Krafty Librarian

Even though it is still snowing and  are in a fluffy white deep freeze, March is just around the corner.  March is not only the month of Spring and flowers but it is also when I will be hosting the Medlib Blog Carnival.

The Medlib Blog Carnival is a collection of blog posts on things pertaining to medical libraries.  Each month a new collection of posts are hosted at a different blog site for others to read.  March is my turn to host. 

So all of you medical, health, and library bloggers out there, please consider submitting one of you posts to the carnival.  Submissions must be made by March 6, 2010 to the .  You don’t have to specifically be a medical librarian or a librarian to submit a post.  The post just has to be related to medicine and libraries in some way.  Some topic examples are: library technology, librarianship, Evidence Based Medicine (EBM), PubMed, bibliographic databases, information literacy, open access, print vs. online, medical apps, library apps, mobile technology, user education, etc. 

I look forward to all of the submissions and will have them up for everybody to read March 9, 2010.

Foursquareis the latest geo-location app to hit the mobile market.  Currently it is available for the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and the Palm.  People who have other types of mobile phones that can get on the Internet can us the mobile website version.  People load it on to their phone and “check-in” to places that they visit. A CNN article has says, “Next Year’s Twitter? It’s Foursquare.”

Some people have the app on their phone sync on their Facebook account so you might have seen something similar to Caroline McCarthy of cnet’s foursquare check-in within the Newsfeed of Facebook.

 Why would somebody want to tell people where they are and where they have been?  I am not quite sure of all the reasons but one reason is the social sharing mania that you see with things like Facebook, Twitter, etc. and the other reason might be the perks.  Yes, perks.  People who check in to all sorts of places like Starbucks, restaurants, parks, offices, libraries, bars, stores, etc.  Additionally people are adding information (Tips) about these places as they visit. 

For example foursquare people who visited the Cleveland Clinic left these tips:

@Table 45 (*Krafty note: Table 45 is nice restaurant at the Cleveland Clinic)
Be Sure to check out happy hour between 4-6 pm. Free appetizers.

@The Cleveland Clinic
The Clinic may be a hospital, but it also has a new shopping area: bookstore, clothes, au bon pain, and a sushi bare are all new.  If you need to find something ask one of the “red coats.”

The tips are most often used at restaurants (like: Harvest Salad is great but get dressing on the side because they drench it on.) and stores with coupons or specials (like: Sign up for their newsletter and get $5 off). 

Foursquare has already struck several deals with large companies such as Pepsi and Zagat.  Small local businesses are getting into the foursquare fever, marketing deals to mayors (the person who has checked-in the most out of anyone at a specific location) and regular foursquare users.  TechCrunch noted, “Not only does the mayor of the venue Marsh (local bar performance space) get free drinks, but everyone who checks into the venue on Foursquare and shows proof (on your iPhone or other mobile device) gets $2 off a ticket to any performance that night.”

Some librarians are even talking about how they can get into the foursquare fury. If you look at the Technology Trends Webinar hashtag #TTWebinar and scroll down a bit, you will see where people are discussing the use of foursquare in libraries. 

From @libkitty
“Looking at foursquare. It seems like libraries could create promos, special offers, without using a smart phone, or even a cell.” 

Foursquare is fun. I have it loaded on my iPhone and I can definitely see where people would want to use it to get tips and discounts, because I love that feature.  I am not quite sure of its practical use in libraries, although a lot of people on #TTWebinar had some interesting ideas.  But one of my biggest problems with fourquare is privacy.  Yes you heard it, me with a blog, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, and active member in MLA is worried about privacy.  You can Google my name and everything about me is out there for all to see.  But I kind of find foursquare a little too Big Brotherish.  Granted it is self induced Big Brother.  I’m just not sure if I really want people to know where I have been and where I am at.  Caroline McCarthy described how your foursquare check-ins aren’t private on Facebook despite your security settings. 

Another problem I have with foursquare is that I keep forgetting to check-in.  I am no longer the mayor of the Cleveland Clinic Alumni Library (which is probably good because you would probably want your users to be mayors) and when I go to restaurants I am either 1. watching over children to ensure appropriate behavior or 2. too excited to have a dinner alone with my husband to remember to pull out my phone and check-in. 

