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.

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

I like Twitter. It's another easy way to get to know what's happening in other people's heads, what they're reading, what they think is interesting. And I get to share those things with the world too: special events, what I think is important, what I want to share with people. And it certainly doesn't hurt to be in the middle of all those swirling ideas and communications. I may even get a new idea myself one day! lol

But one twitter related phenomenon disturbs me: over-following. I guess all tools get taken into the realm of spam, misuse, commercialization, et cetera, but when supposedly "real" people using Twitter are following literally thousands of feeds... I mean, what do they think the "following" function is for? Well, maybe I've got it wrong. I think it's to read the tweets of those whose opinion you respect or are interested in in some way, those feeds that are going to inform you of something like an institution's upcoming events. You're populating a list of things to theoretically read. You may skip a few but the idea is to read a good portion of them. But when someone's following 2747 Twitter feeds, what good is that? Unless these are all very rare Tweeters, that's a lot of material even to ignore regularly.

The first thing that I think when I see that is that they are playing some sort of game. "I really need a lot of followers so I'm going to follow others so they feel like they should follow me!" I'm following 25 right now and I even consider weeding out a few now and then.

Again, maybe I'm all turned around on this. Maybe there's some Twitter tool (Twool? Gawd, I've gone over to the dark side. lol) that helps weed through the piles of Tweets that must build up. Anyone know anything about this? Hmmm...

Labels: aboutCommunication, aboutEthics, aboutHumanNature, aboutInformation, aboutOnlineTools, aboutProductivity, aboutReading, aboutReason, aboutSociety, aboutTechnology, aboutWeb2.0

Want an story detail that everyone will get? Want a good laugh? Want to use up about 30 hours of your life in one go?

Then you need to check out tv tropes, or "Television Tropes & Idioms". This is a wiki chock full of pieces of "literature", mostly from movies and television, that are well-used enough to be recognized in a number of works. For example, the article on "The Hero" describes the usual characteristics of this type of character in countless movies, tv shows, novels, etc.

"This guy is a hero, pure and simple. He's almost always right, is a friend to all his bandmates, and morally superior. He has a well-rounded skill set. He's not as strong as The Big Guy, or as smart as The Smart Guy, or as sensitive and socially adept as The Chick, but he's close."

Labels: aboutMovies, aboutOnlineTools, CheckedOut, funny

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

I have been playing World of Warcraft for a while now. Just as with everything in my life, I try to tie it somehow to librarianship. I've thought about ways that I could look into and write about the information seeking behaviours of WoW players, what a service providing information in-game would or could be like, or the imagery and perceptions of books, libraries and librarians that exists within the game.

There are others connecting World of Warcraft (and other games or virtual environments) to something academic. Wow.com had an interesting interview last month with a professor of anthropology at the Inver Hills Community College in Minnesota who has created and offered a class entitled: "Warcraft: Culture, Gender and Identity". Beyond teaching students about some important cultural concepts in an environment they all know and enjoy already, this course also provided a chance to show how a gaming world like WoW can be used in teaching, which seems to be a slowly but surely growing trend.

What do you think? Is this an appropriate connection? Do games and software like these provide enough complexity or an appropriate venue to learn from?

(For those of you who may not have "got" my poor attempt at humour in the title, watch this.)

Labels: aboutEducation, aboutGaming, aboutInformation, aboutOnlineTools

So as some of you may have noticed, I've been using Twitter for a while now. Everytime I mention it in conversation to a person not twit-lightened (lol), they shake their head violently and laugh about reading about whenever people go to the bathroom (and it's not because I used the word "twit-lightened"... I swear, this is the first time!).

I really like it actually. I find I'm thinking up a kinds of new types of tweets to put up. I've started listing the children's books I'm reading to my son every night (as well as the books and stories I'm reading), linking to them and (since I'm at finding the link at Amazon anyway) writing a little Amazon review about them (example). I'm always complaining about the dearth of book reviews out there to inform librarians in their collection development efforts so I figured I could do my small part to help out.

I've enjoyed Twittering so much, and see it as so potentially useful as an information dissemination tool, as well as a networking and archiving tool (I actually back-up my tweets myself, not being confident in Twitter's own willingness to store my inane statements throughout the years), that I've put in on my daily to-do list. Crazy, I know. Anyone else been using Twitter lately? Or something similar?

Labels: aboutCommunication, aboutInformation, aboutOnlineTools, aboutReading, aboutWeb2.0

As of yesterday, Google has removed the BETA label from Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and GTalk.

Wow. What a time to be alive... Where was I, at, uh, 8:02 am?!?! Asleep? Eating breakfast with the kids? Well, I didn't notice until Lifehacker told me yesterday when I checked my RSS feeds at around 10 am. And it didn't really sink in until tonight.

