Apropos of my sabbatical time at the Canadian Council on Learning, Will Durland, Terri Thompson and I will be speaking at the 2008 Campbell Collaboration about Finding Grey Literature. My role will be to represent the scientific view of retrieving the grey literature which is to provide alternate perspectives and to avoid publication bias, among other reasons. Many of the issues are the same for social scientists.
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This wiki entry on medical Punjabi is designed to help medical students and other health workers obtain information on learning basic Punjabi. There are more than a million Punjabi speakers in Canada, but ~350,000 in Toronto and 145,000 in Vancouver – many consumers with health literacy issues.
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What is medical Punjabi?
The purpose of medical Punjabi is “…to help the medical interviewer learn to conduct a simple but thorough history and physical examination in Punjabi. This includes a combination of words, simple phrases, and intermediate-level sentences, arranged under sections for taking a medical history and for physical examination, as well as a glossary of body parts/organs and common diseases. Some knowledge of basic Punjabi is helpful.”
For more information (and resources, see the wiki entry). In BC, the Ministry of Health has over 120 one-page fact sheets about a range of public and environmental health and safety topics. They are easy to understand. Some are available in Punjabi, Chinese, Spanish, French, and Vietnamese.
During the 1990s, Laurie Blanchard and I worked together on the editorial team for the Bibliotheca Medica Canadiana, a pre-cursor to the current Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association.
So, I was really pleased recently when Laurie was recognized by her peers for her Info Long Term Care blog by winning the Manitoba Libraries Association 2008 Library Innovation of the Year Award. Laurie uses her blog to provide current awareness services for healthcare professionals who work in the field of geriatrics.
The J.W. Crane Memorial Library – where Laurie has worked for sixteen (16) years – has been a long-standing provider of information on aging and long-term care in Canada. Laurie uses her blog to deliver information to users and those beyond her primary clientele. Through the use of a blog interface, RSS and social bookmarking tools, Laurie has created a useful ‘portal’ with targeted content from evidence-based sources of information on geriatrics and long-term care.
Laurie has worked a long time in the field, and I’m glad she is being recognized for the work she does at the Crane Library. Congratulations to her.
Zotero is one of those next-generation free software tools that undergraduate students tell us about – a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you manage and cite your sources. And, it resides in the browser itself, where you do your searching. Take a tour of Zotero.
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. Here’s a nice viewlet on using Zotero to extract bibliographic information from Google Books & Google scholar.
. And even a Zotero-Microsoft Word plugin.
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. Google has been improving its bookmarking service called Google Notebook, and even has its own blog. Keep in mind that a widget must be downloaded, which some library people cannot do if their IT folks don’t permit it.
. Check out this helpful frequently-asked questions (FAQ) sheet.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be preparing and delivering a number of presentations. In addition, I’ll be mentoring two directed studies, one about social software, and the other about SDI-type searches (remember: selective dissemination of information?).
I can tell you all with 99.9% certainty that I enjoy working with students as much as teaching them what I know. In fact, most of the work that I do as a teacher per se, at least as far as SLAIS is concerned, is about two-way mentoring more than teaching in the didactic sense. And, yes, it’s true I develop friendships, some of them long-term, and others for the period we are working closely together. It’s all good to me as I feel like students teach me as much as I teach them.
My approach to presenting is: ‘give everyone a reason to listen’. It’s not a bad philosophy and has served me well. Doing a public talk is a performance, an opportunity to strut your stuff. My success as a teacher is that I always try to read my audience before, during and after the talk; to refine my ideas; and then reflect on my strategies, here, on the blog. It’s part of my reflective practice.
Next week, first up, is the Campbell Collaboration with my friends from the Canadian Council on Learning. That brings me to my other point: use examples in teaching and mentoring. Contextualize your ideas and what you want to teach, always. Use case studies. Let your listeners and learners think for themselves, engage them and interact with them. Don’t lecture. Build long-lasting relationships with your students.
Mentoring and teaching – is about the love of learning, so convey your enthusiasm.
