davidrothman.net

Martha Hardy (friend, medical librarian, incredibly cool person) hipped me to NCBI ROFL, a wonderful blog that highlights the best chuckles from PubMed citations.

Edit: D’oh! Nikki posted about this yesterday and Berci before that!

I have become a truly lame blogger.

June 27th, 2009 | Category: Blogging, For Medical Libraryfolk, Fun | Comments (2)

Thanks so much to Laurie Blanchard and everybody at CHLA for inviting me to speak! I enjoyed Winnipeg and it was a treat to finally meet people like Francesca Frati (who is awesome) and Mark Rabnett.

The slides for my talk (which look awful in Slideshare) are embedded below.

To clarify for Krista Clement:

I think anything that removes obstacles between users and the information they want is good. If more fully automating some functions of the library makes those functions less visible, I think that’s great. I don’t think that doing a better job for users will result in decreased funding, but I do think that better automation will cut costs.

June 9th, 2009 | Category: For Medical Libraryfolk, Medical Librarianship Blogs, Presentations, Shameless Self-Promotion, Technology | Comments (1)

How timely that a friend sent me the link to this game just when I needed a fun break from Swine Flu panic.

In Sneeze, you are an influenza virus in one human and have the opportunity the spread yourself in various environments by having your human sneeze just once on each level.

May 7th, 2009 | Category: For Medical Libraryfolk, Fun | Comments Off

MIDLINE, the Newsletter of the Midwest Chapter of the Medical Library Association has a Q&A with my friend and kick-butt medical librarian Melissa Rethlefsen.

May 7th, 2009 | Category: For Medical Libraryfolk | Comments (1)

A friend who is a medical librarian emailed me. She writes:

“I’ve been setting up local RSS pages with Feedburner [for email distribution] and Feed2JS [for dislaying the content of feeds on Web pages] for our most popular journals, to allow for TOCs.

…

It seems the publishers have gotten wise to this and are not allowing their feeds to be resyndicated. It started with EbscoHost — I noticed their feeds never seemed to refresh themselves (which totally defeats the purpose of having a feed). Now it seems ScienceDirect is also blocking re-syndication. FeedBurner can’t pick up the feeds; Feed2JS gives an error, yet the feed validator says it’s a valid feed. SD is providing it’s own source-code to paste into local web pages, but it takes so long to load the page that it invariably times out = useless.

Just wondering if you’ve heard of this from anyone else…”

I don’t use either one of these, so I haven’t seen this problem. Has anyone else? Please let us know in the comments?

April 28th, 2009 | Category: RSS/Feeds, Technology | Comments (4)

Holy cow! Holy pig!

Watching misinformation spread is sort of entertaining. Check out all the people who talk about not eating pork on Twitter. (The flu is not spread by eating pork.)

Hah! As I was writing this post, the latest xkcd appeared!

The CDC’s Emergency Preparedness and Response Twitter feed seems to be a frequently-updated source of sanity:

RSS Feed for CDC’s Swine Flu site

Maps
Google Map 1 (H1N1 Swine Flu)
Google Map 2 (”Swine Flu 2009″)
Google Map 3 (”HPAI H5N1 30-Day Outbreak Map”)

HealthMap (previously mentioned here) might be the most complete map visualization. HealthMap’s twitter feed is also interesting, but gives a more panicked impression than that of the CDC (see above)

April 27th, 2009 | Category: Consumer Health Info, For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology | Comments (4)

The idea behind rateadrug.com is for users to rate drugs.

Our goal is to provide unique user-generated data on side effects and subtle side effects of medications. We want to know how these prescription drugs make you feel.

I’ve seen stupid applications of social media in healthcare, but this may take the cake as the dumbest I’ve seen in a good while.

April 25th, 2009 | Category: "Social Software", Consumer Health Info, For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology | Comments (15)

Way behind on sharing this, but better late than never.

The Mayo Clinic Libraries’ Liblog has a screencast by Melissa Rethlefsen on PubMed’s new Advanced Search features that you can embed on your own page:

In case I have not mentioned it recently: Melissa is awesome.

April 2nd, 2009 | Category: For Medical Libraryfolk, How to, Medical Librarianship Blogs, Search, Teaching/Training, Video | Comments (5)

I spent too much of today on the phone with a vendor from whom I’d requested an advertised, free, 30-day trial of an information resource on behalf of a clinical department at MPOW. (For now, I won’t name the product or company, but I welcome your guesses in the comments.)

