davidrothman.net » How to http://davidrothman.net Exploring Medical Librarianship and Web Geekery Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:31:52 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 How to: Add a Free Medical Dictionary to Word 2003/2007 http://davidrothman.net/2010/02/21/how-to-add-a-free-medical-dictionary-to-word-20032007/ http://davidrothman.net/2010/02/21/how-to-add-a-free-medical-dictionary-to-word-20032007/#comments Sun, 21 Feb 2010 15:58:26 +0000 David Rothman http://davidrothman.net/?p=2976 Got an email from a friend the other day:

“I wonder if you have found a free add-on for Word 2003 that includes medical terms in the spell check feature and is secure enough for me to recommend to my users at the hospital?”

This is such a great question and something that has come up at my place of work previously. Out of the box, Microsoft Office Word doesn’t recognize a whole lot of the specialized medical vocabulary that people at our hospital use every day. The result of this is that Word frequently fails to recognize clinical terms and underlines them in red, essentially making them false positives for spelling errors.

Only one employee in my department has Stedman’s medical dictionary installed in her copy of Word 2003 because paying a license for each copy used in an entire hospital would add up to an unmanageable sum quite quickly.

Among the books made available to all employees through our hospital’s intranet is a medical dictionary- and that’s okay for the kinds of people who don’t mind stopping what they’re doing to look up a word, but it would be so much faster and easier for Word to be able to spell-check and correct spelling issues with medical terms.

So I promised the friend I’d think it over and come up with some recommendations.

In MS Word, a “dictionary” is just a list of words.

That’s all. Nothing on pronunciation, etymology, or definition.

A quick search reveals that these “dictionaries” (word lists) are stored as .dic files.

Microsoft even tells you how to MAKE a custom dictionary.

So, what we really need is a list of words to turn into a custom dictionary.

OpenMedSpel is pretty awesome.
Free, open source, and released under a GPL license, OpenMedSpel includes nearly 50,000 medical terms. This is all looks great, but while they have a plug-in for OpenOffice, there doesn’t seem to be one for MS Word.

No problem, though. I took apart a .dic file, and it is pretty much a .txt file with a word on each line, renamed with a “.dic” file extension. This means we can just download the .txt version (in the .zip fail available here) and rename it from OpenMedSpel 100.txt to OpenMedSpel 100.dic and save it to our computer.1

To add this .dic file to Word (2003 or 2007), we just follow these instructions from Microsoft:

  1. Start Word.
  2. In Microsoft Office Word 2003 and in earlier versions of Word, click Options on the Tools menu.

    In Microsoft Office Word 2007, click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click Word Options.

  3. In Word 2003 and in earlier versions of Word, click Custom Dictionaries on the Spelling & Grammar tab.

    In Word 2007, click Proofing, and then click Custom Dictionaries under When correcting spelling in Microsoft Office programs.

  4. Click New to create a new custom dictionary.
  5. In the File name box, type a name for the
    new custom dictionary, and then click Save.

    The custom dictionary is added to the Dictionary list.

  6. In the Custom Dictionaries dialog box, click OK, and then click OK in the Options dialog box.

That’s it. You have medical term spell-checking in Word 2003 or Word 2007.

PLEASE NOTE: I would not hesitate to recommend this solution to my hospital’s CIO and could demonstrate to him why there is absolutely no security risk in adding this .dic file- but I wouldn’t go around setting it up on other employees’ computers without his go-ahead.

Want to go with a bigger word list?

The MTHerald blog has built on the OpenMedSpel list to one that contains almost 100,000 terms. I downloaded and checked it out and will recommend it as a harmless, malware-free .dic file- but as with any file I don’t host myself, I can’t promise that’ll be true tomorrow.

There are a number of other sources for lists of medical terms or abbreviations you can find online and add to your .dic file as suits you.

Know of any other especially good sources? Please advise in the comments.

1 If you want to take a shortcut, you can download my .dic file here (right-click, Save As), but please note I don’t plan on keeping it updated as OpenSpelMed makes changes- so if you’re reading this more than a year after it was posted, I’d go get a fresh copy of the .txt file from OpenMedSpel. Firefox users: Firefox’s native spell-checking isn’t bad at all, but OpenMedSpel has a free Firefox plug-in you’ll probably want to check out.

