Got my hands on my copies of the book today! How exciting!
Yay!
You can buy a copy from:
Springer Publishing
or here:
I’m looking forward to eventually seeing it in WorldCat. 
Congratulations to Melissa Rethlefsen (who wrote a heck of a lot more than I did)! You should really go email Melissa now and tell her how much she rocks.
It isn’t a publication I generally set aside time for reading, but this most recent issue has a few items articles that look interesting, including:
(Please see previous post on infodemiology- full text here. Also of potential interest this flu season: WhoIsSick?)
http://www.google.org/flutrends/
We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and discovered that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.
It’ll be interesting to watch this year trend against previous years’ data- I’m going to be watching New York especially closely.
I also like that Google embeds a search panel on the page (via the American Lung Association) for finding the nearest place to get a flu shot.
Google will also let you download the historical data and/or the data for current estimates.
More from the Official Google Blog
Jill Hurst-Wahl’s slides are available here.
My apologies to the awfully nice folks who attended the CE course I taught at UNYOC a couple of weeks ago! I’ve taken far too long to get these slides posted:
Also: I’ll be on a panel at NYLA tomorrow (Friday, 11/6/2008) afternoon at 4:00 PM- please say hello if you’re going to be there! As usual at these sorts of things, I’ll know almost nobody. But hey- I might get to meet Polly Farrington!
Lei Wang’s slides from his presentation for the Connecticut Library Association on 10/24/2008:
Eugene Barsky and Dean Giustini wrote an editorial for Physiotherapy Canada on practical tips and useful Web sites for physical therapy that is short, practical, and chock full of resources I know and like. It isn’t comprehensive by any means (and doesn’t seek to be), but I think it provides a really good, digestible introduction to some useful tools for those in physical therapy.
Barsky E., & Giustini D. Web 2.0 in Physical Therapy: A Practical Overview. Physiotherapy Canada, 2008; 60(3): 207-215.
Available at either of these URLs:
http://www.swetswise.com/eAccess/viewFulltext.do?articleID=38506191
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/j767550n62473718/?p=6d30aec4e9ba49ae905cefbbfa34e113&pi=0
I read you had a heart attack!
Yeah, I just recently read that myself.
How are you feeling?
Thanks for asking. I’m feeling very grateful that I have *not* had a heart attack.
Are you sure? I could swear that I read you had a heart attack.
I’m pretty sure. I checked.
David H. Rothman of TeleRead DID have a heart attack. I don’t know him well, but on the many occasions where a confused emailer has been routed from one of us to the other, he’s always been awfully pleasant. Best wishes to David and his family for a speedy recovery.
If you’re not ill, why haven’t you been blogging?
I have noticed a pattern: Those who have asked me this question generally do not have children. Those who have ever had a new baby at home don’t bother to ask- they correctly assume that all of my priorities have been radically shaken up. I’ll probably resume blogging when things settle down and I figure out where in my order of priorities this blog figures.
Posted by request from Lin Wu:
Dear Colleagues,
We are inviting all medical librarians to take this survey. The purpose of the survey is to explore the roles of health sciences librarians in enhancing and supporting evidence-based medicine (EBM) practice. Results will be reported only for research purposes. The survey will take no more than 10 minutes.
Take this link to the survey:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=ghjbae2_2fJaeUMVJ_2bK7z0HA_3d_3d
Thank you for your time and participation!
If you have questions about the survey, please contact Lin Wu directly:
Lin Wu
Reference Services Librarian
Health Sciences Library
University of Tennessee Health Science Center
877 Madison Avenue; Memphis, TN 38163
Email: lwu5 [AT] utmem [DOT] edu
Toll-free: 877-747-0004; Local: 448-5404
Mark Rabnett, Pharmacy and Pharmacology Librarian, was the recipient of a 2008 CAUT Dedicated Service Award. Each year the Canadian Association of University Teachers recognizes individuals for exceptional service to their academic staff associations. Recipients are nominated by their association.
Mark served for six years as the Contract Administrator for the University of Manitoba Faculty Association and eight years as UMFA representative for the Libraries Constituency.
Mark is hereby forgiven for not posting a lot of excellent entires lately on his blog.
I don’t own any Apple hardware (dang it), so I’ve stayed out of discussions about the use of the iPhone in a healthcare setting- but when someone like John Halamka opines about such things, I pay attention.