So while I am not sure of its use in libraries it is definitely a Friday Fun type of application that you might want to look at and play around with.  I wouldn’t recommend syncing it with Twitter friends or Facebook friends unless you are ready for your check-ins to be visible to everyone on those applications.

That also most sounds like a looping question. In the real estate market a house is worth as much as somebody is willing to pay.  But in media world a song may be worth millions but people are only willing to pay .99 cents for it.  In the case of the house, you only have one buyer, but the song you have millions of buyers.   Still with both products there is only so much a buyer is willing to pay for a product.  Price something too low and you will get a lot of buyers but you lose out on potential profits, price something too high and you have less buyers, possibly losing more money than if you had just priced it a little cheaper.  It is a tight rope walk. 

Last year music companies were able to set their prices on their songs with iTunes variable pricing.  The variable pricing gave music lables the ability to set prices as low as .69 cents to as high as $1.29 for individual songs.  So how did that pan out a year later? 

Not so good, music sales are slower. Warner Music Group (WMG) announced  that its unit sales growth (individual song sales, not album) on iTunes has slowed since the price increase.  Sales at the $1.29 level were down and if it weren’t for the revenue generated by the .69 cent songs, they would never have made a net gain.  The CEO of WMG acknowledged  he was unsure as to whether it was the economy or the 30% price increase (or both) that was the cause.  “It’s difficult to know, even today, if it is just consumer resistance to a higher price points or if taking a pricepoint of 30 percent more at such a fragile time (is to blame). I don’t think there’s been another company to have taken such a price increase in the 2009 period.”

So why is this a big deal for medical libraries and companies who provide content to them?  The last 3 or 4 technology webinars and discussions I have sat in on have all talked about pay for access book and journal article content.  Instead of libraries paying big bucks for ejournals and ebooks they can make them available to users by making them pay access at the user level.  Right now I only hear academic libraries seriously discussing this but I can see it making its way into the cash strapped hospital world. 

Pay for access is nothing new.  Almost every journal publisher I can think of has their own pay for access public site where they charge unaffiliated (or sometimes unaware affiliated) users anywhere from $25-$40 for a copy of an article.  Publishers have also experimented and used institutional pay access models, most of the models I have seen have been where the institution pays for the accessed material not the user.  During the webinars more people spoke about models where the user pays for access.  In some libraries this is a foreign concept, but in others such as academics where students have copy and printer accounts associated with their library accounts, this is not so radical an idea.

If more and more libraries begin to look at userd to pay for access, price will be a key factor in overall usage.  The music iTunes model is an established model.  The ebook purchasing model where people download a title to a handheld device is still fairly new.  Yet they are already experimenting with price for buying electronic title access for handhelds.  Amazon.com looks to return to providing Macmillan books at a higher price  (Amazon.com’s usual top price was $9.99), and there is speculation that many other publishers will follow Macmillan’s lead.  The industry is already predicting a short term slump in ebook revenues as customers resist price increases, but they are banking (literally) on the system to adjust and be to their benefit in the long run. 

Really? Will that work?  Granted there is only one year’s worth of data from the iTunes price change but I am willing to bet publishers are going to have a difficult path in more than just the short term and we haven’t even begun to discuss ejournals and paying per article to download to a handheld device.   The world of popular literature is different than academic or medical literature, but these publishers also have be aware of the thin line where price is a burden to convenience.  I just wonder with consumers balking at music content costing $1.29 whether they are willing to buy print materials (ejournal or ebook) at a considerably higher price.  Or have we as a society been conditioned by iTunes to expect a .99 cent item?  I am not saying that a whole book goes for .99 cents, after all a whole album goes for much more than that.  But in the world of academia and medicine where people are using reference books and journals for that “one needed chapter” or that “one important article” are people going to want to pay full price for the entire ebook or $40 for the online article?  Or are they going to start demanding ala cart pricing within the item level?

I have no idea, it is just something that has been bouncing around in my head the last few days.  But one thing is for certain, as people become more and more used to getting things on their handheld devices, delivery, demand and pricing are going to change considerably.

There has been so much discussion about the changes happening with the new PubMed interface I think new about the subject subset strategies being updated kind of got lost in the noise. 