]]> http://davidrothman.net/2010/02/21/how-to-add-a-free-medical-dictionary-to-word-20032007/feed/ 12 Mayo’s LibBlog Shows You How to Use My NCBI http://davidrothman.net/2009/10/14/mayos-libblog-shows-you-how-to-use-my-ncbi/ http://davidrothman.net/2009/10/14/mayos-libblog-shows-you-how-to-use-my-ncbi/#comments Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:56:03 +0000 David Rothman http://davidrothman.net/?p=2808 Melissa Rethlefsen does it again with another great screencast:

[via: http://liblog.mayo.edu/2009/10/13/video-tutorial-my-ncbi-custom-filters-and-sharing-collections/]

Melissa rules.

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]]> http://davidrothman.net/2009/10/14/mayos-libblog-shows-you-how-to-use-my-ncbi/feed/ 0 Screencast: Introduction to new PubMed Advanced Search http://davidrothman.net/2009/04/02/screencast-introduction-to-new-pubmed-advanced-search/ http://davidrothman.net/2009/04/02/screencast-introduction-to-new-pubmed-advanced-search/#comments Fri, 03 Apr 2009 01:00:19 +0000 David Rothman http://davidrothman.net/?p=2502 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.

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]]> http://davidrothman.net/2009/04/02/screencast-introduction-to-new-pubmed-advanced-search/feed/ 5 The Book! http://davidrothman.net/2008/12/08/the-book/ http://davidrothman.net/2008/12/08/the-book/#comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:48:08 +0000 David Rothman http://davidrothman.net/?p=2197 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.

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]]> http://davidrothman.net/2008/12/08/the-book/feed/ 10 How to: Use Gmail to Manage List Emails http://davidrothman.net/2008/04/09/how-to-use-gmail-to-manage-list-emails/ http://davidrothman.net/2008/04/09/how-to-use-gmail-to-manage-list-emails/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2008 04:02:09 +0000 David Rothman http://davidrothman.net/2008/04/09/how-to-use-gmail-to-manage-list-emails/ I subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists because they frequently contain useful information, but being subscribed to these lists using the email account provided by our hospital would be problematic. The volume of postings on some lists would clutter up the acount, making it more difficult to manage and making it more likely I’d miss other, more important emails from inside our organization.

So I subscribe to lists using a Gmail account. Here’s why:

  • Separating list emails into a separate account allows me to treat them, as a whole, in a different manner than emails from higher-priority senders (patrons, co-workers, etc.). This lets me keep my attention focused where it needs to be.

  • Because list emails are in a separate account, I also never have to annoy other list subscribers with “out-of-office” messages that get sent to whole list- because there’s never need to turn on an “out-of-office” message for this account.

  • Threaded conversation: Instead of having one line per each email received, Gmail inboxes have one line for each conversation. That means that my Gmail lists inbox doesn’t get as cluttered. It also lets me efficiently manage whole conversations instead of individual emails, even if a particular email is sent to multiple lists I subscribe to. Example image below shows that all (23) emails on the topic of “abortion” being made a stopword in POPLINE are one (expandable) line item in my Gmail inbox:

  • Mute function: If there’s a particular conversation(/thread) that I’m not interested in continuing to follow, I can “mute” the conversation and not need to see any further emails in that thread.

  • Gmail’s search capabilities are awesome. If I want to find a MEDLIB-L email I remember was sent by Michelle Kraft about OvidSP, I can search for label:medlib-l from:Kraft OvidSP and find it really, really quickly.

  • Gmail’s filters are powerful and easy to use.
    • Assigning labels: You can set up your Gmail filters to automatically assign colorful labels based on information that lets you scan your email quickly. For example, you could set your account up to automatically assign colored labels based on which list the conversation is from.

    • Forwarding based on content: You can combine Gmail’s great searching and filtering to monitor your list subscriptions. Say you subscribe to multiple lists, but only really want to pay attention if Young Adult services are mentioned. I can create a filter from the search for young OR youth OR “YA” and set any hits from that search to be automatically forwarded to my primary email address so it comes to my attention. Imagine the time saved by not having to manually look through all those emails for mentions of the topic I want to follow.

Bonus tip: Would you rather read your list email information in your feed aggregator? Set your lists Gmail account to forward the emails to MailBucket, and MailBucket will give you the content in an RSS feed.

