Why isn’t SEO a core duty of LIS?

This will be a serious post asking the question–why aren’t information professionals committed to search engine optimisation (SEO)–why does SEO appear to be the domain of ‘big cheese’ business types?  According to its definition, SEO is concerned with improving the findability of a website or resource. Yes, I do understand that the flip side of this is foisting a product or advertisement (in website format) onto the world–but can’t we use SEO’s powers for good as well? [Note: yes, this is moralising, adverts can be 'good', but in my world view literacy and education trump adverts being plastered on every available surface.  Thank you, Ad blocker.]

What I find frustrating is any informaticist/ librarian-led discussion of search engines or websites or blogs does not really touch on the black box inside the websites that increases their findability, or perhaps works against them (and needs fixing).

Because when I see interesting and informative postings like the one on the econsultancy blog, I cannot help wondering why these discussions are taking place wholly outside the LIS domain. Why are the comments populated by a ‘founder’ here and a ‘director’ there, but no information folk?

The crux of this rant is that ‘they’, the directors, head honchos, etc should be coming to us for wisdom as search experts (in theory).  It appears that our search expertise is only partial at best–we are the users of search platforms and not creators.  Will this ever change?

PS. AddtoAny might be a good idea for this blog.

Farewell then NLH

The National Library for Health is officially part of NICE from Wednesday. They have published their last newsletter.

Celebrating 10 years of National Library for Health

 

Articles include:

 

·         The NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement bid farewell to the National Library for Health

·         What Will Happen To The National Library for Health

·         NHS Evidence Update

·         Specialist Libraries: April Annual Evidence Updates

·         Map of Medicine Update: Over 360 Map Pathways now available on NHS Choices website

·         Clinical Knowledge Summaries

·         TDAG Conference 2009

·         New Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) Licence for the NHS in England:  Q&A

·         KM Specialist Library Update

Learning from fast cars and philosophers

Ah the hobbies of a librarian.

If you met Giles Deacon in a pub, you would imagine him to be a geeky young librarian in love with his study of medieval hunting techniques

I prefer watching Formula 1 and arguing down the pub. The BMJ features Juliet Walker exploring things medicine has learnt from the fast moving expensive enterprise which is the Grand Prix. These include learning techniques from the pit stop to the hand over between the operating theatre and intensive care unit. Adopting a ‘lollipop man’ (in F1 this role is to signal when everything that needs to be done is done and the driver can leave) to coordinate everything at Great Ormond Street Hospital cut errors by 40%. You can see more about this at the Science Museum which has an exhibition on the subject.

On Wednesday I’m planning on going to a talk entitled ‘Is psychology a science?‘  It’s being hosted by Philosophy for All, a London based group aiming to open up philosophic debate to erm well everyone. I’ve been a member for a while and miss more sessions than not but they watch films and pick them apart in terms of philosophical content too as well as walks so refreshing for mind and body. Reminds me I need to buy some walking boots…although I have just bought one of the Time Out books of urban walks so perhaps my current shoes will do. Anyway I am looking forward to what the speaker has to say however as I learnt everything I know about stats and experiments in my A-level psychology years and the British Psychological Society certainly sees itself as scientific.

Ooh I like quick plugs. I have one for a …

Ooh I like quick plugs. I have a longer one for a conference that is maybe a little outside of the ‘health’ scope of this blog, but definitely within the ‘tech’ side of things. It is the ISKO UK conference, happening the 22nd to 23rd June 2009 in London. The theme is ‘content architecture’ and, of the titles that I can comprehend, many sound quite interesting.

Wow, there’s even a healthy topic or two:

e.g. Semantic metadata annotation: tagging Medline abstracts for enhanced information access

If you register by the end of this month, the fee is £115 (member) or £135 (nonmember).  The ISKO website is worth a look for upcoming open meetings and such.

