The boy (Aaron) is the scientist. The girl (Rashell) is undeclared, profession-wise. Well, they’re 8 yrs. old, but my oh my can they dance. Pure. Paso doble. Joy.
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Jim Henderson Gets ‘Wiki With It’
I wish we would hear more ideas via a blog from Jim Henderson, Life Sciences Librarian, McGill University’s Life Sciences & Osler Library of the History of Medicine. He is clearly one of our profession’s best thinkers and visionaries. Jim’s paper on Google scholar, for example, is one of the most-cited papers on GS in the literature.
Apart from that, Jim is a patriarch of health libraries in Canada (read the very brief UBC Health library wiki entry that I wrote) – and one of my ol’ professors. Recently, much to my pleasure and surprise, Jim announced an important interdisciplinary global health wiki that has been created and in which he is taking part:
“The McGill Library has created a Global Health Resource Guide to promote collaboration and to share and organize knowledge about resources within the McGill community and beyond in Canada and internationally.
This resource guide was created as a wiki using MediaWiki software so that as many people as possible would be encouraged to both use the guide and add resources to it. All members of the McGill community – students, faculty, clinicians, researchers and staff – can add resources to the guide by logging in with their McGill user ID. Anyone in the international community with an interest in global health is welcome to use the guide for finding global health information and resources. If you are from an academic community outside of McGill, we encourage you to participate and contribute to the wiki.”
I look forward to Jim doing his wiki thing. Let me know if you need my help, Jim.
Congratulations to Krafty – clearly, her medical library blog is among the most widely-read on the web. As I said here, it’s an important voice for our profession.
Yesterday, one of the physicians I quoted in the BMJ web 3.0 editorial was asking me about a newly-emerging area in neuroscience called connectomics.
“There’s an MD/PhD neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman at Harvard“ he said “developing connectional maps of the human brain.” As he described it I flushed up with librarian excitement, the kind I don’t get often anymore when answering reference questions. I ::lurve:: new ref questions. Although neural connectivity has been studied for decades, researchers have not been able to generate detailed pictures of the millions of neurons in the brain or connections between them – until now.
By developing detailed models of the greatest computer ever devised (the brain) and how it malfunctions when circuits are missing (or misconnected) means that the world’s neuroscientists can find answers to some of the most pernicious problems facing human beings such as finding treatments for schizophrenia and autism.
Whenever the words mapping and connectivity are spoken, I experience a special kind of health librarian glee. Not sure why. And not sure how I developed this problem but connectomics really got me pumped. I also recognized that connectomics is a rather suitable metaphor for mapping in the semantic web.
Making new connections on the web? Developing connectional maps? Perhaps we should refer to the emerging discipline of the semantic web as semantomics.
References
1. NIH Videocasting Event – ‘Connectomics’ March 2008 – http://videocast.nih.gov/Summary.asp?file=14343
This term, I took an excellent course with Drs. Mark Bullen and Tatiana Bourlova entitled ETEC520 – Planning and Managing Learning Technologies in Higher Education. The course challenged many of my assumptions of what e-learning is and, coming at the subject matter as a librarian, what roles librarians may have in embedding themselves in e-contexts.
My final paper looks at a “New Vision for E-learning in British Columbia’s Post-Secondary System to 2010 and Beyond” , and is hypothetically written for the Minister of Advanced Education.
Here are a few of my key messages from the paper:
• The rise of e-learning is a growing international trend linked to globalization, and parallels the rise of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Bates, 2001). A symbiotic relationship exists between the health of national economies and access to e-learning in knowledge-based societies. (And, librarians have roles here)
• Effective e-learning emphasizes access to high-quality, diverse public and private educational and training opportunities. However, it is critical that regulatory practices monitor private e-learning companies and the quality of their courses. (For example, do these companies have librarians on board?)
• E-learning in BC is now contingent on comprehensible organization, regulatory oversight, broadband access in smaller remote communities and ongoing base-funding for program development and addressing the digital divide. (What roles do librarians have in promoting e-learning?)
• E-learning is likely to grow exponentially in the next decade as BC diversifies economically (Plant, 2007). The challenge is how to make effective use of e-learning technologies and programs while meeting the emerging learning and training needs of British Columbians in an increasingly globalized economy.
• Other provincial ministries in Canada have invested heavily in the enabling infrastructures and mechanisms for e-learning (Abrami, 2006). BC should respond accordingly, and assess work completed to date. This must be done within the context of privatization of higher education, and fiscal and regulatory challenges.
• More research is needed into the efficacy of e-learning, and how to target disenfranchised groups such as the First Nations and women. Provincial strategic planning and budgeting should include funding for research into e-learning. Civil servants, policy makers and academic librarians need to plan strategically for e-learning over the next decade and beyond.
References
1. Abrami, P.C. (2006). A Review of E-learning in Canada: A Rough Sketch of the Evidence, Gaps and Promising Directions. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology. 32(3) Available from: http://www.cjlt.ca/content/vol32.3/abrami.html
2. Bates, A.W. (2001). National strategies for e-learning in post-secondary education and training. Paris: UNESCO/International Institute for Educational Planning.
