse is considered any author with RN, BSN, MSN, and in the case of international publications the appropriate international license/credentials/degree.
• A pre-CINAHL limit has been created allowing users to search for articles pre-CINHAL.
• Limiting articles to humans will retreive all articles where studies were done on humans.  Of course it will also retrieve articles where studies were done on both humans and animals.  this limit does not work for pre-CINAHL.
• The DOI (Digital Object Identifier) has been added to all records 2009-forward.
• The PMC ID (PubMed Central ID) has been added to records 2009-forward.

 

For more information or any questions on CINAHL go to http://support.epnet.com/cinahl

If you didn’t attend the meeting and you missed the opportunity for the $100 early registration for online attendance, you still have the ability to register now for $180 to access the videos and resources from the annual meeting online.  While $100 was a great deal, that ship has sailed, but $180 is still a good deal considering you didn’t have to pay for airfare, hotel, and food.  For $180 you have access to approximately 40 videos of meetings, programs, and section programs, plus the videos from the lightning posters, and PDFs of the traditional posters.

Post-conference registration is available at the MLA 2010 site.  If you attended MLA either online or in person don’t lose your conference email confirmation because that has your badge number which you will need to access the online content. 

The NLM Technical Bulletin now has a link to the video of Dr. John Halamka’s Leiter Lecture that was given at the NLM on the last day of the MLA Conference. 

Also check out Melissa Rethlefsen’s video (YouTube) of the Section Shuffle that happened at MLA.  In the video you get to see some of the section members talk about their sections and why you should join, you might also happen to spot a couple of your colleagues in the background.  Great job Melissa.

For whatever reason you couldn’t make it to MLA this year but you would still like to know about what is going on at NLM.  Never fear, the June 8, 2010 entry on the NLM Technical Bulletin includes information about the NLM exhibit booth including links to the voice recordings of the presentations at the booth. 

Presentations already available are:

• ClinicalTrials.gov Update
• DailyMed
• Health Services Research & Public Health Update
• History of Medicine Update
• MyMedicationList and RxNorm
• PubMed Review
• Resources for Disaster Planning and Response
• Toxicology & Environmental Health Update
• UMLS Update
• Using My Bibliography to Manage Compliance with NIH Public Access Policy

According to the bulletin the following are comming soon:

• NLM Online Users’ Meeting Questions and Answers
• NLM Update PowerPoint Presentations
• NLM Online Users’ Meeting PowerPointe Presentations for Remarks, MedlinePlus, DOCLINE

So if you weren’t at the meeting or if you were at the meeting and had a scheduling conflict it might be a good idea to check out some of these recordings.  Don’t forget, regular meeting attendees and online meeting attendees have access to many other videos and presentations from the meeting at

https://www.xpressreg.net/register/MEDL050/xpresstoolkit/login.asp

International Pharmaceutical Abstracts  is produced co-operation with the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists and includes 30 years of world pharmacy literature; plus, related health, medical, cosmetic journals, and state pharmacy journals.  The abstracts of presentations at major pharmacy meetings are also included. The IPA also includes references to alternative and herbal medicine (over 10,000 references).

The IPA is free for the month of June through Ovid. 

Try it at Ovid or learn more about International Pharmaceutical Abstracts from Ovid.

The NLM Technical Bulletin lists a few changes to PubMed that were implemented last Thursday (6/3/10).  Here is a brief run down of the changes, for more information including helpful graphics go to the May/June issue of the bulletin.

Email Abstract Format – Users can now include/exclude the MeSH and “Other Data” associated with the PubMed citation int he email.  The other data would be things like Publication Types.

PubMed Advance Search – The Advance Search page will be modified to provide users with a “more cohesive” method to build searches.   “The ‘Search’ and ‘Preview’ buttons will be improved to process search terms present in either the Search Builder box or main search box.”  Boolean operator buttons will now be in a pull down menu and terms in the Search Builder will default to AND unless users choose OR or NOT before clicking the Add to Search Box button.  Finally, search box in advance search will not include autocomplete and the RSS and the save search feature will not be offered from that page. (It appears that you can still save your advanced searches and RSS them once you have run them and you are on the PubMed Results page.)

PubMed Discovery Ads– At first when I read this title I thought PubMed was going to start allowing advertisements which surprised me.  It turns out that what they are discussing are the helpful bits of information in the “discovery area” (right side of PubMed results).  The bulletin refers to these helpful bits as “ads” and they are “designed to lead users to additional information or assist with searching.”  Whatever NLM wants to call it, this information has a new look to it with fewer lines, colors, and no more bulleted lists. 

Use Parnter Organizations to Sign in to MyNCBI– Unfortunately I don’t have any information I I can offer on this subject.  Apparently you can now sign in through a partner organization and also link your MyNCBI to your partner organization.  But really, can the NLM Technical Bulletin make this sound any more complicated or confusing?   Why somebody would want to do that is not explained in the bulletin, neither it is explained in (all three answers of) the Frequently Asked Questions on the Partner Account page.  The only place I could find some information about the partner organization is from the 2008 number 364 issue of the bulletin.  However that just says, “Use the ‘See more sign in options for My NCBI partner organizations’ link at the bottom of the Sign In page to learn more about this new feature which includes linking existing accounts with a partner organization account.” (It is a 2008 article so I don’t know if there was a link there, but there isn’t one now.)

There is a relatively small list of organizations listed as partner organizations.  From what I can gather logging in under the partner organization is sort of like logging into your (if your organization is “partner”) organization’s PubMed.  I assume (but could be completely wrong) this also enables full text linking and ILL. However I have no why somebody would want to do that instead of logging into MyNCBI.  Why would somebody choose to do one or the other?  More information and clarification from NLM would be nice.

CrunchGear posted a video and paragraph of Japanese doctors using an iPad (check out the “high tech” plastic baggy used as the iPad cover) during surgery.  Doctors in a hospital run by Kobe Univeristy used the iPad as a display during a surgical procedure.  A link to the video (in Japanese) is on CrunchGear.  As CrunchGear notes, this is not the most “elegant” usage of a new medical device in medicine but it is kind of interesting to see the different applications people find for the iPad, such as dolphin communication. Yes you read that right, dolphin communication.  Researchers at Dolphin Discovery’s swim facility in Puerto Aventura, Mexico are using the iPad (and the Panasonic Toughbook) to teach Merlin (2 yr. old bottlenose dolphin) to associate symbols with objects. 

For more “different” uses of the iPad check out the Huffington Post photos and videos. (My favorite Stephen Colbert uses it to chop veggies for salsa).