Krafty Librarian

The New England Journal of Medicine has been conducting research to better understand their audience.  Recently when I attended their Library Advisory Board Meeting they presented the findings of the 2009 Essential Journal Study(PDF).  The Essential Journal Study is an independent study which randomly surveyed physicians in 12 specialities.  The study sought to find out what journals physicians considered essential to their practice of medicine. 

According to the study, physicians are three times more likely to read an essential journal sooner, spend twice as much time reading an essential journal, and they are twice as likely to re-read an essential journal.

When this information was presented at the Board Meeting the first thing I thought was this was extremely valuable information to have for small hospital librarians who are struggling with journal subscription dollars.  For a librarian to know what the top ten essential journals are in specialities is extremely helpful for collection development AND to justify journal budget/purchases to administration.

For example, according to the study, the Top Ten Essential Journals in Cardiology are:

1. Journal of the American College of Cardiology
2. The New England Journal of Medicine
3. Circulation
4. Journal of the American Medical Association
5. American Journal of Cardiology
6. Annals of Internal Medicine
7. Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography
8. Catheterization & CV Intervention
9. Mayo Clinic Proceedings
10. American Journal of Medicine

These are journals that cardiologists in this study have deemed essential.  What is striking is not that JACC occupies the top spot, but that half of the journals in the list are not specifically cardiology journals. 

Much of this report is written for those interested in advertising in NEJM.  However the information is still helpful to librarians who aren’t interested in purchasing advertising but are equally interested in what physicians read.  I know what you are probably thinking, you are probably thinking that Krafty got this information from the New England Journal of Medicine  so no wonder their journal is ranked highly as is other non-specialist journals.  It is important to know that while NEJM did sponsor the study, it was not identified as the sponsor.  The Matalia Group Inc., an independent research organization, designed, administered, and analyzed the study.  So NEJM had no control over where they or any other journal was ranked in the study. 

Librarians are asked to do more with less so they scrutinize where are money goes.  Every bit of information to help librarians make selections is important.  Impact factors can be helpful, but small hospital librarians often don’t have the time or resources to get the impact factors for each journal considered for purchase or elimination.  Additionally impact factors relate to the publishing of articles and who is citing the articles not specifically how much that journal is read.  Library online usage statistics can only take us so far sometimes, especially when we have a short usage history to go on.  This is a nice list of the top ten journals deemed essential by the readers themselves.  It would have been nice to see what journals are at the bottom of the list, but having the top ten is very helpful to use in conjunction with the other journal evaluation methods.

Look over the list and find out what journals your Cardiologis, Endocrinologists, Gastroenterologists, Hematologists, Hematologists/Oncologists, Infectious Disease Specialists, Internal Medicine Specialists, Nephrologists, Neurologists, Oncologists, Pulmonologists, and Rhuematologists are reading before any other journal.  What journals you should be concentrating your collection development budget money on.

Every librarian cringes at the mere mention of the word, W-i-k-i-p-e-d-i-a.  There I said it and yes a shiver did go down my spine.  But medical librarians seem to be more sensitive to it than others.  Perhaps this because of my perspective as a medical librarian or perhaps it is because medical librarians fear the unique multiple anonymous authorship platform which drives Wikipedia’s content could have a disastrous impact for somebody using it as a medical resource. 

Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg recently published the article, “How today’s college students use Wikipedia for course-related research” (First Monday. v15 (3) March 2010), the findings of which were part of an ongoing national research study based in the University of Washington’s Information School called Project Information Literacy.

Based off of the Head’s and Eisenberg’s research, it looks like our worries that college students are using Wikipedia as their sole information source are a bit unfounded. 

It turns out Wikipedia is not the most consulted resource to find background information.  The top resources (in order) were: Course Readings, Google (finding sites other than Wikipedia), Scholarly Databases, OPAC, and Instructors.  Wikipedia was 6th after instructors.  However it was still a highly used resource, with 85% of the respondents saying they used it.

While more science students used Wikipedia than social science students and more four year college students used it compared to those enrolled in 2 year schools, 82% of those surveyed responded they use Wikipedia most often to “obtain background information or a summary of a topic.”  It seems that many of them use to as the first step to previewing their topic and to get ideas on where to get started. 

 “Students reported they could not begin their research process until they had an idea of what they were going to write about. They did not think that they could approach an instructor about an assignment, until they knew more about their topic. They did not use a scholarly research database early on, given the specificity of academic journal content.”

