Among other things, Grammarly checks for commonly misused words.

“The Grammarly editing tool not only helps you locate misspelled words in your writing, but also helps you to identify the correctly spelled words that you have used incorrectly.”

Grammarly requires credit card information in order to start the free trial, so I stopped my registration. I don’t like those sorts of trials- the ones that rely on the user to forget the trial was in progress.

Not long after, I got an email from Valerie Bass at Grammarly (see annotated screen capture below):

So I replied.

Hi Valerie-

Two things:

1. I don’t like “free” trials that depend on credit card info. They tend to rely on the user forgetting the trial is in progress.
2. Irony: You wrote:

“Perhaps the requirement of a credit card or a PayPal account was a problem for you, in which case I’d like to ensure you that Grammarly will not charge you unless you choose to keep your subscription…”

I believe you meant “assure,” not “ensure.” 
http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/assure.html

No human at Grammarly proofed your email for correct use of words? I ran that sentence through Grammarly itself and noticed that it didn’t catch this mistake.

Best regards,

-David

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I still think it is a huge waste of resources for a library to invest any time or money in a Second Life presence.

“…[W]hen a book is returned and is to go on hold, the computers all have this quick audio clip (from star trek) that says “Something’s wrong!”
We wanna change it to something funny and more lighthearted. any thoughts?”

This started me thinking about sound clips that could be integrated into an ILS/LMS or into one’s own PC if one is fond of library humor.

(Don’t know how to change the sounds on your Windows PC? Check this out. You’ll need the .wav version of these files.)

Some ideas I had:

• Beastie Boys:
  “Hold it now, hold it now, hold it now, hit it!” [mp3] [wav]
  Download audio file (holditnow1.mp3)
  
  
• From Carly Simon’s ‘Tranquillo’:
  “Put it on hold! Put it on hold!”[mp3] [wav]
  Download audio file (Put-it-on-hold_Tranquillo.mp3)
  
• From Schoolhouse Rock:
  “Circulation!” [mp3] [wav]
  Download audio file (Circulation.mp3)
  

Other ideas?

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Twitter and similar tools have no innate value. The value is in the network you use the tool to connect with.

So I’d collected a cast number of citations in Zotero, but needed to export them in a custom format to a .csv if I wanted to upload them into another database. I was also a little put-off that Zotero’s search wasn’t more powerful (that’s just me being picky- Zotero is awesome and anyone who says otherwise will get an earful from me).

A little Googling led me to this post by Royce Kimmons that discusses how to query Zotero’s SQLite database.

(This post is largely a short summary of Mr. Kimmons’- but it is such a neat trick that I wanted to share it.)

Zotero’s database is SQLite. For me, the database was located here:

C:\Users\[UserID]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[random string].default\zotero\zotero.sqlite

In your OS, it may be elsewhere. According to Zotero’s support documentation,  ”[t]he quickest and most reliable way to find your Zotero data directory is through the “Show Data Directory” button in the Advanced tab of your Zotero window.”

Once you find it, COPY it somewhere else to work with it. Don’t monkey with your original database.

Then you need a tool for working with the copied database. Kimmons recommends SQLite Manager, a Firefox plugin, but I ended up using SQLiteStudio (free, portable application that requires no installation) and found it much more pleasant to work with.

Even knowing next to nothing about Zotero’s data model, I could modify Kimmons’ query to get just the data I wanted, exactly how I wanted it.

Another option is to export the SQLite as SQL and run your searches using your favorite database tool (even MS Access).

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Know of something I should blog about? Please let me know!

If you prefer, you can leave me a voicemail here: (315) 876-9574

BioMedLib.com (found, confusingly at http://bmlsearch.com/)is a newer offering that Mir Said Siadaty made me aware of in September and that I’ve only just recently started to play with. These are, in my opinion, the major selling points of the tool:

Use BioMedLib to solve common MEDLINE® search issues
• Does it take a long time to screen your search results in order to locate relevant articles?
• Are you sure you have found all the relevant publications for your query?
• Do you need to monitor authors who are publishing on your topic?
• Do you wish your search engine could sort the results by their relevance and publication date?
• Do you want to have a PDF copy of the search results for your records?
• Are you tired of using special query syntax language for more relevant results?

