There was an online presentation and q&a period on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009, about the proposed redesign of the primary PubMed pages. This was scheduled to be released this summer but is not up at this time yet.

My overall impression is certainly an improvement. It's a much simpler, streamlined and current design, which should ease public use and enjoyment of the product, both of which are rather important. There were the usual questions about functionality, but, as the presenter David Gillikin, Chief of NLM’s Bibliographic Services, repeatedly pointed out, this is an upgrade of design only. Strict functionality will not be touched.

Krafty Librarian points out:

Since most of the "cool" or helpful things like Details, History, Citation Matcher are only available from the Advanced Search, many people may want to have a nice short cut straight to that area.

I would have to suggest that NLM considers adding random reminders if not fixed links to tools like this in with the boxes on the right "Related Articles", "Recent Activity", etc.

I love forward to the the release of the redesign. I can't wait to play around with it and explore. It certainly welcomes a bit of curiosity and playing more than the current interface. What do you think? Are you excited?

[ "PubMed Redesign 2009" presentation, 45 min, learned of from a Krafty Librarian blog entry ]

Labels: aboutHealth, aboutInformation, aboutLibrarianship, aboutOnlineTools, aboutTechnology, aboutWeb2.0, reviews

 

A major U.S. government agency utilizing Web 2.0 methods and tools. It warms the heart.

The CDC is hoping that the next Surgeon-General's 2009 report on tobacco will "go viral" through using such tools as "Facebook, Twitter and MySpace" and RSS and devices like "iPhones, BlackBerrys and other personal digital assistants", and are going to try to make it possible for the public to share the information easily. It's certainly a good sign, but I have to say, not really a surprising one. We've all seen the effects of such simple technological tweeks enabling smoother communication, sharing and mixing, and how quickly a good portion of the public has taken to absorbing it into their lives and enriching the global society. It seems quite obvious by now that to not utilize this phenomenon would be to bury yourself and whatever information you are trying to get out to the world.

Now if only Canada would follow suit. lol

Anyone hear of any other group doing something similar? Do you think that efforts like this will succeed?

[From "Surgeon General's next tobacco report to get Web 2.0 push" by Doug Beizer at FederalComputerWeek found via Google News]

Labels: aboutCommunication, aboutHealth, aboutInformation, aboutOnlineTools, aboutSociety, aboutWeb2.0

 

About a month ago, I heard on the radio (it's CBC so it's trustworthy) that, for the good of your hair, really, we shouldn't be washing our hair every single day. It has to do with the fact that your scalp/follicles produce oils to prevent your head from drying out (I think that's what they said) and since shampooing removes all that oil and grease, it's actually drying it out, causing more oils to be produced. Shampooing indirectly makes your hair greasier. And the last thing I need is to be doing damage to my already retreating hair. "Come back here, you!"

So I tried it. I only wash my hair about 3 times a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, just to make it easy to remember. I've been doing it every since that fateful radio show, so it's been about 5 weeks, and honestly, I really can't tell the difference. It felt somewhat weird the first few days without it, and I thought everyone was going to be able to tell and be all grossed out, but no, I'm not disgusting people daily, I haven't been scaring small children on the street.

So what do you think? Eww or yay? Try it. It saves your hair, oh and it also saves shampoo. Bonus!

Labels: aboutHealth

 

Just checked out a relatively new wiki called "Medpedia". This is a highly controlled yet global wiki acting as an encyclopedia for medical concepts (such as drugs, conditions, anatomical terms, tests, etc.) for use by anyone from medical professionals to health care consumers (articles having tabs for both "plain english" and "clinical" versions). It is still in the development or beta stage and will be for a while, as projects like this must and ought to be.

It has a seemingly reasonable search function from my few tests, listing title keyword hits first then those from the article text. It's difficult to determine how effective it is at this time, given that there are so few entries written so far (I estimate only about 1700). To aid searching, there is also an "All Articles" display that lists all articles (duh) in alphabetical order.

From what I can see, the content is excellent, each article providing a wealth of information in a common format (recognizable to anyone who uses Wikipedia), organized into useful categories. For example, in the broad concept article for "Cancer" there is a glossary of related terms to help the user understand the subject better and to link them to other articles that may be helpful. Drug entries have the usual necessary subcategories such as other names, how it's to be taken, risks, and alternatives.

I have two problems with this otherwise exceptional tool (and project). Firstly, not all finished articles have what I would consider sufficient references to support the content. Some have dozens of excellent linked citations (such as the Plain English article for "Aspirin" but some have one citation or nothing listed under references. Hopefully, this will be remedied as the site grows.

The other issue I have has to do with the drug information. More than any other medical information, drug monographs are subject to confusion, rapid change and bias from interested parties. Although the articles about various pharmaceuticals are given as much scrutiny as all other content in this site, I'm more willing to trust the collective information about them from such texts as "DrugPoints" (formerly the USPDI), Martindale's Drug Reference, and even the CPS. I would think that a comprehensive reference for drug information would at least contain a mention of these resources.

So go and check out Medpedia for yourself. Tell me what YOU think about it.

(This entry was also written for BrackenBlog, the somewhat internal blog for the Bracken Health Sciences Library at Queen's University.)

Labels: aboutHealth, aboutOnlineTools

 

I worked from home today.

My wife and son were sick and I asked if we could rearrange the reference desk shifts so I could do my fair share first thing in the morning and then go home to watch and take care of the kid's sicky needs, and let my wife sleep and get better (and get her things as she needed them - she didn't), and at the same time, get as much done from work as I needed to do at least for tomorrow.

It actually turned out well because, although I was watching my little 4 year old son in the living room, and he has a tendency to get up and raise hell even when he's sick, he was pretty tuckered out and managed to sleep for several hours, during which I got quite a bit done. Excellent.

But the whole affair brought back how much I wish I had a good workspace: office, writing room, home library, inner sanctum, fortress of solitude, Batcave, happy place... whatever you want to call it. And subscribing to Lifehacker doesn't help. They're always writing stuff about how some reader or whoever has created the perfect unique workspace: built their own standing desk, turned a unused corner into a haven for something needing a haven, or whatnot. I don't have anything like that. And I wish I did.

We have a basement... which is actually not as bad as it sounds, despite it being pretty bad. We live in a small backsplit house and so a good third of the house is a half a storey below the ground floor. It's semi-finished (meaning it's got temporary carpeting and fake wood panelling all over it - I think Dennis Leary's dad lived here) but it's not enough and there's no privacy or soundproofing or coolness.

It's got to be cool. You've got to have a space you like to be in, that you're proud of, that you want to spend time in.

Maybe the next house. Hmmm...

Labels: aboutHealth, aboutHousing, aboutWork