“Students in the sessions explained that Wikipedia entries have value in the beginning because they provide a ‘simple narrative that gives you a grasp,’ ‘can point you in the right direction,’ and ‘help when I have no idea what to do for a research paper”

While most students use it in the beginning of their research most do not end with it; they use more scholarly and authoritative resources as they progress through their research.  When students are in “deep research mode” they use library databases more frequently than Wikipedia. 

Ok so they use Wikipedia in the beginning of the search and thank God they don’t use it in the end, but isn’t starting with something such as Wikipedia with questionable accuracy a problem? For example, if I am going to cook I have got to have good ingredients to start with.  If they are going to do research they have to have reliable information to start with right?  According to Head and Eisenberg, this is less of a concern for students. 

“At the same time, we found credibility (another “C”) was less of a criterion for Wikipedia usage. Only 16 percent of the respondents in our survey reported using Wikipedia because it was more of a credible source of content than other Web sites.”

“Students in our sessions assumed they would need to substantiate what they first found in Wikipedia in their early stages of research with some additional fact checking.”

Additionally students who did question the information did extra fact checking elsewhere. 

So academic and medical librarians can breathe a little easier. Students hear us (and their instructors) loud and clear about using Wikipedia for research.  Yet we shouldn’t be totally blase about things either.  As Head and Eisenberg point out, there is an opportunity for us to help with “presearch,” narrowing down topics, figuring out search terms, obtaining background information. 

Heard and Eisenberg specifically focused on Wikipedia and what additional resources students used, their article did not discuss the ease at which students can access these “beyond Wikipedia” type resources.  That was not the intent of their paper, but I believe we as librarians need to continue to focus on making information as easily accessible to students.  If you remember earlier in this post, Google was the second most popular resource for finding information.  It is essential for our online resources to be IP validated, available off campus, and for us to try and get our library resources as full text-available as they can be.  The student is not going to know what the library does and doesn’t have full text online access to.  They are going to click on the journal in Google and if it comes up full text, it comes up.  If it doesn’t they will probably move on. 

This why some full text resources are so frustrating.  Journals like those from LWW don’t easily guide the normal student who uses Google to Ovid (which is how institutions get the full text), Google first guides them to the American Journal Of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation LWW site, not the Ovid site. (Krafty Disclosure: Google does list the Ovid site for the journal, but it is the 3 entry down and I have to believe that more “normal” users are going to click on the first or second entry which is the LWW site because it has journal information listed below the link and the second entry on Google says Current Issue: and is clearly a sibling page of the first entry.)  I don’t mean to specifically pick on Ovid/LWW, because this is a problem with other publishers as well.  For example if you search for Seminars In Colon & Rectal Surgery the first link is not to ScienceDirect (which is how most institutions access online Elsevier titles), the ScienceDirect link is the 6th entry on Google results.  If “normal” users aren’t clicking on the 3rd entry they sure as heck aren’t clicking on the 6th one. 

The problem is even worse for online books.  How on earth do students find online books?  At least with journals we have things like Medline which direct us to articles, there is no PubMed for books.  And many online catalogs are miserable to search and lack much of the details that users need (see my post Book Metadata Lagging Behind Journal Articles) so many students and librarians search Google Books and Amazon.com.  So far the common entry points for online books are OPAC or the library’s website.  Yet students don’t always use those for finding books and they aren’t going to find an online book very easily using Google. 

Having online journals and books easily accessible/linkable to the institution through Google is a win for students, librarians and publishers.  For students it connects them to information.  For librarians, student are using our paid resources and we are connecting them to the information.  For publishers it drives up library usage statistics which is the main reason, besides price, as to whether we are going to renew the product. 

So while we all should take comfort knowing that students, “get it” when it comes to Wikipedia, we have a lot of opportunities in helping them with the “presearch” and connecting them with the resources once they are done with Wikipedia. 

The Online Program Planner for the MLA 2010 Annual Meeting is up and running.  I have just quickly browsed through it and selected a few things that I will be attending. 

“It is possible to access your itinerary using an online mobile device such as an iPhone or BlackBerry by entering the link in your mobile browser.”

Krafty’s Hint: The URL is long and if you want to type the entire thing into the web browser on your cell phone then more power to you, but I have a better way.  Copy that unique URL and paste it into an email you send to yourself.  Access that email from your mobile device and then bookmark it. 