Each year the subject subset search strategies are reviewed to determine if modifications are needed.  These modifications can be something like changing MeSH, adding or deleting terms, or changing parts of the strategy to optimize retrieval.  According to the NLM Technical Bulletin February 5, 2010 post, the Bioethics, Cancer, and Toxicology were revised.  Complementary Medicine and Space Life Sciences are next on the list to be revised in the future.  The PubMed Subset Strategies page has already been updated reflecting the changes to the three terms. 

It is probably a good idea to check this page out anyway to make sure your search strategies for Aids, Complementary Medicine, Systematic Reviews, etc. are up to date and you are getting the most out of your search.  Obviously these strategies aren’t for every search on Aids or Cancer but if you need to do a massive comprehensive search or if you are looking for ways to expand your search this is a great resource.

There’s been some discussion on this blog and other places about the iPad and it possible use in healthcare.  I ran across this article, “Apple Isn’t the Only Vendor With New Tablet,”  yesterday and thought I would discuss it today. 

Motion computing will most likely be unveiling a new tablet (presumably called the C5) for healthcare at the HIMSS conference March 1-4, 2010 in Atlanta.  According the Information Week article, the C5 is more in line with what clinicians need for a mobile computing device. 

The C5 is:

• Rugged for falls
• Can handle regular swipes of disinfectant
• Has a barcode scanner and RFID reader for drug safety and supply/inventory
• Has a camera for telemedicine

However the C5 is still too big if you want it to fit in the white coat pocket.  The article quotes Michael Stinson (Motion Computing VP of Marketing) saying, “It’s not uncommon to see [the C5] used with a cart.” 

People have been trying to make the perfect tablet for physicians for a while now.   Tablet makers will be watching and copying each other and Apple to try and get into the Healthcare market.  It will be interesting to see how this pans out and how/if medical libraries can fit in there.

By now it seems like everybody has weighed in on the iPad, so of course I feel compelled to add my .02 cents. 

I like the concept of an iPad, I just am not sure I like the iPad.  Personally, I think Steve Jobs needs to get over his anti Adobe Flash issues (Dude Steve, Flash works on my PC just fine, maybe it is Apple’s fault *gasp* that it is buggy on Mac platforms…just a thought.) According Adobe,  70%-75% of games and video content is Flash, I have no way to verify that data since it comes from Adobe and not a third party.  But it seems like whenever I am on my iPhone and I want to look at SlideShare, an Internet movie, or animation, I get the broken Lego that tells me Flash isn’t loaded.  Hopefully HTML5 will be the answer to our animation and video prayers for iPhone users, because I don’t see Jobs backing down.  Until there is an answer to the Flash (or lack of Flash) problem, it will be difficult to use the iPad for animation or Internet video purposes.  Why is this a problem?  there are lots of great medical animations and videos on surgeries, exercises, procedures, etc. that are very beneficial to professionals as well as consumers.

Flash is just one of the video problems the iPad suffers from.  Apparently the iPad’s 1024×768 pixels and 4:3 ratio presents some problems for videos.  If all of those numbers sounded like gobbelty gook then let me say that the iPad plays videos at the same scale as an old CRT television set.  Forget watching an HD movie, wide screen films, and movies in other formats. For examples of what happens, check out this post on TUAW. It seems most of the people upset by this are videophiles.  But combine the scaling problems with no Flash, and the iPad is limited for medical professionals and patients to view educational medical videos.

Another big problem is iPad’s 3G network, AT&T.  I swear the groan that came forth from millions of people could be heard ’round the world.  I would bet the American iPhone users already stuck on a glacial 3G network were doing more than groaning.  Luke Wilson may be able to surf and talk at the same time, I just hope his friend has no more game show questions for him to answer quickly.  Supposedly AT&T is ready for the iPad and says they can handle it.  Yet according to The New York Times, AT&T “largely expects the iPad to be used in coffee shops and at home, where users can rely on Wi-Fi, as opposed to dragging down the company’s 3G network.” Oh boy, this just has disaster written all over it.  Please AT&T prove me wrong.