Check out John’s post on why “…the iPod Touch is a device to watch for clinical and educational applications.”
If anyone would like to buy me an iPod touch, please feel free.
(If you’re interested in technology and healthcare, you should be reading John’s blog: Life as a Healthcare CIO [feed])
There are a good number of sources for online health information videos, but I tend to take special note of those sites that will allow me to embed videos on any Web page I want.
http://insidermedicine.com/
Self-description:
“The Insidermedicine Project is a physician-led news and knowledge-translation initiative that allows patients, doctors and medical students to keep up on the latest medical information by watching our unique videos that are created each and every weekday by our team of medical experts. Our goal is to reach patients, medical doctors and students around the world to ensure that each is receiving a daily “evidence based” health and medical update.”
[Full disclosure: I did a very little bit of consulting for Insidermedicine]
http://www.medicalvideos.us/
Self-description:
“MedicalVideos.us is an online library dedicated for videos and movies related to Medicine and Surgery to provide one easy place to find whatever a doctor,medical student,nurse or any individuals involved in medicine to find whatever he/she looks for.With a simple broadband connection you can enjoy the high quality medical videos either to learn new techniques or to be updated with the latest advances in medicine.”
http://www.emedtv.com/
Self-description:
“The content on the eMedTV Web site is designed to help users better understand their health and play a more active role — together with their physician — in planning their healthcare.”
http://www.cdc.gov/CDCtv/
Self-description:
“CDC-TV is a new online video delivery resource available through CDC.gov. Web visitors can now view or download videos on a variety of health, safety and preparedness topics. Most videos are short and all include closed-captioning (some videos are also open-captioned), so they are accessible to all interested viewers. The library of videos will expand to include single-topic presentations as well as different video series focused on children, parents, and public health professionals.”[via]
http://icyou.com/
Self-description:
Above: Embedded video in which icyou describes itself.
I started drafting this post about 4 months ago. Sheesh.
If I send an ILL request to many large academic medical libraries, I’ll often be sent a password and a link where I can log in and securely download the PDF. This is great because my IS department has pretty strict limits on the size of our email accounts and if mine gets too large, my ability to send new emails will be blocked.
Smaller libraries might want to offer a similar service, but not have access to a secure server (or the software or the know-how) with which to set it up.
There are a great number of free online services for sharing files, so how do we narrow down the right ones to try?
Features we want:
If we use these criteria, the choices narrow down very quickly.
drop.io has quickly become my favorite for the following reasons.
Also nice: No registration is required. It also doesn’t hurt anything that drop.io looks really cool. Great design.
One also-ran:
Transfer Big Files (brilliant name) almost matches drop.io in meeting our needs, except that it can’t apply an expiration date to the file.
Did I miss any other file sharing services that meet the criteria I outlined?
As a service to healthcare practitioners, industry, consumers, and others, USP has developed a free tool for accessing drug names that have been identified with a medication error. USP’s Drug Error Finder allows a user to search more than 1,400 drugs involved in look–alike and/or sound–alike errors. It not only lists the other drugs involved in a mix–up, but also designates the severity of the error where at least one report was received through USP’s Reporting Programs. Use USP’s Drug Error Finder.
[Via ResourceShelf (via iHealthBeat)]
Last week I posted Rachel Walden’s readlly good idea for a useful 3rd-party PubMed/MEDLINE tool and received several exciting responses.
Martin Gerken
Martin Gerken was the first to make an attempt that you can try at:
http://www.pharmakologie-bremen.de/test/meshr.html
…but Rachel got some error messages from it.
GoPubMed
Martin and Rebecca both suggested using GoPubMed.
David (not David Rothman) confirmed that GoPubMed worked nicely but had some problems (which GoPubMed’s Dr. Liliana Barrio-Alvers later answered).
David’s (not Rothman) Tool
David (again, not David Rothman) also made an attempt at creating the tool that Rachel asked for that you can try here:
http://www.docmobi.com/mesh/.
I threw in a list of PMIDs and got useful results presented in a pleasant manner:
Nice, huh?
Rajarshi’s Tool
Rajarshi Guri was next to build a tool to do this. His, though, doesn’t have an interface- you just add your PMIDs to the URL. Here’s an example using the same PMIDs I used to test David’s tool.
