Category: Uncategorized

“Librarians “must assert themselves as key players in the (online) learning process …and change their roles from information providers to educators” (Cooper & Dempsey, 1998) ..providing technical support (Hulshof, 1999) and moving from “information gatekeepers” to “information gateways” (Haricombe, 1998). Many educators advocate for more librarian involvement, as teachers and learners, in communities of learning: “librarian[s] can shift focus from explaining library resources to meeting the ongoing information needs of the students in the broad information environment”…

***************************

The American Association of Higher Education (AAHE) has developed a standard framework for teaching entitled “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education” – all academic librarians should be familiar with these principles when venturing into digital spaces to do teaching, liaison and outreach.

Good practice in online educational and digital spaces should:

1. encourage contact between students and faculty (communication)
2. develop reciprocity and cooperation among students (peer to peer)
3. use active learning techniques (constructivist, cognitivist)
4. give prompt feedback (sound assessment)
5. emphasize time on task (rules of engagement)
6. communicate high expectations (sound assessment mirroring professional work)
7. respect diverse talents and ways of learning

Chickering and Erhmann have recently updated these practice guidelines to illustrate how communications technologies, and especially the web, can be used to support these seven “good practices” (see http://www.tltgroup.org/programs/seven.html).

References

I. Chickering, A., & Ehrmann, S. (1996). Implementing the seven principles: technology as lever. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2), 3–6.
II. Chickering, A., & Gamson, Z. (1987). Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 39(7), 3–7.

An introduction to a new wiki entry: Classification & indexing in health libraries

****************************

“Medical libraries around the world have used the National Library of Medicine classification scheme since it was first developed in the 1940s. Its development as a faceted scheme can be traced back to the work of the influential medical bibliographer John Shaw Billings in the 1880s, Herbert Putnam and Cutter’s work on the Library of Congress classification system in the late 1890s as well as the Belgians Paul Otlet and Henri de Lafontaine’s work on the Universal Decimal Classification system during the same period.

The NLM Classification Ws – Medicine & related subjects – originally a vacant section of the Library of Congress scheme since it was first developed in 1897 – is a more detailed classification system than just about any other currently used in health libraries. However, the LOC and NLM systems are designed to work together to ensure optimal resource discovery, browsing and seamless access to pre-clinical and clinical materials across health library collections.”

I had the pleasure of supervising a directed study this summer with a very talented SLAIS student by the name of Michele Wiens. Michele’s final report.

************************

Michele is concurrently a SLAIS student and senior manager of privacy, strategic operations (mapping) and knowledge management at UBC’s The Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP) .

HELP is an interdisciplinary research network of faculty, researchers and graduate students from British Columbia’s six major universities although HELP is housed on the Point Grey campus.

************************

Michele maintains HELP’s large database and library collections related to child development, socioeconomic factors and health. She has an MA in Epidemiology and Geography from UBC and is a sessional lecturer in geography at Simon Fraser University. Her health research and teaching experience spans 23 years.

************************

Michele’s directed study looked at current awareness strategies for HELP faculty – especially how to use OvidSP as a tool to retrieve research based on rigorous filtering, information retrieval and alerting methods.

Should health librarians be supervising directed studies? Is this the way they can extend their liaison and outreach with UBC departments, units and faculty? You decide. Leave a comment below. ~!Dean

Not necessarily in order of importance or influence – merely ‘of note’:

1. Surfing the mobile web – (i.e. Apple iPhone for physicians)

2. Micromedia (or microbloggging) – (Twitter, Identi.ca)

3. Micromedia Aggregation/search – FriendFeed (and microcarnival for docs) Monitter, Twittersearch, Twellow (cool applications)

4. Social Networking – DoctorsHangout, Facebook, Genepartner, Healtheva, Intermedi, LinkedIn, Sermo, SocialMD, Within3

5. Personal health tracking – My Digital Health, Google Health, HelloHealth, Medsphere, Microsoft HealthVault, Quantified Self, 23andMe

6. Video aggregation – YouTube, bliptv, Scivee, WebMed Technology

7. Bookmarking & infoclouds – Amedico, CiteMD, Connotea, Delicious, Diigo, LabMeeting, PeerClip, Wordle

8. Virtual reality – Lively, Second Life [slide set],

9. Google/Wikipedia challengers – Cuil, Knol, Medpedia, e-Meducation

10. Medical diagnostic & content creation/search – InfoMedmd, Ologeez!

11. Web 2.0 leaders – Talk and share via web 2.0 blog carnivals and discussions with medical folks like Ves Dimov, Bertalan Mesko and Gunther Eysenbach

Gunther Eysenbach and the other folks at the Journal of Medical Internet Research continue to generate some important knowledge about the impact of web 2.0 in medicine.

In the following article – “Health 2.0 and Medicine 2.0: tensions and controversies in the field” – the authors take on various ambiguities in coming up with coherent definitions for health 2.0 and medicine 2.0.

As many of you know, I prefer putting my energies into accepting some of the inevitable vagaries of web 2.0 than critiquing or rejecting definitions. I don’t really get how rejecting the terminology advances discussion at this early stage anyway. (Though I admit some of it has merit.)