Digital formats.  If you are planning on using the iPad to read books, you need to know that Apple is using the digital book formatcalled EPUB, which is different from Amazon.  I have no idea what specific medical books are available in EPUB’s format, but the TUAW reports, 0ther ebook readers use this format: Barnes & Noble Nook, Sony Reader, iRex Digital Reader, and the iRiver Story. Some of the publishers that will be on the iPad are Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette.  Whether you believe Jobs was angry at Harold McGraw for leaking iPad information or not, McGraw-Hill has plans for its books on the iPad. In an interview on CNBC (the day before the iPad debuted) Harold McGraw stated (video link) “We have a consortium of e-books. And we have 95% of all our materials that are in e-book format on that one. So now with the tablet you’re going to open up the higher education market, the professional market. The tablet is going to be just really terrific.”

If they are opening up the higher education and professional market, there are still a lot of hurdles that need to be accomplished.  John Halamka, Chief Information Officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Chief Information Officer at Harvard, AND Joseph Leiter Lecturer at MLA 2010 wrote a post on the iPad and the ideal clinical device.  His ideal clinical device is:

• Less than a pound and fits in a white coat pocket
• Battery life for an 8-12 hour work shift
• Sturdy
• Built in full keyboard, voice recognition and very robust touch screen input
• Provides a platform for a variety of healthcare applications hosted on the device or cloud.

According Halamka, no device is completely there yet, but the iPad may be closer than other devices like the netbooks, laptops, iPhones, and Kindles. 

Personally I believe the platform and applications for healthcare is going to be the biggest hurdle.  I said it once before, finding a Mac in a hospital is about as rare as finding a vegetarian in Outback Steakhouse.  They are there, but not always, and don’t count on them to work within the system.  The vast majority of regular hospital departments do not work with Macs and have no intention of working with Macs.  Despite some growth and development in the iPhone EMR app side of things (EPIC has an iPhone app), very few hospitals support iPhones because they are still viewed as a personal device within hospital IT departments.  The hospital IT world is still very much PC and Blackberry. 

Scandinavian librarian, Thomas Brevik, has an interesting short post on what the iPad might mean to libraries.  He predicts that it will “fuel reader demand for e-books.”  He also sees two main challenges for the iPad in libraries, delivery of content and reader habits.

Brevik’s perspective seems to be primarily from the public library side of things.  Even so, the content issue is big.   Thomas specifically writes about content and e-books and libraries.  I think the content issue is bigger than that.   From what I could tell from the iPad release, the only things that will run on an iPad are apps (similar to the iPhone).  So in order for you content to be displayed or used on the iPad, you are either going to have write an app (or subscribe to a library program that has an app) or have all of your programs/services/resources available through Safari web browser….and also not have Flash. 

I don’t know if the iPad will make an immediate big splash in healthcare and or medical libraries.   However, in typical Apple form they have turned up the heat on the portable market.  They have created a really cool portable device for under $500.  I anticipate us seeing more changes due to the ripples the iPad has caused by jumping into the ultraportable pool that has been dominated by inexpensive netbooks.  It makes for interesting times.  Who would have thought in 2000 that ten years later would have one of the most popular music players that is also a phone?

The MLA 2010 Top Tech Trend Panel is getting a new look.  There will be some returning veteran panelists from previous years presenting, but this year’s Top Tech Trends panel will include a lightning round highlighting technology in libraries.

The Medical Informatics Sections and co-sponsor Educational Media & Technologies Section want you to be in the lightning round.  We are looking for panelists with a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints, so don’t hesitate to apply. Vendors are welcome to apply, but the content must be relevant to technology and libraries and not a sales pitch.

Did you do something at your library that worked really well or perhaps it totally tanked?  Talk about it and share your information, let us learn from your success or mistakes.  The lightning talks will be brief, focused talks on a particular technology topic and highlight late-breaking ideas, trends, successes, or even failures. Each panelist will be given strictly 5 minutes to talk, followed by time for Q&A.

 

Since imitation is the best form of flattery, check out ALA’s LITA page for more information on lightning talks: . Our thanks to LITA for providing great information.

The Top Tech Trends program will be Sunday, May 23, 3.00-4.30pm.
The session will be divided as follows: 50 minutes for presentations, 40 minutes for questions & discussion.