But it is somewhat of a big thing. On the Google blog entry about this, they talk about the issue of our new "world of rapid developmental cycles where products like Gmail continue to change indefinitely". The beta label could have suggested that these tools were not "perfected" yet, possibly meaning that something could go wrong at any moment. I know I thought about that recently when I noticed the beta sticker on Gmail a few weeks ago and mulled over what that meant. Should I go with something else? What else is there really? Does that word really mean that another free tool lacking the label would be any better? And there's always the issue of data back-up. Should I be doing that? Do I want to? Do I have the time? Is it even possible in all the tools I may want to do so for?

Although the removal of the beta label from these Google products is virtually meaningless directly, it makes a kind of sense to be done around now. The nature of these tools are not really changing - they will still be improved and changed as Google sees fit - but it was probably past due keeping it as a conspicuous issue in these tools in comparison with the other new things Google is and will be producing.

What do you think? Was it a good move? And what does it mean for them or for us users?

Labels: aboutEvents, aboutOnlineTools, aboutWeb2.0

I already commented on the potential problems of adding Wikipedia articles to a library's catalog in the Distant Librarian blog entry that brought up the subject for me here, so I won't go over them again. What I want to do here is consider the benefits of doing so and doing it in the best way possible.

One benefit is that since an assumed good number of users see them as valuable and worthy of usage already, we can somewhat "ride the wave" of Wikipedia's success. Having their content linked to in our collection might say to a good portion of our patrons that, "Yes, we are hip and we can help you get to the resources we know you want." That may not sound like the best reason, but survival of an institution that most of us believe is worth saving may also be worth pandering a little to ensure continued appreciation. I'm not sure what the long term results of such pandering might be so this is probably not a sufficient reason but it does have a certain amount of short-term appeal at least.

Another benefit is that actually, many Wikipedia articles are valuable and include content not included in other resources to a sufficiently similar extent if at all. A venue where anyone anytime can add topics and start filling them up with content will always include more same-level topics than one that must pay authors to develop content. This is saying nothing about the quality of such content but if we assume some bare minimum level of quality that is sufficiently higher than neutral, or worse yet, outright falsehoods, then something is better than nothing. There will be somewhat informative articles in Wikipedia on topics that a for-fee or author-restricted resource will be able to provide. The benefit to a library catalog is that it can be filled with some content not available elsewhere.

A third benefit is that it is free, at least in terms of direct cost. Libraries do not typically have infinite budgets for collections and anytime a minimally worthy resource can be added to the collection for not outlay of money, it must be considered. Of course, the disadvantage of online resources such as Wikipedia articles is that they don't come with handy pre-made MARC records, requiring a certain amount of expertise and effort on the part of those who want them added.

Given these three benefits, how can the addition of at least some Wikipedia articles (and perhaps other similar online resources) be made easier particularly for those libraries with little time or smaller staff complements. First of all, they need to be linked to at the specific version level. This solves the issue of quality control that we tend to pride ourselves on in our collection (as mentioned in the comment mentioned above). Also, when a library/librarian has decided that a specific article version is worthy of addition, the metadata created needs to be shared, made available to other libraries considering it in the future. As a profession we tend to share well so let's use our large numbers to solve our general lack-of-local-resources problem. Finally, if we go down this path, we should go all the way down the path: if we're adding Wikipedia articles to the collection, advertise that we're doing so. One of the big problems with the library catalog as a tool is that users don't know what's in there. We need to tell them. It needs to be made clear all the kinds of resources are included in the collection and why. Not all at once though. One at a time.

Still not sure it's a good idea... May get too messy. But it seems to have a few useful positive side effects and is doable at least on a small scale. What do you think?

Labels: aboutClassification, aboutInformation, aboutOnlineTools, aboutWork

I've only recently starting thinking about some of my more complicated tasks as "projects" as defined by David Allen's GTD system/book. I think this has helped me immeasurably (that's a lie, I could totally measure it) by at least forcing me to break the process into smaller more manageable bits. My problem is that I'm not prepared to do it the way GTD suggests - recording the first action and then dealing with the next action when that's done (or at least that's my reading of it) - because I know that I would put off each step just a little which would add up to a whole bunch of procrastination. So I determine all the steps, their order, and which ones can be done simultaneously. This front loads the project work which is one of the big barriers but once it's done you'd think it would be easy from then on in. My big problem is that I don't have a tool or system built well enough to easily organize the individual tasks and then, in the midst of completing them, I come up with a better way of organizing them, or I remember a new task that I forgot to insert somewhere... What I need is a good seamless method/tool to help me manage all this and insert it into my work flow I already have (i.e. Remember the Milk). I keep looking but I have yet to reach the finding stage.