After 30 minutes of my patiently letting her finish pitching me with sales information I did not want (We’re already interested in the product! Why would I ask for a trial and quote otherwise?!), I asked for the third time if we could get a quote.

Vendor: Well, I’d really like for you to have the trial for a week before I tell you that.

[Uncomfortable pause]

Me: I can understand why, from a sales perspective, you’d want that. However, if my internal client evaluates the trial for a week, likes it, and THEN finds out it is impossibly beyond her budget, she will have wasted a week of her valuable time…so I need to have that information up front.

Vendor: Well, how much money do you have budgeted for this type of resource?

[Uncomfortable pause as I wrestle with my disbelief that the question was asked]

Me: (Slowly and calmly) Lets assume for a moment that I have that information. The quote you give me should be based on what you feel the product’s market demand merits. If I have that kind of information, let us assume that there is no way on earth I’d share it with you. The quote you give us will not be based on how much money is available.

Vendor: Well, we don’t want to devalue our data either.

Me: That’s why you set prices based on market demand, not on how much money the prospective client has, especially in this economy. Right now, you’re devaluing a prospective client- and I suspect that’s even worse for your bottom line than devaluing your data.

___________

Fortunately, my internal client finds this behavior as despicable as I do.

(Again, I’d love to hear your guesses about who the vendor/product is. If you guess correctly in the comments, I’ll email you and tell you so.)

March 24th, 2009 | Category: Vendors | Comments (19)

Don’t have an OCR application handy at your place of work to read the text of a scanned page? No problem.

What is OCR Terminal?

OCR Terminal is a free online Optical Character Recognition service that allows you to convert scanned images and PDFs into editable and text searchable documents. It accurately preserves formatting and layout of documents.

Free, requires sign-up.

March 19th, 2009 | Category: Technology, Web Applications | Comments (2)

There are a number of names in the 2009 Movers and Shakers by Library Journal that made me smile. I’m whacky on cold medicine and half asleep, but these need mention and will, in addition, receive a “Macher and Shtarker” recognition from davidrothman.net.

Melissa Rethlefsen:
Melissa is a co-author, a mentor who is always ready to help, and a wonderful, treasured friend. I can think of no medical library geek who would be more appropriate to receive recognition for her awesomeness.

Rachel Walden:
Rachel has been blogging longer, better, and more consistently than I have. Her blog is not only wonderfully informative and frequently entertaining- it also makes medical librarians look soooooooo good. Rachel was absurdly nice to me when I started blogging and has remained someone I frequently turn to for advice, both professional and personal. I join Library Journal in noting Rachel’s butt-kickery.

I was shocked to discover that Dorothea Salo hadn’t been recognized previously. What do I enjoy more than a smart, articulate, argumentative person? One who disagrees with me. I can’t claim to know her well, but I’ve had fun getting to chat a little with Dorothea on Friendfeed and I’ve always been impressed by those of her writings I am able to properly understand. Read her blog if you haven’t yet.

I’ve only gotten to know Jenica P. Rogers-Urbanek a bit in the last year or so, but quickly came to respect her knowledge, intelligence, kindness, and wit.

Dave Pattern is one of those guys who is perpetually playing with new, interesting, and useful geekery. We should just be grateful he uses his talents for good and information services. If his powers were put to evil applications, we’d all have reason to fear.

I was also pleased to see smart folks like Michael Porter, Sarah Houghton-Jan, Lauren Pressley, Jason Griffey and Karen Coombs. I know none of them well but have admired their work when I’ve encountered it.

Congratulations to these and others recognized this year!

March 15th, 2009 | Category: Perception of Libraries/Librarians | Comments (4)

This Visible Human Server is loads of fun to play with:

English language instructions:
http://visiblehuman.epfl.ch/Directions%20for%20use_Real%20Time%20slice.pdf

March 9th, 2009 | Category: Technology | Comments (1)

Okay, so we already knew that Pubget is pretty neat and, for the organizations who can implement it, it speeds up the process of getting the full text PDF to the user.