In order to be eligible you must complete a form and submit it by February 15, 2010. You will be notified of the results by February 22, 2010.

The application form can be found at

Are you struggling to keep up with new technologies, or are you pretty tech savvy and like to try and stay up to date with things?  Library Journal’s Webcast Alert just alerted me to a free 1 hour webcast on Tuesday February 9, 2010  at 3:00pm EST called, Gadgets and Tools and Apps, Oh My!

Two panelists, Tina Hertel and Karla Marsteller will be discussing updates on search, communication, and graphics applications and gadgets for the library. 

Bummer, you say you are at the reference desk at that time, or it is your day off because you are working the weekend?  Never fear, the webcast will be archived for one year following the intial broadcast. 

Registration is FREE!

Tina is a Librarian/Help Desk Analyst at E.W. Fairchild Martindale Library, Lehigh University.  Karla is the Excutive Director at Palmyra Public Library.  I realize neither of these librarians are medical librarians so some of the things they might talk about won’t be applicable to us in the medical world.  But there are a lot of tech things out there I am sure they will mention a few things that will be interesting and helpful to us. 

Oh and did I mention that all it costs is one hour of your time?! Pretty good deal if you can come away with a nugget or two of information.

Now that I have got your attention with a title that I borrowed from a post on the Undergraduate Science Librarian, “Why academic librarians need to stop going to library conferences,” I guess I should rephrase my statement to: Librarians Need to Attend Their User’s Conferences. (A more accurate but less snappy title.)

The Undergraduate Science Librarian’s post hit home with me a little bit.  She describes a general disconnect between the library world and the research world, which she witnessed at the ScienceOnline2010 conference.  At that conference two librarians held a session for scientists and researchers about available library tools.  From that session, Bonnie Swoger (the author of the blog post) noticed that “scientists and scholars aren’t aware of what librarians do, beyond the whole ‘buying books’ thing.”  Bonnie also believes that librarians aren’t spending enough time listening to scientists and scholars to figure out what they really need and want. 

Bonnie links to a post from Martin Fenner, “Scientists and librarians: friend or foe?”  which addresses Dorothea Salo’s (one of the librarians at the ScienceOnline session) dismay over the disconnect between librarians and scientists.  Fenner lists several ways librarians can be more relevant and helpful to scientists.  Most of the things he lists are services, such as provide and support an online reference manager, online user training and support, microblogging for quick help support, institutional bibliographies, institutional repositories, help with article submissions, and help with Web 2.0 tools. 

I know many of you in library land are saying, “But we do many of those things he wants, why is there still a disconnect? Do they think the online tutorials grow on trees?”  My guess is that there is a general disconnect between what librarians do and all of their users.  Whether it is scientists, researchers, doctors, nurses, students, etc. many still think we are book buyers.

I have two examples of how I felt the disconnect.

Incident 1:
A few years ago my husband and I were invited to a large get together with many couples.  While at dinner one of the women (who I had just met) asked me what I did.  I told her I was a medical librarian.  (She was a physical therapist.)  She got that glazed look in her eye and asked me “Really? So what do you do, make copies and shelve books?”  As offensive as that statement was to me, she didn’t mean it that way, she was entirely clueless as to what a medical librarian did. 

Incident 2:
My husband and I met some friends at a local bar before a baseball game.  The boyfriend (I had met once or twice before) of a friend asked me, “So why are you interested in a career in which you will be replaced by Google in a decade.”  He had too much to drink to be polite.

So how can we begin to deal with this disconnect?  Well, I like what Bonnie suggested.  “We need to start attending the same conferences as the scholars we serve.”  Bonnie is putting her money where her mouth (keyboard?) is, on her post she states, “I will not be attending the ALA annual conference this summer. Hopefully, I will head to Denver for the Geological Society of America national meeting in October. And perhaps the year after that I will make it to the American Chemical Society conference.”

I think MLA and librarian conferences are important, it helps us to connect and learn off of each other, but I think Bonnie’s idea of getting out there and attending our CUSTOMER’S conferences might be helpful.  We need to start thinking a little more like business and start marketing to our customers. For many of us, it may not be practical to go to the national conferences of our customers.  How about local conferences and meetings? How about city groups, institutional groups or meetings?  Heck try and get in on the Monday meeting at your institution.