The BioMedLib™ search engine provides easy solutions to all of the above, and more. BioMedLib is free of charge and open access. Seeking to help themselves and others to overcome their frustrations with the search process, a group of biomedical scientists used extensive research and their years of experience to build BioMedLib.

In short, these are the things I liked about ReleMed.

The customization of the interface through the “Theme” features is sort of neat, but not really my cup of tea. The “Who is Publishing in My Domain?” feature doesn’t do anything I’d want to pay a premium for because these things aren’t difficult to do with free tools.

And I’m not thrilled with the search results for simple searches. If I enter “Melissa Rethlefsen” into the PubMed search field (she has a unique name, so Melissa’s name is a great test), I get good results: items where she’s an author or co-author- 12 hits.

BioMedLib doesn’t return ANY results with the same search terms, but if you search for “Rethlefsen M,” it returns 17 hits….but those 5 extra hits are articles where Melissa is NOT an author.

So…meh.

Thoughts?

[Other posts on 3rd-Party PubMed/MEDLINE tools]

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You can follow me on Friendfeed or Twitter if you want to- but be aware there’s lots of stuff there that may not be related to libraries or health information.

Zotero: A Guide for Librarians, Researchers and Educators

Certain librarianish tendencies seem to have stuck for good, despite the fact that I don’t work in a library any more.

Wanting to structure data about publishing/presenting by members of my department’s faculty, I quickly grew rustrated with RefWorks because it doesn’t do NLM citations properly and it doesn’t even have a Ref Type for Presentations. (My view, by the way, is that it is false advertising for RefWorks to claim that it supports NLM. It doesn’t. Not correctly and not thoroughly.)

So I started again looking at Zotero, which I dreaded. The last time I tried it, I found it frustrating and quickly gave up.

This time, though, I had a secret weapon: Jason Puckett. Jason is a friend and I knew he was a sharp and terribly nice guy with great taste- but I had no idea how good his book was.

Jason’s book, Zotero: A Guide for Librarians, Researchers and Educators is outstanding. I’m a fussy critic of writing, but I loved Jason’s. The structure of the book is simple, the writing is clear and friendly. This book got me up to speed on Zotero much faster than if I’d just relied on the documentation and my own experimentation.

Thanks to this quick start, I discovered that Zotero is far more powerful than RefWorks and accomplishes much more in far less time.

If you ever were curious about Zotero, get the book and start playing with it. If you’re a RefWorks user, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much more powerful Zotero is while still being pretty darn easy to use.

ALA Folks: You can buy a DRM-Free version here.

Medical Libraryfolk: I’m curious. What are your favorite tools for managing bibliographic data? Really, please let me know in the comments or drop me an email. I want to manage the data of all publishing/presentation done by members of our faculty and I’d welcome suggestions of what tools to try.

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Hey! You’re reading this in an aggregator of some kind! [sarcasm]Haven’t you heard that RSS is dead?[/sarcasm]

For instance, I’ve never developed in ColdFusion before and one of my Web applications needs to have the front end (a public-facing side on the public-facing server for users) on a ColdFusion8 server and the back-end of (used by members of my own department) lives behind the firewall, in our intranet, and runs ColdFusion9…so I’m learning two version of ColdFusion at the same time.

And I’ve worked with Sybase and MySQL databases, but Oracle is new to me. The Database Administrator I work with is a friendly, immensely helpful guy who I try to avoid bugging unless I’m really, really stuck. Developers far more experienced and skillful than me have all admonished me: “Be very, very nice to your DBA.”

So when I run into problems, I tend to head back to the manuals for the software I’m using (Oracle’s SQL Developer, PL/SQL Developer), but sometimes that doesn’t give me the sort of quick, painless solutions I crave.

