Read The 'Net: A Tangled Web of Health Information on Yahoo! Health. Some good but incredibly basic information about information on the web. (Woah. Meta.) "Lot's of junk on the web." Yep. "School, government and non-profit sites are probably more trustworthy." Uh-huh. "Your doctor should be the final judge on health info." Totally. And at the bottom, if you want to know more about using health web sites in general, there's a link to the US National Library of Medicine. A library? Libaries know about information too? Wow. Who knew? Perhaps your local librarian might know about good information sources, online or off, as well. No. It's better to go to your doctor (or your local "president and CEO of the American Institute for Preventive Medicine") for to learn about the nature of the info-universe out there. They're the experts on looking up stuff, right? And they've got plenty of extra time to sit chatting about the bias and trustworthiness of online publications and portals. No appointments necessary. Just walk in and ask the librarian at the reference desk, er, I mean the doctor at his/her doctorin' table and ask them. Good luck and say hi for me!

(Allergy alert: May contain sarcasm.)

Atlantic City votes to ban smoking on floor of casinos... Woah.

Just finished reading:

Harris R & Wathen N. 2007. "If my mother was alive I'd probably have called her.": women's search for health information in rural Canada. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 47(1):67-79.

which concluded with the following suggestions (some of which are pretty obvious but are important to spell out specifically nonetheless).

1. "...an important, overarching consideration for those designing and delivering health reference services should be the promotion of communitywide awareness of such services."


2. "...women want and need not only health information per se, but to have it presented, and ideally discussed, in the context of a caring, interactive relationship - one that respects the woman as the expert when it comes to her own needs, concerns, and context."


3. "For many, 'health' is incorporated in the concept of 'well-being' or 'quality of life,'" and "Any health reference service, therefore, should be interlinked with other subject areas that patrons may view as part of health and well-being, or, as one of the women in [the] study put it, 'the emotional side of health.'"


4. Health information programs and services should be designed not only to help patrons find high-quality information, but also teach them basic skills for searching, identifying high-quality sources, and knowing what types of information require follow-up action, such as consultation with a healthcare provider."

The basic message was that "It seems naive, if not cynical, to assume that the healthcare needs of women who live in rural communities will be met by simply deepening the supply of Internet-based health information..."

Labels: health, librarianship, reading

Whenever I read about some country creating a law like how France is trying to outlaw inciting thinness, I first think, "Hooray!" What a great idea... Hopefully it will help save the health of some people.

But then I think about how truly chaotic and irrational legal systems really are: why don't they (or why haven't they already) outlaw the promotion of unhealthy behaviour or possibly bad behaviour. That would cover something like this plus all sorts of other things as well like smoking and lack of exercise, and drugs, and so on. Of course, now you're thinking, "You naive little idealist... how could a government or legal system define what is generally considered unhealth behaviour, let alone BAD behaviour." But isn't that what they're already doing as a matter of course? this ban on inciting thinness would have to include some connection to what is defined as unhealthily thin. Criminal law is all about defining what is considered bad behaviour.

Instead of trying to create a list of what is unhealthy or bad, whichever legal effort you're arguing for here, wouldn't it be more practical and helpful to define more generally what we mean by these ideas. By producing books and books of legal definitions and procedures and consequences, all we end up with is a profession of interpreters of those texts, and more and more citizens who don't really know what they can and can't do, or should and shouldn't do. On the unhealthy side of the issue, it's already bad enough given that health sciences are already complicated enough without wrapping the concepts in legalese.

And it's not like we don't have anybody to try to generally but usefully define unhealthy and/or bad... Doctors and other health care professionals are always perfecting and tweaking what they think should be considered unhealthy. As for "badness", beyond the applied definers like police officers, lawyers, judges, and the clergy, there are also philosophers of ethics that think of nothing else all their lives. Sure they all disagree, but so do law makers and medical researchers. The latter make much more headway but of course they have much more funding than "professional" philosophers. Imagine what we could nail down if there were whole institutions of philosophy, as powerful as hospitals and law firms. Imagine...