I am not sure if I am going to use the Online Program Planner this year or not.  Last year I experimented with adding everything into Google Calendar (which is also on my iPhone).  I was able to add meet ups with friends, social gatherings, and other things that are not on the official program.  I also set it to alert me 10 minutes prior to the event so that I knew where I needed to be next. 

Searching for information within a book chapter when you don’t own the book is a pain.  Medline and other online databases have spoiled me.  I can easily hop on to Medline and verify a citation or do a funky search for a specific keyword in the abstract, it is second nature to me.  But give me a list of 5 book chapters that I need to verify the correct page numbers and it turns into a royal pain in the butt that can take me several hours to do.

Why have we librarians allowed books to be indexed and organized so poorly?  This was our bread and butter for so long, yet we fell asleep at the keyboard.  Catalogers strive to add all sorts of information such as the size of the book whether it has illustrations or bibliographic references, but there is no system wide requirement to add the table of contents in the catalog.   Honestly that is some of the most important information.  The table of contents often more accurately reflects the contents of the book  than some of the subject terms that our catalogers so painstakingly assign. 

Yet when I search for the book Female Urology, Urogynecology and Voiding Dysfunction in LocatorPlus, WorldCat and Amazon.com, guess which place has the table of contents on their site? Click on Search inside of this book on Amazon and voila the table of contents.  Neither LocatorPlus nor WorldCat have the table of contents.  It is only after I clicked on the fourth library (University of Western Ontario) listed on WorldCat was I directed to a catalog record that contained the table of contents.  (WorldCat lists results are according to proximity.  Those closest to your current location display first, so depending on where you are your results list may be different than mine.)

Why is it that we librarians require the size of the book in the cataloging record but we can’t require that the table of contents be added to our local or national catalogs? Frankly I find it quite sad that the National Library of Medicine’s LocatorPlus doesn’t have the table of contents for a medical book but Amazon.com sure does. 

Now Amazon.com doesn’t have the table of contents for every book.  When Amazon doesn’t have it and LocatorPlus, OhioLink, and the libraries within WorldCat don’t have the table of contents I do some deep digging within Google to find the information, or I end up calling or emailing a library that does own the book asking them for a special favor to pull the book from their shelves to help me verify the correct chapter information. 

Why is it that almost every recent journal article in PubMed has an abstract that can tell us more about the article but we don’t seem to have that for books in our catalogs?  Do I need point out that Amazon.com has this? This should be built into our catalogs.  Having the table of contents and the abstract to the book is WAY MORE IMPORTANT than the size of the book which is in many cataloging records.  What user cares that the book  is 27cm?

And librarians wonder why users are using Google or Amazon.com instead of the catalog to find books. 

There are arguments back and forth about the death of the library and trying to grab users on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc.  But if we as an organizational group can’t get our own national systems like LocatorPlus better and providing helpful information, we are going to have a real problem.  The reason I say it needs to be national systems is because many librarians download the records from NLM.  Additionally, when you do a search on Google for a medical textbook, results from LocatorPlus should be listed right up their with Amazon.com. 

I am not a cataloger I am not hip to all of the things that go on with ILS.  Perhaps something is a foot that me and the users don’t know about.  I would love to hear a cataloger’s thoughts on some of this.

This article, E-Books in the Sciences: If We Buy It Will They Use It?, appeared a while ago in Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship and I thought it was interesting.  The librarians at York University, Toronto, Canada conducted a survey evaluate whether their e-books were being used and how.

What I found interesting was despite the fact that 52% of the faculty are aware of York’s ebook packages and 44% have used ebooks, only 20% of those responding faculty recommend or actively encourage their students to use e-book materials. 

Only 20%?! Why so low?  While faculty knew ebooks existed and used them, there was still a lot of confusion and miscommunication about access, copyright, downloading and subject availability.

What isn’t surprising is that most people don’t read the book straight through.  Only 3.4%  of the graduate students responders read the whole book and NONEof the faculty responders read a whole ebook.

It appears that people read ebooks for quick reference.  Most of the graduate students and faculty read less than one chapter or only browsed through the book.  Only 12.% graduate students and 13.9 faculty read a whole chapter. 

These are just two of the many things that I found interesting in this article.  There is a clear disconnect between what patrons perceive about their ebook library holdings (access, copyright, usage, etc.) and patrons have are not reading academic ebooks like people are reading popular ebook titles.  I think that is a revelation to some librarians and many publishers.  However, if you think about it….Since when has anybody read a textbook like a popular literature book?  Just because it is online doesn’t mean the content lends itself to the whole book reading or even reading an entire chapter online. 

