Google irks health librarians

An article published not too recently on HCPlive has irked a few health librarians on LIS-Medical. This excerpt in particular seems designed to rub us the wrong way:

Forget your local medical library and PubMed and use Google Scholar to search for scholarly literature published in the form of peer-reviewed pieces, theses, books, and abstracts from any number of scholarly organizations, including professional societies, universities, and academic publishers.

One librarian has responded to the piece with enthusiasm, suggesting she had become fed up with PubMed. The Krafty Librarian has sounded off about PubMed recently, to say while PubMed had always hidden the controlled vocabulary, the MeSH, it had become even more hidden with the recent revamp. Is this a full-on backlash against PubMed, or a few disgruntled individuals?

I find myself not wanting to agree with the librarians who slated the HCPlive article. I would like to think that the words ‘forget your local medical library’ are indeed fighting words (to light a fire under our sometimes complacent bums). Can our local medical libraries not compete with Google Scholar, seeing as they have must have full access to this free search engine, and many more databases and resources that may not be free or as ‘user friendly’?

I disagree with the librarian who insists that doctors are at danger of ‘wasting their time’ by engaging with new web technologies such as apps. This is downright patronising to doctors-why should they not be allowed to keep up to date on their own, if they want?

He also stated that to miss out the apostrophe in ‘Crohn’s disease’ was a calamity in Google Scholar. No it isn’t-check out the ‘Did you mean’ suggestion at the top of the results. Google is great for spell-checking!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Usefulness of social networking for scientists: greatly exaggerated?

A study of research patterns in life scientists found that (duh) they all have different patterns of accessing information. Of course we knew this, or at least suspected it, but I can’t help but be pleased that the British Library found space for this news on its Press Room page.  It shores up the notion that libraries and ‘resource centres’ need to be flexible with different users.

“Researchers use informal and trusted sources of advice from colleagues, rather than institutional service teams, to help identify information sources.” Yes they do-another reason why perhaps an information professional must inject themselves into the teams with which they work, rather than sideline themselves. Depending on how an organisation is set up, this can be quite natural and easy (if one’s desk is ‘integrated’ into the team area, for example, as proximity tends to predict positive regard) or difficult, if the information team is isolated or in a ‘bricks and mortar’ library away from the clients.

I thought it interesting that the report highlighted that social networking tools (blogs, podcasts, social bookmarking, etc) had not proven terribly appealing to life scientists.  The full report elaborates that, firstly, “there is not the critical mass of individuals using such services to make it worthwhile” to use them to “enhance research”. Secondly, and I almost choked while reading this, “the time required in order to become a proficient user is prohibitive.” Don’t give me that. These are highly trained people who, as it says in the next sentence, may use “grid technologies” and “an intricate array of analytical tools” in their day to day work.

What do you think about the ‘not enough time’ to learn simple, user friendly web-based software argument?

I really think that the report should have written: “the scientists can’t be bothered with this social networking stuff because of general complacency and then notion that Twitter and the like will only be around for a few years before we get something new, so, again, why bother?”

Nor is this attitude unique to the life sciences. I know someone very influential, at a Canadian charity, who is crying out to use Twitter for fundraising and marketing. But she is sadly also ‘too busy’.

In other news, the “Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) has acknowledged that social media has contributed significantly to the income it has raised for its current appeal. In the first week of the DEC’s appeal for Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, over £3 million was donated,” mainly via the BBC website, Twitter and Facebook.

A spokesperson from the DEC said “the biggest risk we faced was not that we might make a mistake [with using Twitter], it was that we would miss a chance to help save more lives.”

Check out #casestudieslife on Twitter to contribute to the discussion about how researchers use and access information (or not!).

It’s apparently Global Handwashing Day …

It’s apparently Global Handwashing Day today and I can’t resist mentioning the British study (mentioned in the Guardian) that exposed men and women to signs cajoling them to wash their hands (“soap it off or eat it later”) in motorway service station toilets. Without the signs, 2/3 of men did not use soap (!!) and 1/3 of women couldn’t be bothered either. With the pro-handwashing signs, the researchers found that 12% more men, and 11% more women, used soap.

The annual arrival of the CILIP AGM-foll …

The annual arrival of the CILIP AGM-follow #cilipagm on Twitter to read updates from @tomroper, @m_hopwood and @CILIPinfo-always gives me a little thrill. I am aware of the content of the meeting, via Twitterfall. I am not sure if they have set it up to allow those distant to participate, but perhaps this should be a consideration next year. Which way will the vote for the membership fees go? I was torn over this issue as £7 more per year is not considerable, but I wonder if more effort shouldn’t be put towards diversifying the content of conferences and training so that ‘non-traditional’ areas of information management-web developers, information architects, SEO managers, etc-would be tempted to join. These are areas in which a large number of people work. The 20,000 strong population of CILIP could be seriously augmented.

Anyone attending CILIP AGM 2009 have any reflections they’d like to share?

Update: It looks like membership fees will go up, then, as the majority voted yes to this measure (115 to 66).  The treasurer spoke to say that this would help increase advocacy (=marketing? I hope- ‘advocacy’ is a bit vague.), establishing statutory school libraries and helping health libraries.  Bottom line: CILIP fee increase-still cheaper than a bottle of decent riesling.