Labels: aboutOnlineTools, aboutWork, funny

There's a few interesting things in this strip that made me want to put it here... after the roflmao's of course. lol

1. "Constant novelty saps my initiative."
   • There's actually two parts of this that made me pause. Firstly, the concept that constant new stuff could or would affect someone's creativity and productivity negatively. I don't think this happens to me. I find it's the other way around: I discover new tools and find myself pulling them apart, thinking about how I would improve them if I had the time or the ability. Or thinking of new or weird (or usually just librarian-centric) ways of using them. That's the constant novelty that I experience in the net. Mere informational novelty doesn't really affect me since I'm immersed in it every day as a librarian... it's really functional novelty. "I can do what now? That's cool."
   • The second is a little more meta than that. I've never really thought of the Internet as being a source, or rather a particularly unique source, of constant novelty. In a way, that makes sense... Thinking about your stereotypical pre-Internet horse-and-carriage, steam-locomotive, stone-tool kind of existence, I guess there wasn't as much sudden change, regular mass communication, constant input as there is today. But although there seems to be a lot more info-producers around, once the printing press got up and running, there was still more information than the average person could absorb in a lifetime. We just see the lists and streams of it better and we can dig through piles of it that were not quite as reachable as before.
     


2. "I'm gonna try to spend a weekend at home without Internet."
   • Try? Ok, I like the Internet. Correction, I LOVE the Internet. I spend my whole day at work on it. I come home to it. I play games on it. I plan my day with it. I write with it. I read with it. But I've yet to reach a stage where I couldn't pull myself away from it. I could spend a whole weekend off the computer as easily as I could spend a whole weekend on it. And why would I want to? It would be like saying, "I'm gonna try to eat for week without refrigerating anything." You could do it, and it might be an interesting experiment but there's no real ethical consideration here, which is what seems to exist when people talk about using computer or Internet related tools. It's a computer people, not a TV with a keyboard!


3. "I give you an hour."
   • Again the sarcasm. Ok, it's for the benefit of the joke, but it disturbs me to hear people first rage about the evils of technology or their bewilderment at the draw of something online, then respond with absolute certainty that it has you in it's clutches! You either understand a phenomenon or you don't. You either see something as inherently and obviously harmful or you don't. Have faith in your fellow humans that we're not mindless and pitiable automatons!

Labels: aboutOnlineTools, funny

March 26th. I guess I had nothing to do. And I certainly wanted that certain monkey off my back that's been hounding (Monkey? Hounding? From my back? Hmmm.) me ever since it became such a sensation.

Yes. I started a twitter account and feed back then. And now it's into May and I have been updating it once in a while. And that's ok. I didn't start it to be the constantly-updating-of-everything-I-do-and-everything-I-think kind of twitter. I chose something focused, practical, and simple. I tweet only about the books I'm starting or finishing, or articles, or movies, or other media in my life. That's it. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) I have not had much time to read or watch anything with all my work, volunteering and job-searching. Those are 3 full-time jobs that I'm doing alongside my flawless parenting and husbanding (no, not husbandry... we've got two kids and we're done as far as I'm concerned).

And it's kinda fun too. Limited to, what is it, 140 characters? Yeah, I can fill THAT up pretty quick. And since I've kept a strict rein on what I'm going to tweet about, it should be easy to keep up. The only problem is that now I have not only joined a community ("So-and-so just created at Twitter account! So-and-so is following your feed!") but it comes with a whole new set of info-streams that I'm tempted to redirect, process and absorb (Very borg-like.) but that I've managed to put off for now.

So go try it if you haven't already. And if you have, tell me about what you've learned so far. Or give me the link to your feed. You know I'll buckle and then you'll be famous. At least at my house.

Labels: 2checkout, aboutCommunication, aboutOnlineTools

Have a few seconds at the computer and don't know what to do with them? Try out Domai.nr.

(Yes, that's the URL. Most web browsers will assume the "http://" and not all addresses have a 'www' at the front.)

This simple tool will take what you type in (single words seem to work best... phrases may get mangled) and suggest combinations of domain names, domain name types (although .com and .net are among the most common, there are literally hundreds), and first level directories to represent your entry as a web address.

I of course had to try my first and last names (not exciting) and, since I'm a librarian, I had to try that next. It suggested "librari.an"... I thought, woah, that's awesome... I'm gonna buy that domain. But Domai.nr links to a site that allows you to do just that, a site that tells you how much and what's required. Turns out that it would cost almost $300 USD a year to own it. AND you have to have a local contact in the islands of the Netherlands Antilles. AND you have to have a company located there. "Well, I don't have ALL those things..."

It was fun while it lasted. Tell me if you find any other interesting ones!

[ via Lifehacker's entry entitled "Top 10 Tools for Your Blog or Web Site" ]

Labels: 2checkout, aboutOnlineTools

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