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]]> http://davidrothman.net/2008/04/09/how-to-use-gmail-to-manage-list-emails/feed/ 18 How to: Follow CIL 2008 online via RSS [Edited again] http://davidrothman.net/2008/04/02/how-to-follow-cil-2008-online-via-rss/ http://davidrothman.net/2008/04/02/how-to-follow-cil-2008-online-via-rss/#comments Wed, 02 Apr 2008 04:21:48 +0000 David Rothman http://davidrothman.net/2008/04/02/how-to-follow-cil-2008-online-via-rss/ [edit]
  • Added a feed from Google Blog Search (which uses a fairly narrow search) to the Superfeed.
  • Added filters to the Superfeed to screen out a handful of false positives.
  • Embedded Grazr widget (see end of post)

[/edit]

[edit2]
Wouter has made the Superfeed available in Dutch. :)
[/edit2]

To make sure I don’t miss any online chatter about Computers in Libraries 2008 (which starts next Monday), I’m subscribed to the following feeds:

If you’re like me, you’d rather subscribe to one feed than several, so all the feeds above are included in the feed below:

Single feed that combines all of the above:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Cil2008Superfeed

Grazr widget below will let you browse the Superfeed contents:

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]]> http://davidrothman.net/2008/04/02/how-to-follow-cil-2008-online-via-rss/feed/ 4 Hacking ReadBurner URLs http://davidrothman.net/2008/01/30/hacking-readburner-urls/ http://davidrothman.net/2008/01/30/hacking-readburner-urls/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:30:29 +0000 David Rothman http://davidrothman.net/2008/01/30/hacking-readburner-urls/ You’ve probably heard about ReadBurner by now.

The idea behind ReadBurner is that it aggregates counts of items that are frequently shared in Google Reader.

First a point of clarification: ReadBurner doesn’t get its data directly from Google Reader in aggregate via an API- it gets the data from the RSS feeds of public linkblogs fed by Google Reader. This is explained on ReadBurner’s About page:

“ReadBurner aggregates items that are shared on the Google Reader.

This works by constantly updating RSS feeds of currently several hundred linkblogs. In order to filter out the best stuff ReadBurner counts, whenever an item is shared by multiple persons.”

ReadBurner’s creator, Alexander Marktl, allows users to submit new linkblogs (or does he?), but he can’t ever gather all of them…so I suspect that ReadBurner won’t ever really represent the sharing habits of Google Reader users. Further, I find it hard to believe that Google would not be working on a similar project that actually will have access to all the sharing data from Google Reader users in its entirety…at which point ReadBurner will stop being interesting.

In the meanwhile, ReadBurner is still pretty neat. The features I’d most like to see added are search and to have searches outputted as RSS feeds. I’ve had no luck getting ReadBurner to output the feeds I want, but I have managed to make it filter for just the stuff I want.

I really wanted a form so I could search and, for instance, see if any posts at this blog were being frequently shared. Sadly, no such search form exists at ReaderBurner.

Fortunately, we can make it search in a limited fashion even without a form by messing with the URL a bit.

The back end of ReadBurner is PHP/MySQL, a combination I gained some familiarity with through working on LibWorm with Frankie Dolan (and by using WordPress to power this blog).

All our little hacks will start from this URL:
http://www.readburner.com/index.php?

From here, we can play with two parameters, r and a.

r = The name of the source the item came from
a = The name of the author of the item

So if we wanted to see items in ReadBurner that were shared from davidrothman.net, we just need to tack r=davidrothman.net onto the end of http://www.readburner.com/index.php? like so:
http://www.readburner.com/index.php?r=davidrothman.net

For another example, shared items from Boing Boing could be found like so:
http://www.readburner.com/index.php?r=boing%20boing

But what if we want only to see shared items items from Boing Boing which were authored by Cory Doctorow?

To our existing http://www.readburner.com/index.php?r=boing%20boing, we’ll tack on &a=Cory%20Doctorow1, giving us:
http://www.readburner.com/index.php?r=boing%20boing&a=Cory%20Doctorow

Marktl himself shows how to tweak the URL of ReadBurner to filter for language and for a minimum number of shares.

Of course, there are easier ways to get this kind of info from ReadBurner. Once could subscribe to the feed for the recently submitted items and then filter using Yahoo! Pipes or one of the other free tools for filtering RSS feeds…but that’s not as much fun.

____
Check it out: Noted biblioblogger Steven Cohen is one of the top sharers on ReadBurner. :)

1 the ‘%20′ represents the space character between Cory’s given name and surname and does the same between “boing” and “boing” in the previous example

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]]> http://davidrothman.net/2008/01/30/hacking-readburner-urls/feed/ 6 How to: Find Instructional Materials with the Medical Library CSE http://davidrothman.net/2007/12/05/how-to-find-instructional-materials-with-the-medical-library-cse/ http://davidrothman.net/2007/12/05/how-to-find-instructional-materials-with-the-medical-library-cse/#comments Wed, 05 Dec 2007 05:02:19 +0000 David Rothman http://davidrothman.net/2007/12/05/how-to-find-instructional-materials-with-the-medical-library-cse/ A few days ago I made a Google Custom Search Engine for searching the Web sites of medical libraries.