It was surprising to see (in the tweets also) that technology costs exceeded 500k-why so much?

Members appear to be discussing other possibilities such as a ‘pay as you go’ (!) option and different ways of interacting with CILIP. Also mentioned was how to increase subscriptions with 4,000 members expected to retire in the next 10 years. Marketing, advocacy, image change. Make CILIP fun. Please!

Woofer: Twitter for the verbose

Did you know that there is a Twitter clone out there called Woofer that forces you to write 1400 character plus updates? It doesn’t surprise me that Twitter alternatives are popping up, given the notoriety of Twitter (I would say ’success’ but some of you will undoubtedly disagree with me). But what is surprising is that anybody could possibly need this bloated number of characters to impart their wisdom to the woofersphere. And be forced to a large, and arbitrary, minimum.

I have no desire to read reams of text in a update format, especially when there is no pressure to at least try to be grammatical and eloquent, as there might be in a blog.

I do like the idea of ‘woofing’ instead of tweeting. Perhaps there should be a halfway house (of ‘meowing’? ‘neighing’?) that gives you 200-250 characters as a maximum?

I agree with Mashable on this one-Woofer appears to be a joke.

I’ve just come across a study that shou …

I’ve just come across a study that should be on the NCBI ROFL website. Research that is perhaps interesting in theory but of dubious (or debatable, if you’d like to give me your thoughts) value. Impact of nurses clothing on anxiety in hospitalised children by Roohafza et al. Roohafza’s team found that, apparently, white clothing was more anxiety-provoking in paediatric patients than coloured clothing. I don’t question the ideals here-it is just the thought of the clownish bright colours being made standard kit instead of the clean, professional whites, that makes me smile. I was about to bemoan the quality of nursing research also, but all but one of the authors of this study is an MD.

Two way search

Dave Winer, the father of RSS, writes about getting the data flowing both ways.  Or, at least the potential for this, by having search engines use his blog to make results more relevant. And less random. He figures it won’t be sinister as he only reveals general stuff about himself on his blog-what city he calls home, and many other details that will help disambiguate his search query (his example: differentiating firmware driver from car driver).

He likes this idea so much that he bought the domain www.twowaysearch.com!

By the way, the tidbit above was found by going to TwitterFox (which makes Twitter much more accessible in an optional popup,  in my opinion, as it is never the main event), looking at a Guardian Tech tweet, going to a link in their article, and then finding the two way search in Jeff Jarvis’s Twitter feed on his blog here. Jeff’s blog is righteous as well-he has written a post linking to the MistakeBank, a ning site where people share and try to learn from their mistakes.

Human slaves…in a robot world

I was reading a very interesting article in the New Scientist about, er, robots, that can detect our emotions. Or ‘machines’, if you prefer (I noticed that the title had been changed to ‘robots’ from ‘machines’, perhaps in a bid to raise eyebrows).

Yes, robots are fun and so are machines, but where is the health connection, you ask. Machines can distinguish between the 6 ‘basic emotions’, fear, disgust, surprise, anger, happiness and sadness, but only if an exaggerated expression is presented to them. (Digression: reading about basic emotions or universal expressions always makes me a little skeptical as different people have different ways of expressing themselves-you’ll find lots of exaggerated smiles in North America, but comparatively few in the UK).

My favourite part: machines have gotten quite skilled at differentiating between real and fake pain in humans.  One study by Littlewort et al saw computers correctly classify pain 88% of the time. Human volunteers got it right 50% of the time-perhaps they were guessing. Will this technology have ramifications for reducing numbers of benefits fraudsters and pill-poppers as well as people trying to separate pain into organic or psychosomatic causes? Oh, and teaching autistic children to correctly identify facial expressions?

I hope so. Although it is easy to see the scarier side of technology like this. Who knows, maybe we’ll all be forced to adopt poker faces in the future to avoid ‘mood profiling’ and targeted advertising.

Green Dam, Youth Escort

A presentation at ISKO UK 2009 by Zhang Yunliang and an article this weekend in the FT have highlighted some worrying trends in internet filtering and politics. A filtering software called Green Dam/ Youth Escort (which ironically, in my opinion, smacks of salacious content hidden behind a login) will become obligatory and will be installed on all computers sold in China, as of 1st July 2009.  It has already been installed on school computers. While its stated purpose is to protect the innocent people of China from porn and other nasties, experts fear it will used as a method of restricting what they can find on the internet. Read the article. It does an elegant job of summarising tactics by other governments (Burma, Moldova, Uzbekistan and Iran) to censor the internet.

Habitat is guilty of spamming folk on Tw …

Habitat is guilty of spamming folk on Twitter by advertising a promotion using completely irrelevant hashtags such as #Apple, #iPhone and #Mousavi. It is easy to find out what the top 10 trends are by hashtag (as hashtags act as self-assigned keywords) so it is becoming more popular for folks to exploit them. I’m a little surprised that a furniture retailer would exploit them, though. This seems like a new class of spammer altogether. I shudder at the thought of ‘pork rocket’ style spam messages clogging up twitter someday soon. Although, would they be so bad, as I found myself trawling through some of my 700+ spam messages in Gmail (why is Gmail still in beta, by the way?) snorting with laughter at some of the inane poetry in message titles, the other day. Am I sad?