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.
1
This looks like another article that I want to read but don’t have access to.
Ophthalmology. 2007 Oct;114(10):1801-3.
Web 2.0, library 2.0, physician learning 2.0.Liesegang TJ.
PMID: 17908589
(This blog would be a lot better if publishers would just give me free subscriptions- or at least send me copies of articles like this one. I know- it’d be a chilly day in Hades…)
Anyone else read it yet?
The screencast below (made with Screencast-O-Matic) shows how to make a screencast…with Screencast-O-Matic.
Viewing the embedded screencast below (and recording new ones) requires Java.
Why should libraryfolk care about screencasting? Let Paul Pival help answer that question.
London-based medical librarian Reinhard Wentz (previously mentioned here) and medical student Vipul Sharma have produced a a great handout to help introduce users to Wikipedia as a potential resource. The handout includes links for additional readings on background and issues such as bias, currency, reliability, and plagiarism.
I thought it was excellent and was very pleased when Reinhard agreed to have it posted here. I like that it succinctly covers all the most important points and issues in only two digestible pages.
Got feedback? Leave it here and we’ll make sure Reinhard and Vipul see it.
Although he is best-known as an outspoken atheist, Richard Dawkins is a respected biologist.
Really, if you read his work or hear him speak, you get the sense that he isn’t actually hostile towards religious people, he’s hostile towards attacks on reason. So it isn’t really surprising that in his Channel 4 special, The Enemies of Reason, he expresses strong views about superstition and the way it can impact medicine in the form of some “alternative” health therapies in the episode entitled The Irrational Health Service.
You can watch it in the embedded video below:
I particularly enjoy how Dawkins takes apart homeopathy.
Thanks for the heads-up, Graham!
