davidrothman.net

Martha Hardy (friend, medical librarian, incredibly cool person) hipped me to NCBI ROFL, a wonderful blog that highlights the best chuckles from PubMed citations.

Edit: D’oh! Nikki posted about this yesterday and Berci before that!

I have become a truly lame blogger.

June 27th, 2009 | Category: Blogging, For Medical Libraryfolk, Fun | Comments (2)

Thanks so much to Laurie Blanchard and everybody at CHLA for inviting me to speak! I enjoyed Winnipeg and it was a treat to finally meet people like Francesca Frati (who is awesome) and Mark Rabnett.

The slides for my talk (which look awful in Slideshare) are embedded below.

To clarify for Krista Clement:

I think anything that removes obstacles between users and the information they want is good. If more fully automating some functions of the library makes those functions less visible, I think that’s great. I don’t think that doing a better job for users will result in decreased funding, but I do think that better automation will cut costs.

June 9th, 2009 | Category: For Medical Libraryfolk, Medical Librarianship Blogs, Presentations, Shameless Self-Promotion, Technology | Comments (1)

A friend who is a medical librarian emailed me. She writes:

“I’ve been setting up local RSS pages with Feedburner [for email distribution] and Feed2JS [for dislaying the content of feeds on Web pages] for our most popular journals, to allow for TOCs.

…

It seems the publishers have gotten wise to this and are not allowing their feeds to be resyndicated. It started with EbscoHost — I noticed their feeds never seemed to refresh themselves (which totally defeats the purpose of having a feed). Now it seems ScienceDirect is also blocking re-syndication. FeedBurner can’t pick up the feeds; Feed2JS gives an error, yet the feed validator says it’s a valid feed. SD is providing it’s own source-code to paste into local web pages, but it takes so long to load the page that it invariably times out = useless.

Just wondering if you’ve heard of this from anyone else…”

I don’t use either one of these, so I haven’t seen this problem. Has anyone else? Please let us know in the comments?

April 28th, 2009 | Category: RSS/Feeds, Technology | Comments (4)

Holy cow! Holy pig!

Watching misinformation spread is sort of entertaining. Check out all the people who talk about not eating pork on Twitter. (The flu is not spread by eating pork.)

Hah! As I was writing this post, the latest xkcd appeared!

The CDC’s Emergency Preparedness and Response Twitter feed seems to be a frequently-updated source of sanity:

RSS Feed for CDC’s Swine Flu site

Maps
Google Map 1 (H1N1 Swine Flu)
Google Map 2 (”Swine Flu 2009″)
Google Map 3 (”HPAI H5N1 30-Day Outbreak Map”)

HealthMap (previously mentioned here) might be the most complete map visualization. HealthMap’s twitter feed is also interesting, but gives a more panicked impression than that of the CDC (see above)

April 27th, 2009 | Category: Consumer Health Info, For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology | Comments (4)

The idea behind rateadrug.com is for users to rate drugs.

Our goal is to provide unique user-generated data on side effects and subtle side effects of medications. We want to know how these prescription drugs make you feel.

I’ve seen stupid applications of social media in healthcare, but this may take the cake as the dumbest I’ve seen in a good while.

April 25th, 2009 | Category: "Social Software", Consumer Health Info, For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology | Comments (15)

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.

April 2nd, 2009 | Category: For Medical Libraryfolk, How to, Medical Librarianship Blogs, Search, Teaching/Training, Video | Comments (5)

Don’t have an OCR application handy at your place of work to read the text of a scanned page? No problem.

What is OCR Terminal?

OCR Terminal is a free online Optical Character Recognition service that allows you to convert scanned images and PDFs into editable and text searchable documents. It accurately preserves formatting and layout of documents.

Free, requires sign-up.

March 19th, 2009 | Category: Technology, Web Applications | Comments (2)

This Visible Human Server is loads of fun to play with:

English language instructions:
http://visiblehuman.epfl.ch/Directions%20for%20use_Real%20Time%20slice.pdf

March 9th, 2009 | Category: Technology | Comments (1)

Okay, so we already knew that Pubget is pretty neat and, for the organizations who can implement it, it speeds up the process of getting the full text PDF to the user.