Rajarshi also built a Ubiquity command (more on Ubiquity here) that functions reasonably well as an interface- though still not as well as a simple Web form- and without a simple Web form, the tool isn’t really available to a lot of potential users.
Pierre’s Tool
Pierre Lindenbaum spent 30 minutes building a tool to match Rachel’s specs. I was unable to get it to work, but you can download it here and give it a try.
You people rule.
I would love to have heard the lecture that accompanied these slides by Lauren Pressley.
Any chance audio or video was recorded, Lauren?
Just stumbled across this episode of KQED’s Forum (a call-in talk show):
Tue, Aug 26, 2008 — 10:00 AM
The Future of Libraries
Traditional libraries have been caught between declining budgets and the explosive growth of online research. We talk with experts in the field about how the institutions are evolving to meet the changing needs of patrons.
Host: Michael Krasny
Guests:
• Al Escoffier, city librarian for the Burlingame Public Library
• Jane Light, director of the San Jose Library
• Jim Rettig, president of the American Library Association
• Martin Gomez, president of the Urban Libraries Council
Embedded player:
(Yes, I remember what T. Scott said about discussing the future of libraries.)
I frequently like to listen to Uncontrolled Vocabulary, an LIS call-in talk show podcast run by Greg Schwartz.
When he posts each episode, Greg also posts a list of the show’s participants and summary of what was discussed- and that makes the podcast somewhat searchable. If one wants to know when gaming has been discussed, one can use the search field in the right sidebar and get results like these which show three episodes Greg noted as having discussed gaming.
The Problem:
Greg puts a lot of time and effort into Uncontrolled Vocabulary, but itd be much more searchable if Greg transcribed every episode and made that that transcription available for searching. It’d be even cooler if Greg indexed the transcription against timestamps in the audio files so we could jump to the point in the audio where a particular search term is spoken. However, Greg has a job, a family, and a life- so that’s just not a reasonable thing to suggest he do.
EveryZing as the Solution:
Fortunately, EveryZing is already doing it for him.
EveryZing machine-transcribes each episode of Uncontrolled Vocabulary and lets you search that transcript. When it finds your search terms, it links you to the moment in the audio where the search term is spoken.
This link will take you to EveryZing’s index of Uncontrolled Vocabulary episodes. From here you can search not just Greg’s notes on each show, but transcripts. If we use EveryZing to search for “gaming,” we can see that it is mentioned in seven episodes
Say I want to hear the moment in Episode 50 where the phrase “gaming initiatives” appears.
All we have to do is click the hyperlinked timestamp and EverZing will load that episode in a flash player and queue it up to that moment in time. Even cooler, I can embed that player at that timestamp on a Web page…like this:
Machine transcription is far from perfect and it is entertaining to see “ALA” transcribed as “Malay,” but I’m pretty impressed by the potential of this technology.
Almost two years ago, I wrote:
Eventually, the metadata of an audio file (any audio file) should contain not just a text transcript of the audio content, but searchable transcript, indexed to minutes and seconds of the audio. Lets say you want to download the latest Library 2.0 Gang podcast specifcally because you want to hear the first thing Michael Stephens has to say on the topic du jour. You should be able to search the Podcast for the word “Stephens”, select the first first hit in the returned search results, and be taken instantly to the first moment in the audio when the word “Stephens” is spoken.
Imagine the usefulness of such a feature for a clinician attempting to find specific details in a podcast he/she has downloaded.
We’re not quite there yet. The transcription is not included in the audio file itself and the portable audio players don’t yet have the software to search it- but EveryZing shows we’re definitely closer. You can search the transcription of NEJM Interviews, JAMA Audio Commentaries, Johns Hopkins PodMed, MedlinePlus: NLM Director’s Comments and others.
Other neat features of EveryZing:
My favorite parts of T. Scott’s post:
“As I’ve been saying for years the library is becoming less relevant, and no amount of hand-wringing over what we can do to get people to use the library more is going to change that. But librarians are more relevant than ever, if only we can disengage ourselves from privileging our buildings and collections the way that we do and utilizing our individual skills in more effective and relevant ways.”
“The way I see it, the mission of librarians hasn’t changed at all. But we’re not going to fulfill it if we keep worrying about the future of libraries. There’s way too much interesting and fun work to do to waste time on that.”