Connie Schardt pointed out that it could be useful for finding handouts, tutorials and other teaching materials. Here are some ideas on how this might be done.

Your turn: What other searches would be useful?

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]]> http://davidrothman.net/2007/12/05/how-to-find-instructional-materials-with-the-medical-library-cse/feed/ 2 How to: Get Exactly What You Want From YouTube via RSS http://davidrothman.net/2007/11/26/how-to-get-exactly-what-you-want-from-youtube-via-rss/ http://davidrothman.net/2007/11/26/how-to-get-exactly-what-you-want-from-youtube-via-rss/#comments Mon, 26 Nov 2007 13:43:00 +0000 David Rothman http://davidrothman.net/2007/11/26/how-to-get-exactly-what-you-want-from-youtube-via-rss/ Berci asked:

David, do you know how can we subscribe to searches on Youtube? I mean, I’d like to follow the RSS feed of the search term genetics on Youtube, for example.

Jan answered:

You can create RSS feeds for tags. FI: rss for genetics will be http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/genetic.rss.

For search related rss-feeds on YouTube you could try referd.info.

The feed that Jan suggests will only contain videos that have been tagged “genetic.” It won’t contain videos that have the word “genetics” elsewhere in their metadata.

To capture videos that have “genetics” anywhere in their metadata, try this feed:
http://www.youtube.com/rss/search/genetics.rss

Unfortunately, this simple way of creating a search-based YouTube feed (http://www.youtube.com/rss/search/[search terms].rss) will limit the search results to 20 items.

If we want to get more than 20 results in our feed, we need to use the YouTube API, which is powerful and not especially difficult to play with.

If we want a feed that captures the most recent 50 videos, we can use this feed:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/videos?vq=genetics&max-results=50&orderby=updated

Neat, huh? Still, I don’t subscribe to these sorts of feeds.
Unfortunately, both the feed for the tag “genetics” and the feed for the search term “genetics” are too full of junk (including spammy, awful ringtone advertising) for me to deal with efficiently. I once had search feeds like these from YouTube fed into LibWorm, but removed them because the results returned for the search term “library” were frequently inappropriate and wildly distant from Librar*/LIS topics.

If one was determined to make such a feed useful, one could use a tool like Yahoo Pipes to filter out the worst and most obvious of the junk items, producing a feed like this one. It is far from perfect, but most of the junk is gone and little of the good stuff is missing.

(Please feel free to copy this Pipe.)

However, a Pipe used for this purpose would probably need semi-routine maintenance and updates to its Filter module to keep the junk out.1

Okay, that was fun! Any other feed questions?

1 Note for nit-pickers: Yes, I considered more aggressive filtering by category either through the API or Pipes, but there are valid hits across a number of unexpected categories.

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]]> http://davidrothman.net/2007/11/26/how-to-get-exactly-what-you-want-from-youtube-via-rss/feed/ 5 Getting Started with RSS Feeds (JHL) http://davidrothman.net/2007/09/07/getting-started-with-rss-feeds-jhl/ http://davidrothman.net/2007/09/07/getting-started-with-rss-feeds-jhl/#comments Fri, 07 Sep 2007 10:45:34 +0000 David Rothman http://davidrothman.net/2007/09/07/getting-started-with-rss-feeds-jhl/ It looks like the article I wrote for the Journal of Hospital Librarianship is going to appear in print in Volume 7, Issue 3.

My hope was that this article would be a painless, step-by-step guide to help the medical librarian set up and start using an aggregator right away.

Many health sciences library staffers who might benefit tremendously from the utilization of an RSS aggregator are intimidated by the mistaken impression that setting up and using a feed aggregator is difficult or requires technical knowledge. The truth is that anyone who can use an e-mail client can quickly learn to manage an aggregator, and can begin benefiting from its use right away. This article seeks to walk the less technologically inclined health science library staffer through the necessary steps to begin reaping the benefits of utilizing RSS feeds, including setting up an aggregator, finding useful feeds, subscribing to feeds, and managing them. This is accomplished with only an absolute minimum of geekspeak or technobabble.

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