Last week, I wanted to compare the data in a restored backup to the data in our production database and generate a script to copy the missing restored data to the production database. I asked my DBA and a far more experienced developer what tool I could use to accomplish this quickly and easily.

Neither had any suggestions- though both agreed that it would be wonderful if such a tool existed.

It turns out that such a tool DOES exist- and is awesome. A little Googling turned up Data Compare for Oracle from Red Gate Software- which is part of their Deployment Suite for Oracle.

I downloaded the free, fully functional trial and was so blown away by it that I emailed Red Gate to tell them so.

The interface is intuitive and well-designed- without spending a single second on any manual or help files, I made my comparisons and generated a deployment script within minutes of installing the application. Go check out the screen shots on Red Gate’s site to see how simple it is to use.

I was able to compare two databases on two different servers, limit the comparison to specific tables and criteria, drill down for details on the comparison, and generate a script to make the changes I needed. In minutes. Seriously.

Blown. Away.

To my delight, I was able to wrangle a license for my own use at work. This was an enormous relief, as the thought of losing it at the end of the 14-day trial brought tears to my eyes.

Download the trial and try it.

(Does anyone recall the last time I so nakedly endorsed a product? I don’t. That’s how much I like it.)

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A few books I think are essential. What else should I add to this list? What are the books that no medlib geek should be without?

A few months ago, I took a job as the geek (technologist-generalist?) for the Department of Emergency Medicine at SUNY Upstate. I love the job. Love it. The people are great and the work is both challenging and interesting.

While I have really enjoyed shifting more to the mechanics of health information than the content, I’ve found certain librarianish habits and interests haven’t faded.

For instance, TheNNT.com fascinates me.

http://www.thennt.com/

“There is a way of understanding how much modern medicine has to offer individual patients. It is a simple statistical concept called the “Number-Needed-to-Treat”, or for short the ‘NNT’. The NNT offers a measurement of the impact of a medicine or therapy by estimating the number of patients that need to be treated in order to have an impact on one person. The concept is statistical, but intuitive, for we know that not everyone is helped by a medicine or intervention — some benefit, some are harmed, and some are unaffected. The NNT tells us how many of each.”

Here’s a great example: Anticoagulation for Venous Thromboembolism

Or check out Mediterranean Diet for Secondary Prevention After Heart Attack.

Is it just me, or is this site crazy awesome? I’ve encountered a handful of physicians who like the site a lot, but I’ve heared next to nothing from medical librarians. Any thoughts?

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Have you checked out our book yet?

I thought this was a curious philosophy and something about it seemed familiar, so I dug around a bit and found many versions of this line.

• “Perfect is the worst enemy of Good Enough”
• “Perfection is the enemy of Good Enough”
• “Better Than Is the Enemy of Good Enough”
• “Better Is the Enemy of Good Enough”

It didn’t take long to figure out that these were all misquotations of Voltaire:

“The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good.”

I guess I took that point reasonably well (as I understood it). In the context of this talk with the CIO, it meant that it was often not a wise use of resources to pursue perfection when we already had (or could easily achieve “serviceable.”

But whenever I thought of this talk with the CIO, the phrase “good enough” kept rubbing me the wrong way.

I’m not a perfectionist. Perfection is an ideal, not an acheivable goal. Striving for perfection, in my opinion, leads to unsociable behaviors, stress-induced health conditions, and really, really annoying people.like Phil Hartman’s The Anal-Retentive Chef I miss Phil Hartman.

On the other hand, I don’t think “good enough” is an acceptably high bar. When we deliver services to our customers/patrons/clients, should’t we be shooting for “excellence”? Excellence is do-able.

It seems to me that, most of the time, the amount of effort that would bridge the difference between “good enough” and “excellent” is small and that “excellence” pays dividends in extra-satisfied customers/patrons/clients that it is absolutely worth investing.

On the other side of that is that users/clients/customers/patrons are usually savvy enought to know “good enough” when they see it. It tells that that ther needs really aren’t the priority. Rather than paying dividends, it costs.

