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Journal of EAHIL: Web 2.0 (and International MedLib Blogging)

Over at the European Medical Librarians blog, Oliver Obst has posted a link to a recent issue of the Journal of EAHIL (European Association for Health Information and Libraries) in which he has published his new column, titled “Web 2.0″ (see page 50 of this PDF).

Oliver starts with an overview of MedLib blogs,including charts of some North American and European blogs, and talks about EUROMEDLIB. Oliver writes:

…five bloggers from Sweden, Netherlands, France, and Germany decided to take this idea one step further and build a cross-border blog with a real European scope, called EUROMEDLIB – Items of Interests for everyone working in an European Medical Library. As it is stated in the mission of EUROMEDLIB, There is a strong desire for networking among European medical librarians. This blog serves as a starting point for what is at the heart of EAHIL. You will find EUROMEDLIB at http://euromedlib.blogspot.com/. Every European Medical Librarian is invited to participate, either by writing or commenting posts.

I really admire the enthusiasm that Oliver, Dymphie, Benoit, Guus, and Lars demonstrate for community-building. Oliver and Dymphie both added the MedLib Blog badge to their blog sidebars, and Dymphie used the Google Customized Search Engine tools to make a CSE just for searching MedLib Blogs.

Bridging the language gap

I subscribe to the feeds of MedLib blogs in languages other than english and use machine translation to work out what they say if a post looks interesting, but it might encourage more anglophones to read these if each included translation buttons in their sidebars. Babelfish makes this pretty easy, just copy and paste the code here into your page. (I know other web-based machine translation services offer similar tools- anyone have a favorite?)

I have added this to my own sidebar. The machine translation is far from perfect, but it is enough generally to allow me to understand what is being written about in German or Dutch, so I am hopeful that it will function as well for readers whose English proficiency is similar to my proficiency in German or Dutch.

Additional Links to our European MedLib Blogger friends:

OliverObst.de
MedInfo, Oliver’s MedLib Blog (German, German Language)
Biomedbiblog, Dymphie’s MedLib Blog (Dutch, Dutch Language)
DigiCMB, Guus’ MedLib Blog (Dutch, English Language)
Nowhere North, Lars’ MedLib Blog (Swedish, English Language)

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November 30th, 2006 | Category: Blogging, CSEs, For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology | Subscribe to comments | Both comments and pings are currently closed

ob:
December 1st, 2006 at 2:07 pm

David, is there any tool for machine translating RSS Feeds?

David Rothman:
December 1st, 2006 at 2:23 pm

Good question, Oliver. I don’t know of any tool like that, but I’ve put in a message to someone else who might. I’ll get back to you if/when I hear back.