It seems hard to believe that 1994 is now considered pre-historic in Internet terms. Remember Gopher, the text-based tool we used in ’94 to browse Internet sites? Gopher wasn’t a search tool so much as a way to burrow and browse, pre-browsers, graphical user interfaces and Mosaic. The year 1994 was a full year away from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) introducing PubMed, which if I recall some felt would take away our searching work as medical librarians. (If anything, in an era of systematic review searching, PubMed has shown just how much we are needed.)
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I welcomed Yahoo‘s introduction into the wild, early days of the ‘Net – “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” it was called. It was far from perfect, but it was a good directory of websites. Keep in mind that, in ’94, Google’s introduction was still four years into the future. Almost inexplicably, Google scholar was still a decade away. Now, circa ’08, I wonder what would happen if these tools that have changed our work so much were pulled from our toolbox – how we would cope? Would the old, familiar reference questions return to our desks? They just might.
The information technology landscape is completely different in 2008, and it seems foolhardy to talk of this pre-history with any kind of nostalgia. It makes one feel old. What I find intriguing though is that as an academic librarian working in the 21st century of Twitter and the semantic web that I feel we still need to watch developments with Google-Yahoo-MSN very closely.
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So this weekend, when Microsoft – a company that, for me, symbolizes the standalone software company redolent of a closed, pre-web 1.0 era whose best days are behind them – made a valiant effort to purchase Yahoo, I was paying close attention. What would the merger mean for academic and medical searching? (The merger, though not to be, got me thinking that we might, just might, get Microsoft Medicine.)
What are the implications of the failed Yahoo-Microsoft partnership? More Google dominance? 90% market share? My sense is that Google will continue to dominate search spaces, including scholarly, for the foreseeable future, even though there is much potential for start-ups who see that academia needs a proper vertical search space. At the very least, an appropriate competitor to Google scholar.
Some librarians may suggest that Google scholar has the whole academic search space sewn up, so why bother? We still have our proprietary databases. We still have money to pay for them, don’t we? Do we really need a search engine to consolidate a highly-fragmented academic literature? made more difficult to control due to non-indexed open-access journals and the grey literature?
It was perhaps idealistic to think that a Yahoo-Microsoft merger might have addressed these issues, and aimed to beat Google at its own game. For now, I’ll go back to watching who’s likely to make the next move – and I’ll keep wondering how librarians can get in on this whole lucrative business of search at a time when our futures are by no means assured.
Tara Thompson is a Langara College Library Technician Diploma student who is finishing her last academic requirement before graduation by doing a two week practicum at the UBC Biomedical Branch Library. I am happy to report that Tara is today’s guest blogger and has composed her own website review of Women’s Health Matters http://www.womenshealthmatters.ca. – Dean
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“Hi to everyone! When Dean asked me to review Women’s Health Matters (http://www.womenshealthmatters.ca/index.cfm) I was excited because I believe it’s an excellent website for women who are looking for specific health information. The articles on this site are especially helpful, clear and written in a tone which presents important information and a basis for doing follow-up by providing links to various sources. Finally, I would like to thank Susan Murray of the Toronto Public Library’s Consumer Health Information Service for her input into this review.”
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Guest blogger Tara Thompson Reviews ‘Women’s Health Matters‘
I have organized my comments into six (6) categories, and listed my stars (favourite aspects) and wishes (what could be improved) for the site:
1. Accuracy
Star *: This site linked to The Women’s College Hospital (http://www.womenscollegehospital.ca/) which is affiliated with the University of Toronto.
Star *: Several physicians and other health professionals are listed as contributors.
Star *: Women’s Health Matters has been accredited by HON (Health on the Net) (http://www.hon.ch/HONcode/Conduct.html?HONConduct896435).
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2. Authority
Star *: Team members and contributors (physicians, doctors, and nurses) are listed (past and present).
Wish: Site content should include an author listed directly with their content and linked contact information to them.
Star *: News articles and resource evaluations list authors, backgrounds and contributions.