Pubget’s head developer, Ian Connor, keeps me updated on new developments. I was delighted to hear that Pubget now offers RSS feeds with links to the full-text PDFs via one’s organization’s access. The example in the embedded video below uses an open access journal, but gives a good idea what the new feature looks like.

So the idea is that if you click on the link in the RSS feed, Pubget scrolls down the list of the results, highlights the right paper, and displays that PDF.

Pubget also has a new Firefox extension (available at http://pubget.com/pubget.xpi) for registered users at that will allow them “…to download all papers from a search or latest issue to their local hard drive.” See embedded video below.

If your organization uses Pubget, how about writing a review for the JMLA? Everything I see and hear from Ian looks insanely cool, but I’d love to hear what a medical librarian thinks after a road test.

March 5th, 2009 | Category: 3rd Party PubMed/MEDLINE Tools, For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology, Video | Comments (2)

In this video, 4th-year medical student Ryan MacDonald demonstrates how he uses Evernote as his “medical peripheral brain.”

So cool.

March 2nd, 2009 | Category: E-Journals, For Medical Libraryfolk, Presentations, Technology, Video, Web Applications | Comments (5)

[Update] One’s FriendFeed feed needs to be public in order for IntenseDebate to pick up the comments and bring them onto the blog. IntenseDebate isn’t perfect, but I love the threaded comments, I like quickly moderating comments via email, and I like the sidebar widget for comments (if you’re reading this via RSS, visit the blog and check out the left sidebar). I’ll keep it for now. Thanks to those who helped me test it![/Update]

I’ve installed a plugin/service called IntenseDebate on this blog. Among the things it is supposed to do is pick up comments people make on my posts in FriendFeed and import them as comments. I’m curious to see if it will find those comments even if my FriendFeed is set to private. If you’re seeing this post through FriendFeed, please leave a comment in FriendFeed (not a ‘like’) so that can be tested?

Thanks!

February 16th, 2009 | Category: "Social Software", Blogging, Technology | Comments (1)

The Yale Image Finder searches PubMed Central articles for images.


That sounded not only like a good idea, but a good idea I’d heard before. In July of 2007, I posted about UC Berkeley’s BioText¹, which seems to already search PubMed Central for images. Why build another tool to do the same thing?

The answer is found in this Bioinformatics article

The authors note they are aware of BioText, but that…

…we are not aware of a biomedical search engine that can retrieve images by searching the text within biomedical images. This offers several advantages over searching over captions alone. First, captions may not contain all the textual information that is contained in the images. Second, image texts are usually very specific, allowing for precise matching of images with related images.

Neat. So Yale’s tool does OCR on text appearing in images and adds that text to its searching index of images in PubMed Central. Cool.

February 12th, 2009 | Category: For Medical Libraryfolk, Search, Technology | Comments (2)

I’m not sure what to make of WebPax.com…but at first glance, it seems really cool to have a Web-based service for viewing images in DICOM format. I know at least a couple of physicians who will want to try it out right away for sharing the occasional scan with a colleague from a distance.

I *do* like that DICOM files are anonymized as they are uploaded. DICOM tags are cleared and…

• The year and month are not modified
• The day is set to the first of the month
• The time is set to midnight

The patient’s birth date is set to January 1, 1970

I’ll say this much: If I kept a digital personal health record in an online service, I’d want to be able to view DICOMs in it with this kind of tool. Google needs to buy these guys or build a comparable tool. Maybe that’s what they and IBM can work on next.

February 11th, 2009 | Category: EMRs/EHRs/PHRs, For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology, Web Applications | Comments (1)

Most know I’m not a huge fan of Twitter (I prefer FriendFeed), but this interests me anyway.

JustTweetIt is a service intended to help Twitter users find others they may want to follow and includes directories. I recently stumbled across JustTweetIt’s directory of Twittering Librarians

Check it out, see if there are any librarians listed you want to follow and consider adding an entry to help others find you.