So. My new motto is this:

“Good enough” is the enemy of excellence. Strive for excellence and know when to stop reaching for the impossible goal of perfection.

How do you know when you’ve achieved excellence? Ask your users/clients/customers/patrons.

It isn’t clear from the site, though, where the price data is from.

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Have you checked out our book yet?

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
By James Gleick

Okay, I admit I’m already reading this one- and LOVING it.  Gleick (who also wrote a great biography of Richard Feynman), writes in a fascinating, engaging way about the history of information and of information technology.  This book wonderfully illuminates how we got where we are and provides hints at where we might be going.

I would like a stack of 20 copies, please, so I can give one to each of my favorite 20 technology-resistant librarians.

Check out these reviews.

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An Introduction to Research for Health Librarians
By Barbara Sen

This looks like one I’d love to read- and it is being released in May.

“This step-by-step guide provides encouragement, support, and direction for health librarians who may be new to research and evaluation or lacking in confidence or expertise. With a focus on practice-based research, evaluation, and small projects, it guides the reader through the research process, from starting to think about the research question, through to the completion of the research and dissemination of the results. It is designed to encourage quality research from library professionals and encourage them to add to the evidence base in this sector. This timely collection considers methods and approaches that are suitable in a health library context, making it a useful tool for health library professionals and students alike.”

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Evidence-Based Medicine: How to Practice and Teach it
By Sharon E. Straus MD, Paul Glasziou MRCGP FRACGP PhD, W. Scott Richardson MD, R. Brian Haynes MD

This one was released in December, but I haven’t gotten to it yet- and I’ve been instructed quite sternly to read everything Sharon Strauss writes.

“Evidence Based Medicine provides a clear explanation of the central questions: how to ask answerable clinical questions; how to translate them into effective searches for the best evidence; how to critically appraise that evidence for its validity and importance; and how to integrate it with patients’ values and preferences.”

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Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide
By Jessamyn C. West

Rachel Walden taught me what a “librarian crush” is, and I have had a librarian crush on Jessamyn since I saw these signs.

Teaching novice computer users, including seniors and individuals with disabilities such as low vision or motor skills, how to do what they want and need to do online is a formidable challenge for library staff. Part inspirational, part practical Without a/the Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide is a summary of techniques, approaches, and skills that will help librarians meet this challenge.

Jessamyn C. West’s experience as a librarian is deeply immersed in technology culture, yet living in rural America makes her uniquely qualified to write this book. Taking a big-picture approach to the subject, she demystifies and simplifies tech training for the busy librarian, providing an easy-to-use handbook full of techniques that can be used with all of a library’s many populations. As an added bonus, she also examines the players in the library technology arena to offer firsthand reports on what works, what doesn’t, and what’s next.

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The Atlas of New Librarianship

Libraries have existed for millennia, but today the library field is searching for solid footing in an increasingly fragmented (and increasingly digital) information environment. What is librarianship when it is unmoored from cataloging, books, buildings, and committees? In The Atlas of New Librarianship, R. David Lankes offers a guide to this new landscape for practitioners. He describes a new librarianship based not on books and artifacts but on knowledge and learning; and he suggests a new mission for librarians: to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities.

The vision for a new librarianship must go beyond finding library-related uses for information technology and the Internet; it must provide a durable foundation for the field. Lankes recasts librarianship and library practice using the fundamental concept that knowledge is created though conversation. New librarians approach their work as facilitators of conversation; they seek to enrich, capture, store, and disseminate the conversations of their communities.

To help librarians navigate this new terrain, Lankes offers a map, a visual representation of the field that can guide explorations of it; more than 140 Agreements, statements about librarianship that range from relevant theories to examples of practice; and Threads, arrangements of Agreements to explain key ideas, covering such topics as conceptual foundations and skills and values. Agreement Supplements at the end of the book offer expanded discussions. Although it touches on theory as well as practice, the Atlas is meant to be a tool: textbook, conversation guide, platform for social networking, and call to action.

[More here]

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What new books are you reading or looking forward to?

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