Get out from the library and tell your customers what you have and how you can serve them.  But also listen to their needs.

Yesterday a librarian posted on MEDLIB-L about a Facebook group listing the usernames and passwords to databases, full textbooks, journals, and other subscription sites. 

Obviously this is illegal.  Institutions pay for access, must abide by license agreements, and in general try their best to balance the fine line between providing access to registered authorized users and restricting access to unauthorized, unaffiliated users.  Even with the best intentions leaks happen. 

With the Internet came the idea that everything is freely available online to anybody.  The idea that are fees and costs to information online is completely foreign to some people.  To some people it isn’t foreign, they know it is wrong, but they don’t care, they want it and they don’t see why they should have to pay for it.  Nowhere was this more obvious than with Napster.  Napster’s file sharing was just one of the many that existed that music lovers flocked to.  Now days BitTorrent protocols make it easy to distribute large amounts of data enabling people to download movies, tv shows, etc.  A Wikipedia citation from TorrentFreak estimates 27-55% of all Internet traffic (depending on geographical location) is related to the BitTorrent use. 

Compared to BitTorrent, the posting of passwords online is a fairly low tech but effictive and often hard to discover method of accessing fee services.  It was only a matter of time before somebody decided to create a Facebook Group.  This particular Facebook Group is not new to this type of behavior, they also have their own website, Medishare.net, which uses file sharing techniques somewhat similar to BitTorrent.  It appears from their website they are listing and sharing the complete PDF’s of textbooks from Elsevier, Springer, Humana, etc.  They even have files and instructions for downloading UpToDate 17.3 for the PC & PDA!  They are sharing this information by breaking the information up into .rar files for their msn group members to download.   

When faced with these type of sites, what is a library to do?  It isn’t practical or possible for librarians to scour the Internet looking for websites distributing their passwords.  However, it might be helpful for librarians to end or severely limit their use of generic passwords for off campus use.  Giving users their own unique username and password that they use to access resources through a proxy server, Athens, or some other secure authentication method, might help.  It is just my observation, but people seem way more willing to distribute generic passwords to library resources rather than their own personal password to library resource. Additionally, by having each person have their own unique username and password you have method to track down and deal with scofflaws individually. 

Libraries and vendors also need to work together try and keep things on the up and up.  One of the libraries whose passwords to Ovid were listed on the Facebook page were notified by Ovid about the problem.  Yeah Ovid and the rest of the vendors have a vested interest in making sure their resources are accessed by authorized individuals, but libraries have an interest too.  We have relationship with these vendors and as much as we complain about the costs of their products, if piracy drives them out of business who we will get to provide the services or the resources?  It may be argued that these databases just re-purpose information, that the information will still be found if they go out of business.  Sure the data is there, but as with the example of UpToDate, how many doctors and nurses were finding that kind of information (which was out there and available) prior to UpToDate’s creation?  The case of textbooks and journals, where the printed text is undergoing a lot of changes (Kindle, iPhone, online articles, advertising issues), presents different risks.  In this instance it is the actual information that is in jeopardy.  Not only do you wonder about whether it is correct but if a publisher can’t make any money selling a book or advertisement for a journal, they will stop publishing it and the information is gone.  Journal publishers that still cling to username and password access as their only means to allowing institutional online access need to really sit down and either update their access methods or open up their site completely because they are probably dealing with this much more often than those publishers that allow IP validation. 

The Internet has changed the way society accesses information. Some is open and free for all, some is not.  There will always be those who are trying to beat the system illegally.  Deal with it the best way you can, see if you can prevent further problems and then move on.

**Update**

I can’t stress enough how libraries need to be aware of how easy it is get their group codes or general passwords when they post them in unsecure locations.  Shortly after I posted this, a person tweeted that people can always do something as simple as this to see usernames and passwords.  While a many libraries like ASU and JMU do not state their RefWorks group code there are a whole bunch that have it hanging all out there for the world to see.  Hey, Capella University, Cornell, Drexel, Johns Hopkins, Princeton your fly is down and your group codes are showing. You can’t blame people for distributing it when you are already doing that yourself. 

**Second Update**

It appears Facebook has removed the group.