Pubget’s head developer, Ian Connor, keeps me updated on new developments. I was delighted to hear that Pubget now offers RSS feeds with links to the full-text PDFs via one’s organization’s access. The example in the embedded video below uses an open access journal, but gives a good idea what the new feature looks like.

So the idea is that if you click on the link in the RSS feed, Pubget scrolls down the list of the results, highlights the right paper, and displays that PDF.

Pubget also has a new Firefox extension (available at http://pubget.com/pubget.xpi) for registered users at that will allow them “…to download all papers from a search or latest issue to their local hard drive.” See embedded video below.

If your organization uses Pubget, how about writing a review for the JMLA? Everything I see and hear from Ian looks insanely cool, but I’d love to hear what a medical librarian thinks after a road test.

March 5th, 2009 | Category: 3rd Party PubMed/MEDLINE Tools, For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology, Video | Comments (2)

In this video, 4th-year medical student Ryan MacDonald demonstrates how he uses Evernote as his “medical peripheral brain.”

So cool.

March 2nd, 2009 | Category: E-Journals, For Medical Libraryfolk, Presentations, Technology, Video, Web Applications | Comments (5)

[Update] One’s FriendFeed feed needs to be public in order for IntenseDebate to pick up the comments and bring them onto the blog. IntenseDebate isn’t perfect, but I love the threaded comments, I like quickly moderating comments via email, and I like the sidebar widget for comments (if you’re reading this via RSS, visit the blog and check out the left sidebar). I’ll keep it for now. Thanks to those who helped me test it![/Update]

I’ve installed a plugin/service called IntenseDebate on this blog. Among the things it is supposed to do is pick up comments people make on my posts in FriendFeed and import them as comments. I’m curious to see if it will find those comments even if my FriendFeed is set to private. If you’re seeing this post through FriendFeed, please leave a comment in FriendFeed (not a ‘like’) so that can be tested?

Thanks!

February 16th, 2009 | Category: "Social Software", Blogging, Technology | Comments (1)

The Yale Image Finder searches PubMed Central articles for images.


That sounded not only like a good idea, but a good idea I’d heard before. In July of 2007, I posted about UC Berkeley’s BioText¹, which seems to already search PubMed Central for images. Why build another tool to do the same thing?

The answer is found in this Bioinformatics article

The authors note they are aware of BioText, but that…

…we are not aware of a biomedical search engine that can retrieve images by searching the text within biomedical images. This offers several advantages over searching over captions alone. First, captions may not contain all the textual information that is contained in the images. Second, image texts are usually very specific, allowing for precise matching of images with related images.

Neat. So Yale’s tool does OCR on text appearing in images and adds that text to its searching index of images in PubMed Central. Cool.

February 12th, 2009 | Category: For Medical Libraryfolk, Search, Technology | Comments (2)

I’m not sure what to make of WebPax.com…but at first glance, it seems really cool to have a Web-based service for viewing images in DICOM format. I know at least a couple of physicians who will want to try it out right away for sharing the occasional scan with a colleague from a distance.

I *do* like that DICOM files are anonymized as they are uploaded. DICOM tags are cleared and…

• The year and month are not modified
• The day is set to the first of the month
• The time is set to midnight

The patient’s birth date is set to January 1, 1970

I’ll say this much: If I kept a digital personal health record in an online service, I’d want to be able to view DICOMs in it with this kind of tool. Google needs to buy these guys or build a comparable tool. Maybe that’s what they and IBM can work on next.

February 11th, 2009 | Category: EMRs/EHRs/PHRs, For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology, Web Applications | Comments (1)

Most know I’m not a huge fan of Twitter (I prefer FriendFeed), but this interests me anyway.

JustTweetIt is a service intended to help Twitter users find others they may want to follow and includes directories. I recently stumbled across JustTweetIt’s directory of Twittering Librarians

Check it out, see if there are any librarians listed you want to follow and consider adding an entry to help others find you.

February 9th, 2009 | Category: "Social Software", Technology | Comments (7)

Dated 2007 but new to me:

Havidol is clearly an amazing new drug. Thank goodness there’s such a wonderfully detailed site to tell us all about Havidol and how it can treat Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder (DSACDAD).

Click to visit the site

Great parody of direct-to-consumer advertising.

February 8th, 2009 | Category: Consumer Health Info, For Medical Libraryfolk, Fun | Comments Off