Perhaps I can write a bit more about my trip to Arizona soon, but for now I wanted to get the slides posted for those who attended.
It was lots of fun and a treat for me to get to leave Syracuse in January and gape at palm trees for a couple of days. 
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/]
This kind of blog is sooooo useful to searchers like me who are clearly less experienced and expert than the author of PubMed Search Strategies, Cindy Schmidt, M.D., M.L.S.
“This blog has been created to share PubMed search strategies. Search strategies posted here are not perfect. They are posted in the hope that others will benefit from the work already put into their creation and/or will offer suggestions for improvements. Librarians who wish to post comments on this blog or who wish to become authors are invited to e-mail me.”
Example post shown below:
[via: Melissa Rethlefsen and Mark Rabnett]
What New Users Should Know
(How is Quertle® different?)1. Find true relationships, not simple co-occurrences
On Quertle, if you search for two or more terms, you will find documents in which those terms occur in a conceptual relationship, not simply scattered within the same document. You won’t always find as many, but you weren’t really going to read 14,578 documents, were you?2. Quertle understands biology and chemistry
Quertle understands the difference between “TWIST”, the helix-loop-helix transcription factor, and “twist”, the verb. So, use proper capitalization in your query, and you won’t be lost in a sea of irrelevant results.3. Power Terms™ enable you to query for categories of objects
Use Power Terms™ to query for categories of objects, such as any protein or chemical (not simply the occurrence of the terms). See the Power Terms™ link under the query box for further instructions and the list of currently-supported Power Terms™. Use them; we’ll know what they mean. Want other Power Terms™? Let us know.4. Useful help
Throughout the site, mouse over the (?) to see helpful hints. To answer many of your other questions, such as why there appear to be duplicate results, please read the Help and FAQ documents (links at the bottom of the page).Things to look for on the Results page (check the (?) hints on that page):
a. More relevant results
b. Easy filtering and breadcrumb tracking
c. Key concepts automatically identified for you, including members of any Power Term™ categories used in your query
I definitely like the highlighting of search terms and the terms Quertle sees as synonymous:
I like the refinement tools to the right of search results:
It bothers me a bit that Quertle doesn’t actually identify who created or maintains it:
Who is behind Quertle?
Quertle has been created by biomedical scientists, chemists, and linguistic experts, who have many decades of experience with research and finding relevant information to support that research.
Since Quertle is essentially doing keyword searches, its power would be significantly improved if it supported Boolean operators.
Librarians, be sure to check out the Power Terms™. Currently-supported terms are listed here- what others would you like to see?
For more, see Quertle’s Help page.
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.
Rachel Walden points (from both Women’s Health News and Our Bodies Our Blog) to a free online workshop titled “Understanding Evidence-based Healthcare: A Foundation for Action” , offered by the US Cochrane Center’s Consumers United for Evidence-based Healthcare (CUE).
(Embedded below is a video about CUE. If you are reading this post via a feed reader, you may need to visit the site to view the video.)
Posting about the cool stuff Lei Wang does appears to be a habit for me, but as habits go, it sure is worthwhile.
Lately, Lei has been posting “Find It Fast!” video tutorials on the blog he writes for the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at the Yale University School of Medicine. These are great and are available as streaming flash or as an .m4v download (suitably sized for viewing on a portable device!).
The most recent ones, The Clinical Question and The Pyramid of Resources aren’t just useful to clinicians- they would make wonderful instructional tools for new medical libraryfolk, too.
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!
The Saab Memorial Medical Library (at the American University of Beirut) has quizzes to test your PubMed knowledge in both Basic and Advanced flavors.
Just curious: If you teach (or have taught) a class on using PubMed, are these the sorts of questions you’d use to determine how well your students absorbed the material?
I have (no joke) 20 posts that are half-written, and have ideas for another dozen or so that I want to get to- but they’ll need to wait until next week.
Reason 1:
I must try to finish a writing project (about which I’ll write more soon).
Reason 2:
I must make sure I’m well-prepared for my visit to Wisconsin at the end of the week.
Reason 3:
I need to keep refining my materials for MLA 2008. I’m not happy with them yet.
I’m not pleased to put off the blogging, but with the commitments I’ve made to others it is the only thing I can (in good conscience) put on the back burner.
Next week, I plan to put up a few posts about the AMA conference last week and some of the interesting things I learned there.
Also keeping me busy lately: Liz and I are expecting a baby in early July.
More about that next week, too.
Flash SlideCast embedded above. If you are reading this in an aggregator, you may need to visit the site to view/hear the SlideCast.
Okay, not the most engaging way to introduce the Cochrane Collaboration- but still neat.
For another introduction, see this video.
The Cochrane tutorial video I posted a few days ago from YouTube was good in its content, but the quality of the image left something to be desired.
James Carson, the reference/acquisitions librarian at Lake-Sumter Community College who put the tutorial together was kind to contact me and point me towards the much higher quality version.
If you like that, be sure to check out their CINAHL tutorial as well.
Thanks, James!
In the middle of an attempt to explain RSS to a Facebook user (who is already uniwittingly making use of RSS feeds), this exchange cracked me up:
the_dude: I haven’t heard of those Facebook apps. Tumblr? Reddit? Digg?
engtech: Those aren’t Facebook apps. They’re different websites. You don’t have to login to Facebook to read them. They’re out there in the great wilds of the Internet. They’re outside of Facebook.
the_dude: Man, internet people are horrible spellers. What’s up with those website names?
engtech: Web 2.0 means spell check is optional.
http://internetducttape.com/2008/02/28/explain-rss-using-facebook/
Patricia Anderson (whose slides I always find worth a look) put up a new presentation yesterday:
From the Yale University School of Medicine’s Cushing/Whitney Medical Library comes a nice screencast tutorial on generating search-based RSS feeds from OvidSP.
You can download the tutorial (mp4) or watch the streaming version.
Be sure to check out the rest of the tutorials from this blog of video tutorials and consider subscribing to its RSS feed.
The Krafty Librarian has assembled a number of useful resources on OvidSP that should be helpful to those still working on transition plans.
You can also check out what other medical libraries are doing by searching the Medical Library CSE for ovidsp.
You could even seek out specific instructional materials by searching for Ovidsp (handout OR instructions OR “how to” OR training)
For what the biblioblogosphere has had to say about OvidSP, see this LibWorm search.
Medical Librarian Julie Smith points to this video about the Cochrane Collaboration.
Cool!
These Cochrane Podcasts are new to me, too. You can subscribe to them with this link: http://cochrane.org/podcasts/brasil/rss/plenary_all_sessions.rss
Lee and Sachi LeFever are awesome.
This will probably interest libraryfolk more than medicalfolk- but if you like art and design, you might forgive me this off-topic post.
My wife, Dr. Elizabeth J. Fowler, is a professor of art and design history at Syracuse University and is currently teaching a course on 20th and 21st-Century Design. She decided she wanted to give her students extra credit for noticing works and designers they’d studied in class when encountering them in popular culture.
I pointed out that this would make great fodder for a blog that could continue to grow, semester to semester, year after year. She agreed and chose a template on Blogger.com:
This was okay, but when I told Liz I could tweak the template to suit her preferences, she asked for a template resembling a Piet Mondrian work1
I’m pleased with how it came out with just a little tweaking:
Go check out the blog and send in an email if you see something in popular culture that needs posting.
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