Wellcome training

Just a quick plug of the wonderful free Wellcome Library (and Museum collections). They have training courses on using web based resources (mainly to do with medical history as it’s their specialty) but they also do a course about science in the news.

Twittophobes vs. Twittophiliacs

Hey Alan, someone named Nash has come up with a pithy list for why science, tech and maths gurus are giving Twitter the cold shoulder. Reasons include not caring about interacting with others and fear of comments being in the public domain.

Scientists are substantially asocial – feeling more at home dwelling on the workings of their pet problem rather than interested in what other people are thinking about.

But the ‘laypeople’ are chattering away!  A company called Salesforce.com has launched a product to allow “companies to search, monitor and join conversations taking place on Twitter directly in the Service Cloud.”  Ooh, ’service cloud’ certainly has a malevolent ring to it.  And the word ‘monitor’ doesn’t exactly put one at ease, does it?  Do these companies know that Twitter already has a basic search available?

Apparently the product will go for:

$995 per month, which includes the ability to:

• Create an online customer community with unlimited usage for up to 250 customers
• Set up a contact center with up to five agents
• Connect with native cloud computing sites like Facebook, Google and Twitter
• Invite up to five partners to participate in the Service Cloud

Will this be a future trend to watch out for?  And, based on the fairly basic description of the product above, how many groups will pay that amount with what looks like only a slight add-on in functionality to these social networking sites.  I am actually excited about the back and forth (we have already witnessed a preview of this with Facebook wanting to sell its users, as potential customers, to anyone and everyone) that will ensue, in a big way, in the time to come.  What software will come out to allow us to avoid being pulled into the tractor beam of the ’service cloud’?

Connotea

Those of you on the bleeding edge of reference management technology will know all about Connotea.  It lives on your Firefox bookmarks toolbar, ready to spring into action whenever you come across a reference or website on the interweb you would like to save for later. You could think of it as a somewhat geeky social networking tool–you upload citations of interest and tag them, others do the same.  You show them yours, and they show you theirs!  Unless you mark yours as private, that is.

It is nice that it is free, but not so nice that you have to add each reference separately, you cannot, say, go to a bibliography page of a study (in a pearl growing attempt) and add them all in one batch.  It is also great that it talks to Reference manager, Endnote, Word (it sends an .xml file that can be made into a bibliography), etc.  This little gadget could make grey literature searching a whiz–or at least take the cut-and-paste drudgery out of it.

Oh, and no abstracts are included, if they are available. Another big caveat, but it should be easily solved by adding that functionality (hint, hint).

Of course, I am not the first to check out Connotea and it has been blogged on here , here and here.

“Make sure you are Evidence-based” (and up to date)

It seems like Wiley-Blackwell are seriously into EBM. Not only do they publish the Cochrane Library, EBM Guidelines, Essential Evidence Plus (whatever these last two are), but they also do the Evidence-Based Medicine series. I just got a mail shot from them – “Make sure you are Evidence-Based”. They have quite a range of books in the series, some of which seem to be a series of pragmatic, systematic-ish reviews of interventions for a condition, while others take on a slightly more educational role – how to go about formulating your question, doing your search, appraising the results etc. There are plenty of sample chapters to read, so you know what you’re getting. Of course, though, they are expensive. Evidence-based Cardiology is over £100. And given that EBM by its nature goes out of date pretty quickly (or it might not, but the point is you won’t know until you look) is it really sensible to spend your £100+ on a 2002 book called Evidence-Based [...] and really kid yourself that you are, actually, Evidence-Based? Being evidence based seven years ago is hardly evidence based in my (much cheaper) book. I wonder how many they sell, and to whom?