Consequently, since I’m not here to critique this article at this point (though I will~!), I am merely saying that this is the sort of piece that health librarians should be writing for their own professional journals. And, because I would like some time to digest this piece (given that Marcus and I are working on something similar), I present it to you as a valuable addition to the discussion.

*********************************

Hughes B, Joshi I, Wareham J. “Health 2.0 and Medicine 2.0: tensions and controversies in the field”. J Med Internet Res 2008;10(3):e23. http://www.jmir.org/2008/3/e23/

Today we went over 800,000 viewings on the UBC Health Library wiki. The wiki is now the size of a small monograph (~250 pages) with updated content on all kinds of topics. We are very proud of the work we have done to date, the information we have gathered and the analysis that our entries provide for health librarians not just in Canada but around the world.

************************

Are we completely satisfied with the wiki? Well, no, we are continually looking for ways to deal with spam, improve on our successes and encourage collaboration internationally in building new entries for the knowledge base. Please let us know how we can do so. regards, Dean

Greg and I have been preparing madly for LIBR534 in September and discussing major issues facing our field. Ultimately, we run into the issues around using evidence to make decisions in our libraries.

**********************
For a view into opposing sides of the evidence-based library and information practice debate – and whether it actually is a new concept or simply another buzzword describing what we have done for decades – see the following EBLIP 2007 video featuring T. Scott Plutchak and Andrew Booth.

My feeling is that Plutchak is more successful than Booth at getting his ideas across in the debate even though I feel he over-thinks some of the issues (especially whether EBLIP is something new or not). Perhaps Scott takes his views to the extreme to draw differences between Booth’s position and his own.

My own view is that the diametric ends of the debate presented by Booth/Plutchak can be neutralized conceptually by taking the middle-ground – this is a place where most of us are happier anyway. As health librarians, we are able to explore larger philosophical questions in our field from the middle ground and can look at specific foreground questions arising day to day in our libraries there as well.

**********************

What is this middle ground, anyway? I like the approach of the bricoleur – someone who seeks out a combination of factors in order to make her/his decisions locally that somehow feel comfortable, sensible, “right”.

For me, this entails making decisions based on my twenty years in the field, a careful look at the “empirical evidence” (qualitative & quantitative), intuition and a good examination of context (where I work) and consensus (with my staff and colleagues). I don’t believe any extreme is being put forward as a panacea though it is amusing to see how far the ideas are taken in the video.

Discussions about EBLIP, and this includes web 2.0 as well as Library 2.0, and whether they are new ways of doing things or buzzwords seem sterile to me. Isn’t the point that librarians need to improve the empirical standards of our research by using good study designs and empirical methods? I’m glad the debate took place because it’s important to sort out where we position ourselves vis a vis the ideas.

**********************

Since Archie Cochrane in the 1970s, physicians have steadily used rigorous research to make decisions (despite RCTs going back centuries) – why wouldn’t librarians adopt these principles and methods? Why should health librarians be any different? The bean counters we report say to they want us to demonstrate the validity of our decisions based on strong evidence – is the issue how we define usable evidence?

Circa 2008, I don’t know any health librarian who isn’t under pressure to demonstrate the importance of what they do. This includes doing research to demonstrate the importance of our services as well as cumulating it from the professional literature to make decisions.

Finally – if a majority of us believe that EBLIP is a poor fit for our field we need to plan to describe other, more nuanced views of how to practice librarianship in the digital age. (For an example of this middle-ground nuanced view see the excellent article by Bayley-McKibbon).

(Re)Locating yourself within health librarianship – now or in the future?

Check out our redesigned course LIBR 534: Health Information Sources and Services. Feedback appreciated. ~Dean

From the newly-revised wiki entry on Google medicine:

“Newer models of scholarly communication are striving to gain back some control of the knowledge-base in medicine. For example, physician-created content built on open-source software and platforms have enormous potential for the dissemination of medical research. Physicians can submit papers to open access journals and self-archive so that web-bots will present this material in search results. Quick and easy access to evidence-based studies and systematic reviews is the ultimate goal but we are not quite there yet.”

The announcement over the past week that Google’s Knol was going to be in direct competition with Wikipedia caught me off-guard. The two tools seemed to be so different it was like comparing apples and oranges to me. (I was quite impressed with the pre-digested entry on evidence-based medicine, for example; on the other hand, Wikipedia’s entry on EBM has serious over-generalizations and problems).

But as it turns out none of those pronouncements is even close to accurate. Knol is no Wikipedia and it’s a poor-man’s proprietary textbook. Open-access files such as those found at MEDLINEplus or even at the excellent National Cancer Institute site will now have direct competition in the web’s attention-economy. Google also has the benefit of placing Knol entries high on its search results – so they will enjoy findability.

So what is Knol exactly if not a textbook or an encyclopedia? Is it a useful file of information. Sure it is; but from this early view of it, Knol seems to fall in the cracks somewhere as a kind of in-between source of information.

While Knol offers expert-written articles on very specific topics normally not found in, say, an encyclopedia it’s close to the kind of condensed information you find in UpToDate or Clinical Evidence. Filtered by an expert.

Can you see where I am going with this?

Yep, Google medicine. Perhaps medical content in Knol will be its own kind of open-access, searchable Google medicine product. A medical librarian can dream, can’t he? We’ll have to wait and see its progress over the next six to eight months.