So the US Department of Housing and Urban Development tested laying down sludge on lawns and a vacant lot to see if it reduce lead poisoning. Interesting. Lead poisoning is certainly bad but besides the rather suspicious fact that studying this only in poor black neighbourhoods seems unethical in terms of choosing the people who would have the fewest means to argue, it also seems invalid. What if it turns out that it's fine for African Americans but deadly for Caucasians? What if poorer individuals, due to a less healthy diet, are more sensitive to whatever's in the sludge, as compared to middle and higher income families? I don't know anything about this study other that from the above linked article so perhaps I'm assuming a lot but I would hope that details about other tested areas and populations would be reported by the Associated Press.

Watch out health care community! Now that a robot anaesthetist has been developed in France, it's only a matter of time before all the doctors, nurses, rehab therapists, and other health care professionals are replaced with robots! I wonder how good the robot is at 12 holes of Christmas?

Notes from Web 2.you workshop (February 15, 2008, at McGill University, Montreal) session called “Web 2.0, Library 2.0, Librarian 2.0” 1.5 hour presentation by Jessamyn West, Library Consultant from rural Vermont & blogger from “librarian.net” [librarian.net] (professional) & “Abada Abada” [jessamyn.com/journal] (personal)

[Her presentation notes can be found at librarian.net/talks/mcgill]

As a contrast with many of her colleagues, she prefers the title “library technologist” for the work that she does now, helping a number of small public libraries in Orange County, Vermont, primarily with their technology needs and issues.

She began her discussion of the whole 2.0 concept with some of the real basics and what really needs to be considered before any mention of 2.0 anything happens:

• Her (and our) frustration with mere dial-up internet access and that, like it or not, many of our users still have and always will have merely dial-up access.
• The usefulness (or not) of school libraries being wonderfully filled with PCs with high speed internet access in small towns with little or no ‘net otherwise.
• Government agencies and companies trying to put everything on the web (and very often ONLY on the web) and the difficulty some people still have with getting access to that.
  

Through all of these barriers and issues, it’s still important for libraries to recognise their role in making technology fun, easy and accessible.

You know those O’Reilly programming books with the black and white animal on the cover? Well, the term “Web 2.0” comes from one in which the author was merely using the phrase like a brand name and not literally meaning any newly formed technology in particular. The web before 2.0 was just a billboard – sites, pages, information, and images posted to the internet, were just that: posted up for users to look at and admire but not interact with in any way. The desire to be able to interact with what was there, to be able to comment on articles, manipulate images, and reconfigure data, was the birth of the Web 2.0 idea. Beyond this rather vague sense of the user being able to take part in the internet somehow, the 2.0 concept is still not completely clear, including the “spin-offs” like our own Library or Librarian 2.0, similar to the US Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of obscenity, “I know it when I see it.”

Because it is still a concept in its infancy, there are many things to do before (or while) we jump on the Library 2.0 bandwagon. Consider the elderly or novice computer user. In many ways these patrons are even more difficult to assist than the truly disabled like the blind or deaf. And although parts of Library 2.0 can seem to help, such as the idea that we are to be making our tools and services more user-centered, other assumptions make it more difficult, such as the assumption of a certain level of technology being available or interest on the part of the user. The network is not always up and running and some users create lousy content. But the important thing to remember is that you don’t want to refrain from doing something just because the supports MAY not be there someday. “We can’t get nice furniture… What if the library fills with squirrels?” Librarianship is getting much more open now so we have less and less nay-saying-for-the-sake-of-nay-saying like this, but we still have a hard time letting go.

Library 2.0 is not a “what”, it’s a “how”. It’s a way of thinking about what we’re doing without a specific list of tools and resources to do it. And it’s not always just about the web. For example, in those brochures or PowerPoint slides we create, we have a tendency t o simply use the free clip that comes with Microsoft Office. Not all of that is bad and it’s certainly better to have a graphic than not but we could also be searching through flickr.com for images licensed under Creative Commons to get images that are not only free and legal but also much more interesting and attractive. The idea is that we should be experimenting, and just like so many companies and products coming out today in “perpetual beta”, it’s ok to just try something without being absolutely certain it will be perfect first.