Google Street View and the threat to our privacy

So Google have launched Google Steet View in the UK. I’m sure we’ve all played with it already. I looked at my flat, of course, and scrutinized my windows to see if I could see anything that I shouldn’t want anyone else to see. Thankfully all is safe on that account. I peered at my neighbours windows too, though unfortunately the same applied to them too – no bizarre goings-ons were visible. Not that one expects anything in such dignified parts of North Surrey of course. We have standards. I had a look around bits of North London too, where standards are notoriously lax, and likewise failed to spot anything outrageous. In a fit of desperation to find something I even trawled around the back streets of Soho (online, you understand) to see if I could spot any friends coming out of artistic bookstores or health and beauty emporiums and the like, but those clever people at Google seemed to have done their picture taking of that part of town early on a Sunday morning, and the whole place was shut and not a soul to be seen. You can imagine how disappointed I was.

There has been some fuss and hullaballo, as we all know, about privacy and the like, and the fact that burglars could use it to plan their robberies. I’m not sure I’m too convinced that this is a real threat to anyone. People’s faces have been blurred to comply with tougher European privacy laws (quite rightly too), and car number plates likewise obscured. The pictures are snapshots, so evidently they can’t be used to follow or track anyone’s movements. And if you see yourself you can ask to be removed. And really, who’s so sad as to go around looking for funny pictures, apart from the odd desperate blogger (e.g. “Top 15 street view sightings” (US)) or dreadful, reactionary newspapers like the Daily Mail. And even then the most embarrassing shots they can find are disappointingly tame.

There ARE very real and very serious issues about privacy and the surveillance state and all that, but these are the constant monitoring by CCTV cameras and the like, and the lack of controls allowing any part of the state apparatus to keep checks on where we are and where we’re going, but I really don’t think Google Maps is a threat – surely it’s just a great tool? I’m not naive enough to think that Google are some sort of benign organisation, but neither am I so cynical as to think they’re aiming to turn the world into a 1984 style gulag. Privacy campaigners are likely to do themselves more harm than good going after Street View – they should stick to the real threats to privacy (and liberty etc) bought in by the current administration – at least in this country, and probably elsewhere.

Or am I missing something?

Rate your doctor

The consumer side to public medical care has reared its (not so ugly) head in a BMJ article published on the web yesterday.  Written by the founder of iwantgreatcare.org, Neil Bacon, it discusses the UK government’s decision to set up a doctor rating system on NHS Choices.

Doctor rating is nothing new.  Just look at rateMDs, or do a search for ‘doctor rating’ on the ‘net.  Much to my amusement, in university, a professor brought in a selection of reference books, including an encyclopaedic book with listings and ratings of MDs practising in the USA.  At the time I thought, why is this necessary?  Shouldn’t they all be good communicators, intelligent and dedicated?

Yes, but unfortunately for me, this is unrealistic.  I have had some duds in my time–not with MDs but other health professionals. A dentist whose professional advice was to have EIGHT x-rays of my teeth taken in one sitting (I had to sign a ‘refusal’ form to refuse this) and an optomologist whose bedside manner was at times patronising and at times confrontational, and whose prescription was ultimately incorrect.

I think the quality of doctor rating websites needs to improve so that these ratings are findable and usable.  It is quite important that healthcare consumers are heard but are not pointlessly abusive, and Bacon addresses this in the article.

Rating websites should go a step further and verify that a patient actually did consult with the doctor (i.e. that they are not a friend or family member of the doctor who wants to put in a good word).  It may sound strange, but if these rating websites take some inspiration from Toptable (a website that offers deals on restaurant bookings and collects reviews), which only allows users to rate restaurants that they have recently booked, then they would be more robust.

Unfortunately, I found the search functionality on iwantgreatcare.org difficult to find anybody with, and I had some names and places.  A bit of tweaking, a bit of authority control and they would have a very useful resource.

Ultimately I agree that a poor clinician-patient relationship can be very damaging to the patient’s health and a lack of feedback on professional practice very unhelpful to a clinician’s development.

“For a minority of doctors to suggest that patients should somehow be prevented from benefiting from the transparent, internet enabled feedback that has done so much to improve standards and quality in other industries is a throwback to a medical paternalism that most of us thought was long gone.”