Librarians and publishers should read through this article and perhaps a few others like  The strange case of academic libraries and e-books nobody reads and the study by JISC national ebooks observatory project and perhaps do a survey of their own to see how their users are reading their ebooks.

Congratulations to LJ’s 2010 Movers and Shakers.  This year it seemed there were quite a lot of public librarians profiled for many diverse reasons and two people were from outside North America.  Congrats Kiwis and Aussies.

Since this blog focuses primarily on medical librarianship, I usually choose this time to specifically congratulate the medical and health science librarians who’ve made this list.  Alas there were no librarians working in medical or health sciences libraries on the list this year. Never fear, we did have one person representing our broader subject area. 

The lone librarian to represent health sciences subject area is Lisa Chow, Brookyn Public Library, NY.  Lisa works in the Division of Society Sciences and Technology at the Brookly Public Library to bring health reference services to Brooklyn communities.  She created a genetic awareness program and a training session for siblings of kids with special needs.

Since I live in Ohio, I am also going to specifically congratulate Mandy Knapp and Laura Solomon for their work on Saveohiolibraries.com.  Saveohiolibraries.com was formed after Governor Strickland proposed a 50% budget cut for the Ohio library system.  Saveohiolibraries.com was key to preventing the proposed budget cuts, restoring over $147 million in state funding. 

Congratulations 2010 Movers and Shakers.  Medical Librarians start thinking of some medical and health sciences librarians who are moving and shaking through the profession and nominate them for the 2011!  Next year will be LJ’s 10th annual round!  They will profile 50 or more “up and coming” people around the world who are innovative, creative, and making a difference.  Librarians, vendors, and others in the library field can be nominated.  The Movers and Shakers of 2011 “will celebrate the new professionals who are moving our libraries ahead.”

So medical librarians, let’s get some of our great peeps profiled!

According to the March 12, 2010 NLM Technical Bulletin, people using PubMed will be able to customize and tailor the display of their search results using MyNCBI.  Searchers can have the display default to Abstract format, show more than 20 citations per page, etc.  Note, if you want PubMed to display results in Abstract format and have 200 citations per page, your load time might take some time.  So balance your need for everything on one screen with your load time patience. 

PubMed has also increased the number of filters available from 5 to 15 and they are displayed under “Filter Your Results.” 

There are lots of good picturs on the Technical Bulletin and a two minute Quick Tour, Changing Your Default Display Settings, for people wanting to learn more about these features.

I have a problem with MyNCBI.  The problem is with the name.  The folks over at NCBI, NLM, and everybody else tinkering with PubMed to make it “more user friendly” for average users fail to realize the name MyNCBI means absolutely nothing to the average user.  The average user is used to MyCart, MyFolder, MyResults, MySaved, etc.  Think Amazon.com, that is what people are used to using, not cutesy names for things like MyNCBI. They don’t think MyNCBI is where they save stuff and where they can save filters for more tailored results.  I think you would get more average people using the very strong MyNCBI features if you labeled it something else.  Heck I would venture to guess most “average” users don’t even know about filters because they are hidden behind MyNCBI. 

Unfortunately I don’t see the term MyNCBI changing any time soon, NLM has a somewhat long history of naming things that mean something to those “in the know” but mean nothing to the average person.  LoansomeDoc and MedlinePlus are just two prime examples.  You should have heard the librarians at the Midwest Conference last year talk about how consumers don’t “get” what MedlinePlus is and that it is from the National Library of Medicine.

No not the politicians, although that is probably what may have come across your minds.  I am talking about the Bearded Pigs.  The Bearded Pigs bill themselves as the “worlds only library rock band,” they play at various library meetings and they have been playing at MLA since 2004. 

This year the concert is “Pigs on the Potomac” at the Hilton on Sunday May 23rd from 8:00 to 11:00.  If you have never been to a Pig concert then you are missing out, check out some of the photos on Picasa. 

As much fun as their music is, the Pigs wouldn’t be able to put on a concert without the help of The Thicket Society, who helps pay the show expenses.  The concert is free and all are welcome but if you want to help support the band and join The Thicket Society.  Your membership ($40 individual, $75 couple) gets you a t-shirt, button and name in the program.   

So even if you decide to become Thicket Society member or not, the Bearded Pigs are a great time to get together with other librarians in a fun low key way.  I will be there and I hope to see you all there too.

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.