Wish: Where sources are listed, as in news, some incomplete citations are given. The news article, “Breast Reconstruction Advances can fix Distortions left by Lumpectomy” states that The American Society of Plastic Surgeons is the source but a persistent link is needed as well as a publication statement about how that information was approved for use.
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3. Coverage
Star *: Information on Women’s Health Matters is comprehensive and tailored to Canadian women.
Star *: Site is bilingual and available in English and French.
Star *: Health Centres section contains thirteen (13) areas of concentration and the A-Z list contains articles and reviews, web resources and books on over 90 different subjects.
Star *: Women’s Health Matters also includes an interactive, Le Club, which includes an “Ask an Expert” section and a discussion board. The discussion board is moderated by a knowledgeable person related to the subject of that specific board.
Star *: Women Wading Through the Web, which is an online pdf file, is a toolkit to help women sort through all the information available on the internet is also provided on womenshealthmatters.ca.
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4. Currency
Star *: Content is current and matches updates on the “About Us” page.
Wish: RSS feeds could be added as this is a small amount of work for a large amount of publicity.
Star *: The news area is updated regularly, approximately a couple times a week. Newest update as of April 28, 2008 was four days ago.
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5. Findability
Wish: Better metadata. Although keywords are listed for Womenshealthmatters.ca, findability via google is difficult. Using the keywords: “female health resource Canada” the page is not listed in the top 10 pages; keywords: “women’s health resource Canada” appears on the sixth page of Google results. Keywords are all chosen from metadata keywords listed for the index page.
Wish: An index is offered for each health area (an exploded section of the menu on the left side of the screen). However, this is not always coordinated with some of the articles within the site. For example: “Benign breast tumours. (http://www.womenshealthmatters.ca/centres/cancer/breast/description/benign.html)” I am told that this is in the Breast Cancer Health Centre: Medical Description, but this is not reflected in the exploded index on the left side. Health A-Z has opened, as has Health Centres, but neither tells me exactly how I got into “Benign breast tumours.” Better indexing or breadcrumb navigation would be helpful.
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6. Organization & Design
Star *: Overall the site is very pleasing to the eye, with inclusive images. The colours chosen are used to create consistent branding throughout the website. 
Wish: Some discontinuity exists regarding the size of each page. Some pages at the site are a few pages long while the news page is a bit too long.
“What causes Breast Cancer?” prints on two pages but News prints on thirty-two (32) pages. An archive for news is recommended.
Wish: The header may need adjusting. It should be a link to the home page and the title: “Women’s Health Matters” and a little larger. The title reminds me of some place holder (or ‘faux’) websites (see: http://www.googl.org/).
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References
Since November 2004, when Google scholar was released, I have been keeping files of the most important articles of GS written in English. I have decided to wikify these citations, and have come up with a Google scholar bibliography. Let me know what articles or books you want me to add.
ps. I am contemplating an analytical bibliography and will write one once confident I have all major articles on the wiki page.
Some of you know that I ::heart:: skating, and I am fascinated by the power of sport to transcend political, ethnic, religious and other barriers. Michelle Kwan may not have the Olympic gold medal but the work she is doing – bringing others together through sport – is better than gold. I believe that information has similar empowering, transcendent aspects, and believe that health librarians can inspire and unite people through the provision of information services. Today’s inspirational moment! Enjoy.
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One of the recurring conversations I have with SLAIS students is who in Canadian health librarianship is doing research and/or providing innovative library services to their clientele. Many aspiring health librarians want to know who the ‘leaders’ are in the field, and thus I have started to build the wiki files to highlight prominent Canadians.
This week, in my ongoing series of prominent Canadian health librarians – past and present I’d like to highlight the work of Jessie McGowan – an accomplished health librarian with a great deal of experience in hospital libraries and who is doing a lot of useful research, including promotion of the importance of peer review.
What’s remarkable about Jessie is how much she has accomplished in a relatively short time frame; I have tried to hit all the highlights of her career on the Jessie McGowan wiki entry, but let me know if not. Jessie is today’s star on the rise!
