A similarly interesting discussion of this post is taking place on FriendFeed.

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Links mentioned in the embedded video above:
http://davidrothman.net/category/library-20/
http://www.libraryman.com/blog/essays-on-101/

[Edit]

Excellent response from Sarah Glassmeyer (video embedded below):

[/Edit]

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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!

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See also: Academic Librarian PSA and Harper Library PSA

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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:

[Direct link to mp3 file]

(Yes, I remember what T. Scott said about discussing the future of libraries.)

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“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.”

Go read the whole thing.

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Hakia says they’re tapping the expertise of librarians. As CEO Dr. Riza C Berkan writes on the Hakia blog:

Every Web search starts with two queries. One is X. The other one is “who knows X the best?” Because finding X is not enough if the author of that page does not know X himself/herself. This will immediately resonate with you if you ever searched for medical, legal, or financial information for a serious case.

This was called the “credibility” criteria in the old world-order which has progressively vanished in the new age of Internet search engines. You enter X, and get the same “popular” perspective without distinction of credibility. You may recognize some of the sources, but are you an expert yourself about these things?

Ironically, there is a science for this. It is the science of libraries and librarians. That’s their job. They know what is credible, trustworthy, and commercially-unbiased.

So how does Hakia leverage librarian expertise? They say it is by indexing “quality sources” which are “taken from the Medical Library Association recommendations.”

That’s a great idea of where to start, but anyone could accomplish the same by making a Google CSE like this one. The Google Health Co-op greatly surpasses Hakia’s effort here by including a greater number of recommended sites and greater value from having more authoritative recommenders than just the MLA.

Also interesting is that Hakia has created a little micro-portal for each of the following sites:

PubMed – http://pubmed.hakia.com
World Health Org – http://who.hakia.com
ClinicalTrials.Gov – http://clinicaltrials.hakia.com
Centers for Disease Control – http://cdc.hakia.com
The National Cancer Institute – http://nci.hakia.com
National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute – http://nhlbi.hakia.com

Mayo Clinic – http://mayoclinic.hakia.com
familydoctor.org – http://familydoc.hakia.com
Healthfinder – http://healthfinder.hakia.com
HIV InSite – http://hivinsite.hakia.com
Kidshealth – http://kidshealth.hakia.com
Medem – http://medem.hakia.com
MEDLINEplus – http://medlineplus.hakia.com
NOAH – http://noah.hakia.com
American Cancer Society http://acs.hakia.com
Cancer Care, Inc. – http://cancercare.hakia.com
Oncolink – http://oncolink.hakia.com
Women’s Cancer Network – http://womenscancernet.hakia.com
American Diabetes Assc. – http://ada.hakia.com
diabetes123 – http://diabetes123.hakia.com
Children with Diabetes – http://childrenwithdiabetes.hakia.com
The Diabetes Monitor – http://diabetesmonitor.hakia.com
Joslin Diabetes Center – http://joslinharvard.hakia.com
National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases – http://niddk.hakia.com
American Heart Association – http://aha.hakia.com
Congenital Heart Information Network – http://tchin.hakia.com
March of Dimes – http://marchofdimes.hakia.com

These are also interesting, but superior results could be achieved using existing tools. Rather than searching Hakia’s portal for the American Heart Association for myocardial infarction, we could more easily search Google for myocardial infarction site:americanheart.org and make use of Google’s further refinements from there.

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I remember asking my father to teach me to program in BASIC. He cheerfully agreed and handed me the big brown manual.

So maybe I’m weird and so are my folks, but these memories inform my take on the chatter in the blogosphere and on MEDLIB-L about this post by Harvard PhD student Anna Kushnir in which she expresses her frustration with PubMed. Kushnir writes (in part):

“I hate PubMed. I hate it with a burning passion. For a site that is as vital to scientific progress as PubMed is, their search engine is shamefully bad. It’s embarrassingly, frustratingly, painfully bad.”

[...]

“Why is PubMed so behind the times? Why? How does it even work? Does it search only the abstract? Does it also search the body of the papers that are available online? Why does it get so massively confused by an author’s initials and last name together, in one search? Why can’t it alert me when papers relevant to my work are published?”

I’m the first to admit that PubMed has problems and much room for enhancement, but if Kushnir had bothered to look at PubMed’s help manual or try some of its excellent tutorials she’d have learned exactly how it works, what PubMed indexes, how she can search by author, and that it can alert the user when papers relevant to her work are published via email or RSS.

So while PubMed has real, legitimate problems, Kushnir’s complaints don’t really touch on any of them. She could’ve resolved the problems she notes by flipping through the well-written, clearly laid-out, easy-to-navigate manual.

A number of helpful people who are much nicer than I am left useful comments for Kushnir.

Medical librarian Kathleen Crea offered a clear explanation of how articles are indexed and what MeSH is.

Medical librarian Rachel Walden even offered to help remotely with specific searches if Kushnir didn’t have a Harvard medical librarian handy.