February 9th, 2009 | Category: "Social Software", Technology | Comments (7)

New to me- and a good idea to put all of this on one page.

http://www.cdc.gov/socialmedia/

I didn’t know the CDC was on MySpace or that the FDA had a recall Twitter feed.

I decided I should definitely follow the CDC’s Twitter feed for Health Professionals, which is for “…Health Professionals interested in staying up-to-date with CDC’s interactive media activities…”

They’ve also got a widget to help consumers search for products impacted by the Peanut-Containing Product Recall (embedded below).

Includes:

• Blogs
• eMail Subscriptions
• Health-e-Cards
• Mobile Information
• Online Video
• Phone/Email
• Podcasts
• RSS Feeds
• Social Networks
• Badges for Social Networks
• Twitter
• Virtual Worlds
• Web Sites
• Widgets

Go check it out.

Hat tip: Maura Sostack

February 5th, 2009 | Category: "Social Software", Blogging, Consumer Health Info, For Medical Libraryfolk, Online Social Networks, Podcasting, RSS/Feeds, Technology | Comments (6)

(First started drafting this post on 10/27/2008, then posted an incomplete draft by accident on 2/2/2009. Sorry ’bout that.)

I received an email recently which invited me to try the beta version of novo|seek.

Novo|seek is the product of a Madrid-based company called bioalma (a.k.a. Alma Bioinformatics).

novo|seek is an information extraction system for searching the published knowledge in biomedical literature.

novo|seek index the biomedical literature with a text mining technology that enables identify uniquely the key biomedical terms. To do this unambigous identification the technology takes into account external available data and contextual term information. As a result of this indexing technology novo|seek is able to retrive every document where a term is mention no matter the synonym used and discard those documents where the term is use with an unwanted meaning.

So…that means better term mapping? I wonder how the mapping compares to ReleMed.

Since “HRT” is something we know PubMed has had trouble mapping in the past, we’ll try looking for “HRT” in both ReleMed and novo|seek.

ReleMed mapped “HRT” quite nicely:

novo|seek was unable to map “HRT” and produced no results.

Moving on.

With novo|seek you can:

• Extract precise information for over 3 million key biomedical concepts, no matter whether they are diseases, drugs, chemicals compounds, symptoms or genes.
• Retrive key biomedical concepts and bibliographic information to your query.
• Highlight relevant biomedical concepts in the text.
• Filter your results fast and easy.
• Review key information derived from over thousands of documents in a single screen.
• Search for an author and find key research concepts based on the analysis of his or her research.
• Link to relevant external chemical and biological information.

I like the ability to filter by related concepts appearing in the left sidebar, but GoPubMed seems to do this in a similarly useful manner.

Click here for larger image

Click here for larger image

For that matter, PubMed PubReMiner does much the same thing.

Questions for novo|seek:

• How does the relevance sorting work?
• What does novo|seek do that none of the other 3rd-Party PubMed/MEDLINE tools do?
• How does the mapping of search strings to “over 3 million key biomedical concepts” work?
• Could you give an example where novo|seek’s mapping demonstrates superiority to PubMed’s or ReleMed’s?

February 2nd, 2009 | Category: 3rd Party PubMed/MEDLINE Tools | Comments (2)

A friend recently asked for clarification. What is the difference between social media and social networking?

Yours may differ, but here’s my take:

“Social Networking” is an activity. When you go to a professional conference or gathering, you’re engaged in the activity of social networking. People you know introduce you to new people you don’t know. You exchange business cards and, now acquainted, may contact each other in the future directly without the common intermediary who introduced you.

The activity of social networking can take place anywhere, any place, and any way people establish and maintain these connections.

The activity of social networking has been amazingly facilitated in recent years by the appearance and development of online tools built with the specific purpose of illuminating and illustrating the complex web of relationships between people. I refer to these as online social networks¹

Lee LeFever does a great job explaining how online social networks facilitate social networking in the CommonCraft video embedded below, “Social Networks in Plain English.”