[At this point Jessamyn pointed out that she used the term L2 as a short form for Library 2.0, but was not claiming to be starting any new trend or catchphrase for the topic. I say we should start using this right away! lol]

The book “Cluetrain Manifesto”, by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger [cluetrain.com], talks about how the web, and particularly Web 2.0, is changing business. “Markets are conversations,” and some companies are slowly realizing that they need to get back to a more human level of interaction and offering of service: we need to avoid data silos, for example, and resources need to allow “deeplinking”, the ability to link directly to the page or part of the web site that interests us specifically. Some illustrations of how libraries are following this trend are:

• Pace University Library’s reminder to users that they could get a library card for the local public library system and therefore access to different and more resources if the university’s resources are not sufficient;
• Cook Memorial Library’s use of Scriblio to provide usefully named links with friendly text in their catalogue (as compared with the University of Vermont Library’s catalogue, using the standard interface most academic libraries use now with unintelligible labels, long call numbers, jargon, etc.), the moral of the story being “keep it simple”,
• (A comment at this point from the audience repeated the question in an earlier session about the Amazon “recommender” function and whether this was in any catalogues to Jessamyn’s knowledge. Apparently, there are some big systems that have something like this, but there are privacy issues to be considered when a library provides this service.);
• the McGill Hospital Library’s website includes a photo of the staff which makes the library, and the work seem more personal;
• Plymouth State University Library is using the resource type facet for multimedia types, making it easier for users to find exactly what they are looking for;
• Koha (I believe this is the correct spelling) provides an example of the existence of fun or silly interfaces, the fact that tools can be designed in almost any way so that the users are more comfortable in the “environment” (in this case it was a tool for young children).
  

Another issue that is being worked through using Web 2.0 tools, is the issue of increasing numbers of workers complaining about unmanageable amounts of email being received. Using RSS feeds, blogs, social networking sites like Facebook, etc., communication can be funneled to appropriate channels to get the tools to do some of the work of sorting information flow for us.

But Web 2.0 is also about saving the time of the user, as one of the founders of modern librarianship, Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan, defended. And with the right tool or service, this doesn’t always have to translate into more work for the librarian or library staff. For example, there’s a plugin for FireFox called LibX that will allow the user to search a library’s catalogue without having to first navigate to the catalogue’s page. Also, the University of Connecticut Library is using a wiki to create a collaborative FAQ. Wikis have also been used as a platform to more easily create, update, and access the reference manual. The key is to try new things and do your own usability testing – find out what works and who it works for. We keep buying OPACs and other tools that do not work. We need to develop standards and demand compliance.

Finally, Library 2.0 is not a religion and it is not always about technology. It’s about taking the initiative. Go on... Scoot!

Labels: internet, librarianship

Notes from Web 2.you workshop (February 15, 2008, at McGill University, Montreal) session called “Blogging for Professional Development” 1.5 hour presentation by John Dupuis, Head, Steacie Science & Engineering Library, York University & blogger from “Confessions of a Science Librarian” [jdupuis.blogspot.com] , February 15, 2008.


[Presentation given here can be found at tinyurl.com/2u24do or here]

The new “digital world” is all about attention and reputation (from Richard Akerman, CISTI). This, among other reasons, is why blogging is so important, valuable and popular. We blog for social (or selfish) reasons: to become popular, to be known, to improve our standing in a certain field or group, but we also use blogs to explore ideas, to act as an external memory, to make a profit, to communication, and to create opportunities.

(Note: The presentation slides include several comics from the series XKCD [xkcd.com]. And a blog of note is "Walt at Random" [walt.lishost.org].)

The term "biblioblogosphere" among others is used to describe the world of librarian and library related weblogs. And there are many different types of "biblioblogs": from the personal to the institutional, from containing commentary on events big or small to sharing news items and new resources, and from the very broad to the very narrowly defined in terms of subject area. To find blogs of interest you can try:

• blogrolls (lists of related blogs) available on a blog you already know;
• search using
• Technorati [technorati.com]; or
• Google Blog Search [blogsearch.google.com];
• check out the list of blogs on:
• LISWiki [liswiki.org/wiki/Blogs#Individual_Weblogs]; or
• OEDb [oedb.org/library/features/top-25-librarian-bloggers-by-the-numbers]; or
• check out a compilation of individual blog posts via
• “The Library Shelf” [thelibraryshelf.com]; or
• the “Carnival of the Infosciences” [infosciences.pbwiki.com].
  

Although there are plenty of library related blogs, it’s also a good idea to read blogs (or any material for that matter) outside of librarianship. For example, as a health science librarian, I could regularly read blogs from health care professionals like “The Physician Executive” [executivephysician.blogspot.com] or “Stories from the hospice nurse” [atrugoddes.livejournal.com] to connect with my users and stay on top of their personal issues to help me serve them better.