But Kushnir decided that none of this really helped and later commented:

I don’t think I should have to be, or enlist the services of, a medical librarian in order to do a simple search on a literature search engine. PubMed should be an intuitive search engine such as Google, or others. I don’t know of many researchers, either MDs or PhDs, who have had extensive training in computer science or search algorithms. I am going to go out on a limb and say that I am representative of many other biomedical researchers in my struggles with PubMed. I am trained in Cell Biology and Virology. PubMed should be tuned to my needs and my skill set. I should not have to tune to it. Harsh as it may sound, PubMed is most useful for biomedical professionals, not for medical librarians or for computer scientists. Yes, if I devoted an afternoon or more to learning the system I dare say I would become a proficient, but my question stands – why should I have to?

Huh.

The index of biomedical literature searched from PubMed is a vast and complex set of data. Any tool that will search it effectively for very specific needs will necessarily be complex. If Ms. Kushnir doubts this, perhaps she should perhaps try any other interface for the same data. Some other interfaces work better for some purposes and some users, but all are complex.

Using PubMed does not require “extensive training in computer science or search algorithms,” it requires reading the manual. Kushnir actually admits that if she “devoted an afternoon or more to learning the system” she would “become a proficient,” and yet she fails to recognize her complaints as the whining they are.

Kushnir writes at JOVE:

My rant somehow wound up on a medical librarian listserv and they came out in force defending NCBI and PubMed, listing pages and pages of helpful and warm instructions and hints on how to make it do what I need it to do, pages of suggestions, with offers of hands-on assistance and training, which have all been wonderful. Occasionally though, they were biting and harsh, saying that if I only knew what I was doing (and only if I weren’t so ignorant… yup, ignorant), PubMed would seem to me the greatest thing ever.

I’m not criticizing Kushnir’s ignorance and would take issue with those who did. Ignorance, once identified, should alert the librarian to a teaching opportunity- not an occasion for shaming. Criticizing the extraordinary laziness in her refusal to receive help from a librarian or to take a quick look at the manual, though? That’s fair game.

Kushnir continues:

I am a research scientist by long, hard training. I am a fairly web-savvy research scientist, and still, I have trouble with PubMed.

As a medical librarian friend recently pointed out to me, it requires instruction to learn to drive a car. Kushnir is unwilling to read the manual and wants to blame PubMed/NLM for her difficulties. Kushnir talks about having spent hours trying to get PubMed to do what she wants, but declines help from multiple medical librarians who’re happy to teach her and can’t be bothered to invest 30 minutes in reading from the manual because it should, in her thinking, be possible to do without any effort on her part.

Kushnir continues:

The search engine is not made for medical librarians. It’s not made for computer programmers. It’s made for scientists, to be used by scientists, needed most by scientists.

Actually, Medline’s history is that it was made primarily for medical librarians and secondarily for physicians, but that’s not really important.

It should be easy for scientists, goofy, only moderately-computer literate scientists, to use. It should be intuitive (read: Google), it should not have a ginormous page of inscrutable instructions, it should not require the hour-long training sessions, kindly offered at most medical libraries. It should be plug and chug.

I might just as well argue that the tools of virology research should be intuitive to me. After all, I’m a very computer-literate, Web-savvy biomedical information professional. Why should I need her years of training to understand her work?¹

“Inscrutable?”
Kushnir also describes PubMed’s help documentation as “inscrutable.” When I was teaching myself how to use PubMed, I found the documentation clear and helpful, so this surprised me. I decided to run the PubMed Quick Start document through Google Docs’ analysis:

Let’s review these scores:

Flesch Reading Ease: 62.97
(A score from 60-69 is considered “standard”)

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 5.00
(Fifth grade)

Automated Readability Index: 5.00
(Again, fifth grade)

So it would appear that the help documentation is written at a fifth-grade level. I find it hard to believe that a PhD student at Harvard cannot read at a fifth-grade level, so I’m left with the impression that Ms. Kushnir didn’t actually attempt to read any of the documentation before declaring it “inscrutable.”

Suggestions for Ms. Kushnir and other research scientists who don’t like reading the instructions:

• Since Ms. Kushnir is convinced that the Google model is adequate and “intuitive” for searching the primary biomedical literature, I’ve made a Google CSE that’ll allow her to search PubMed using Google. Given how many times I’ve helped people who can’t find what they’re looking for via Google (which can’t really be effectively utilized for very specific information needs without reading the instructions), I’ll be interested to hear how well it works for her.
• Ms. Kushnir may also want to try ReleMed, an interface (with which I am genuinely impressed) that can be used much as one might use Google (sometimes with useful results).
• Ms. Kushnir’s local Harvard library has a copy of Brian K. Katcher’s MEDLINE: A Guide to Effective Searching in PubMed & Other Interfaces. You can read a short review by Melissa Rethlefsen of this slim, accessible, useful book here.

So the tool is necessarily complex because the data it searches is complex and the user refuses to read the well-written help documentation or accept help from a friendly librarian (even when multiple librarians are reaching out across thousands of physical miles of distance and the gulf of the patron’s unwillingness to learn).

I can only conclude that sometimes the user *is* broken.²

Thank you to the two medical librarian friends who read the first draft of this post and offered comments.

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Medical librarian Anne Ludvik takes a proactive approach to helping busy staff nurses solve patient care problems and get up-to-date health information at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center.

“It’s difficult for nurses to get to the physical library, so we work to bring digital resources to them,” Ludvik says.

[Read the rest]

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