I think that online social networks are a subset of social media. Often, “social media,” “new media,” “the social Web,” or “the read/write Web” are used as interchangeable synonyms. For the most part, I’d argue that “social media” is anything that makes information move in a more multidirectional manner.²

There’s no doubt that a kind of networking can and does happen on YouTube or Slideshare or del.icio.us³- but these sites are focused on sharing user-generated content (videos or slides or links with metadata), not on cultivating relationships- so I think they’re not quite the same species as Facebook or LinkedIn.

Put another way: I think of online tool/site/service as an “online social network” if it exists primarily for the purpose of exposing or maintaining the web of interpersonal connections that already exist or the purpose of facilitating new connections. In my venn diagram, online social networks would all be inside the “social media” circle.

Still, this is sort of just thinking aloud. What do you think?

January 29th, 2009 | Category: "Social Software", Online Social Networks, Technology | Comments (8)

(Started drafting this post on 10/12/2008)

We’re well past the point where there is an online social network for every community. We’re at the point where there are an absurd number of online social networks for every community.

A selection of online social networks for nurses:

Nurse Connect (previously mentioned here):

NurseConnect is an online nursing community and networking site for nurses and other healthcare professionals interested in advancing their education, careers and personal lives by sharing experiences and knowledge with others. NurseConnect is owned and operated by AMN Healthcare, Inc.

NurseLinkUp (previously mentioned here), is one of many sites run by Online LinkUp.

ANA Nursespace (previously mentioned here) doesn’t seem to be doing much at all.

SocialRN

I asked Arlton Lowry, the director of SocialRN, to make a case for what sets his site apart from the other online social networks for nurses.

Many of the other nursing social networking sites that are operating are built with one key objective in mind – profit. When sites are designed solely for the acquisition of profit, the design of the site and features suffer. We built socialRN for the nursing community and we have no other objective in mind.

The site offers many of the features that the other nursing social networks offer – like, photo sharing, blogs, status updates, file sharing, groups, ext. But what sets socialRN aside is how it integrates other Web 2.0 applications within the users profile. A user can display their flickr photos, what music they have last listed to – through last.fm, their position with Google Maps, and even their Twitter update. It allows users to bring all the other Web 2.0 services they are using together into one location.

Also, the design of a site is crucial for a pleasant user experience. There is no clutter within socialRN. We have developed the site so that it is easy for a user to navigate content and socialize with other users.

It’s worth noting that the site is built on Open Source software that will is upgradable and expandable in the future. It will allow us to add additional features and grow the site as more users are added.

The Open Source software socialRN uses is elgg, also used by Nurse’s Cafe

In the category of Online Social Networks with Very Unfortunate Names, we have TNA LinkUp.

Liz: Whatcha’ looking at?
David: A site called “TNA LinkUp”
Liz: …You’re looking at porn?!

See? Unfortunate name. ‘Nuff said.

I was interested to find there’s a social network just for travelers, HealthCare Gypsy.

Nurses Lounge interests me because it is made up of lounges that are specific to metro area or nursing specialty.

CampusRN2RN is for nursing students.

I know I’ve missed some- please let me know?

January 27th, 2009 | Category: "Social Software", For Medical Libraryfolk, Nursing, Online Social Networks, Technology | Comments (6)

(Example of how backed-up I am: WordPress says I started drafting this post on 9/18/08)

I was skeptical when I first heard about Health News Review…but learning that Craig Stoltz was involved with the project¹ made me give it a close look.

HealthNewsReview.org is published by Gary Schwitzer of the University of Minnesota’s health journalism program and funded by the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making.

Read a few reviews and you’ll likely find them reliable and wonderfully critical. Be sure to check how how they rate stories.

Health News Review focuses on U.S. news, so anglophones in other nations will want to note these:

For Canadian news, there’s Media Doctor Canada.

Australians have Media Doctor Australia.

The NHS Choices site has a section called Behind the Headlines which seems to serve a similar purpose for U.K. health news.

Your turn: Are there other sites like these that I missed?

January 26th, 2009 | Category: Consumer Health Info, For Medical Libraryfolk, Technology | Comments (5)