Issues to consider when blogging:

• Library 2.0 – as a subject, as a mindset, and in the functionality of your site.
• Privacy – yours and others
• Intellectual property – yours and others
• Politeness – to what degree should you be or can you be
• Anonymity – whether to be so or not
  

Why should someone blog as opposed to publish in the more academic literature?

• Blogs are more immediately available and easily accessible.
• Blogs tend to be much more interactive, allowing readers to contribute with comments and the author to respond to such comments.
• It is much cheaper both for the author and the system as a whole.
• There is no “gatekeeper” when writing a blog post: anyone can create a blog and start posting right away, whereas to get published, you must get past the publishers, editors, and often your own peers.
  

(Note: Check out the book “Balanced Libraries” by Walt Crawford all about Library 2.0 – read more in a brief review from the blog “Slow Reading”.)

Blogs are also an excellent source of information on a variety of very new, controversial, or little known topics. In a comparison of search results on certain current issues, LISZEN (an LIS search engine that includes blogs) [liszen.com] outperformed tools like Web of Science, Inspec, or even LISA, simply because the latter do not include blog literature which is where some of these ideas are being discussed in much more volume. In some subjects, blogs are the only real outlet to get your ideas out. We’re always talking about information overload nowadays but there will always be something new and unique to say and it’s important to make sure your make your voice heard using whatever method you can find.

Audience comment to the presenter remarking how great it would be to have senior university administrators blogging about their work: Check out the French blog from University of Montreal library school director Jean-Michel Salaün “Bloc-notes de Jean-Michel Salaün” [blogues.ebsi.umontreal.ca/jms]

York University has developed a site called Planet York [planetyork.yorku.ca] that compiles blogs posts from blogs written by York U staff and faculty. This not only provides a rich overview of what some of the university’s minds are thinking for the benefit of those outside of the institution, but is a source of pride, inspiration and networking for those within York U as well.

Tips on blogging yourself:

• Find a niche to fill but don’t be afraid to evolve as well.
• Blog your passion. Blog about what you love, otherwise you won’t be able to keep it up.
• Post when you want. We don’t all have to post several times a day or even once every day. The presenter blogs about 3 or 4 times a week. Some blogs are weekly.
• Pause before writing, but don’t obsess about it.
  

Oh and check out the blog “Academic Librarian” [blogs.princeton.edu/librarian]

After-session comments from the audience:

• Consider your impact and reach: If you are job searching you may not want blog posts about how much you hate your boss or about how you steal pens from work regularly.
• Is it possible to delete your entire blog? Many blogging tools allow you to delete your content and account and therefore remove it from the “live” web but search engines by design roam around the internet saving text wherever they can. If you have a relatively new blog, then deleting will probably really delete it. If you’ve been blogging for years, chances are that all your text has been scooped up and archived somewhere.
  

Labels: internet, librarianship

Reading "moving from the ivory tower to the community" by Margo Fryer from the October 2007 "Academic Matters"...

This is an interesting article about UBC's "Learning Exchange" - a facility with free computer resources and Internet access for Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. As I was reading their description of it:

The... patrons are a diverse mix - former resource industry workers whose bodies gave out after years of hard labour, Aboriginal youth wanting to upgrade their education, women with babies needing adult company, immigrants who are participating in our ESL program, substance users trying to stay clean, and homeless people looking for refuge. One any given day, there will be people ... who have been coming there almost every day for years and others who have come for the first time.

...I thought, "My god. They've invented the PUBLIC LIBRARY!"

Labels: funny, librarianship, reading

Re: Free Photoshop beta launches online from USATODAY.com.

A couple of weeks ago, Adobe Photoshop (gawd love 'em) went online. Or at least a version of it. Totally free. At least for now. Stemming from their awesome, but complicated to use photo editing software, and their interest in not being left behind in the whole web-based software game, they've created Photoshop Express in beta.

Although they are hoping that "...some customers will move from it to boxed software like its $99 Photoshop Elements or to a subscription-based version of Express that's in the works," I doubt there will be very much of the former option if they have the latter option available. If I liked editing photos online (and I might), then why would I take two steps back into a client-based thingy? I'd be thinking, "I like this photo-editing online but I need more functions... Hey! What's this?" and they will have got me.