3. Plant, G.P. (2007). Campus2020: thinking ahead. Government of British Columbia. Ministry of Advanced Education. Available from: http://www.aved.gov.bc.ca/campus2020/campus2020-thinkingahead-report.pdf
This week’s POPLINE controversy was a study in the politicization of information; in particular, access politicization and librarians’ roles in resisting ideological postures in mitigating access. This discourse causes us to examine our beliefs as librarians and information professionals – forcing us to take a stand.
Two thorough perspectives on this issue came from two medical librarians, Canadian Devon Greyson and American Rachel Walden. The notion that any organization would contemplate forcing abortion as a ‘stopword’ strikes at the very core of equitable access to information – these two librarians got it right (as did others on listservs).
But what I found impressive was how both Walden and Greyson see issues beyond the initial, most apparent ones. Walden, for example, raises the concern that the manager of Popline may have been been pressured into making this non-sensical decision, without proper consultation. Greyson pointed to the fact that the ALA president is connecting reproductive rights and intellectual freedom.
My contribution to this discourse is that the whole saga is emblematic of information politicization and exacerbated by extreme views. What else would explain this? Further, a lack of transparency and openness in organizations does arise when targeted donated funds are attached to projects with conditions. Pressure applied. Perspectives enforced. It’s shocking but not surprising in an age where church and states have unhealthy alliances, and when there is a war of ideas being waged in the presidential election. Finally, I think the decision to remove POPLINE from PubMed in 2001 was a poor decision, a Bush era decision. If POPLINE content were merged into MEDLINE we wouldn’t have this problem.
In addition, I thought for a while about whether abortion-related information could be retrieved elsewhere. This is the great boon of the Web. Of course, reliable ol’ PubMed uses ‘abortion, induced‘ as a MeSH; Google scholar and Scirus, for all their limitations, would never venture into stopwords for hot topics. Proprietary tools can also be searched, such as CINAHL, Studies on Women and Gender Abstracts and Women’s Studies International – at least in academic institutions.
It is my pleasure to tell everyone that Allan Cho was the successful candidate for a tenure-track position at the UBC Library. In May, Allan will assume the duties of the newly-created Program Services Librarian at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, the new peer-to-peer learning hub and library at the centre of campus. Allan was the recipient of the Bill Fraser Award, which is awarded to the student with the highest standing in medical librarianship courses. (Bill Fraser was one of my teachers, and a founding member of the CHLA/ABSC.)
As many of you know, Allan and I have made some tentative steps in understanding and writing about web 3.0. Allan spends a lot of time writing about web 3.0 and semantic web issues on his blog. Allan earned his Master of Library and Information Studies degree from SLAIS, and a Master of Arts degree in Chinese History from UBC. Allan is well-prepared for his new challenge.
He has spent much of his time as a professional reference librarian working with various community groups and organizations on campus, and was instrumental in helping to establish the CHLA/ABSC Student Interest Group. I am sure that he’ll be extremely successful in his new position, and his plans for using web 2.0 technologies sound very exciting!
Allan is today’s rising star! Congratulations to you, Allan.
I promised a few of you who have e-mailed that I would discuss in a future post how librarians can assume an air of approachability in the reference interview and in the classroom. I have always thought that the best reference librarians knew this, but perhaps it’s worth repeating. Empathic understanding – making users feel that they can ask stoopid questions – goes hand in hand with being approachable in the reference and instructional context.
These issues are the kinds of topics that LIS programs used to discuss in some detail, and we covered in detail during the time I was at SLAIS. Today, there is simply not enough time to convey all of these librarianship values to current LIS students except through mentoring, modelling and mentioning your own approaches/successes.
In medical libraries, this translates into being a facilitator for learning, valuing users’ opinions (even when you disagree or when you know they are misguided) and instilling a sense of trust in librarian-user interactions – whether it’s in-house over the copier or in the middle of your PubMed classes.
Do these values sound familiar to you? These are some of the issues that I will be talking about in my introductory teaching and learning column for JCHLA/JABSC.
Last week, Harvard PhD student, Anna Kushnir, stirred up quite a debate on medical library listservs and blogs about her intense dissatisfaction with PubMed. I am always fascinated by how strong emotions and feelings can be a catalyst for discussion and for cognitive dissonance. A few things that were not mentioned in many of the posts about Anna is how intensively she is working on her dissertation right now – and that she agreed very early on to speak to me.
Anna has very kindly offered to explain her positions and her statements about PubMed and medical librarians. I think there is a lot for all of us to learn by considering her statements and pondering how they may/or may not be emblematic of some of the problems facing our profession. If they are not – that’s fine make your points.
My only request is that you are kind in the comments. I want to promote this exchange as digital amity – for learning. No nitpicking, flaming or categorical dismissals of her statements, please. Enjoy, Anna speaks out with a distinct perspective.
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Interview with Anna Kushnir, Harvard PhD Student
1. How’s the PhD dissertation writing going?
Anna: “So, so slowly, but surely. I am almost done, which is difficult to believe. Thank you for asking.:
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2. What is your dissertation about?
“My work focused on the molecular pathways potentially involved in the reactivation of Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 from neuronal latency. I studied how cellular stress (heat shock, in my case) activates transcription of HSV-1 genes, and on a marginally related topic, how the neuronal response to injury (neurotrophin withdrawal and cytokine secretion) may contribute to
HSV-1 reactivation.”
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3. Several health librarians know you because of your comments about PubMed. But I am interested to know what other finding tools you are using? Why are they helpful or not?
“Aaah, infamy. I really hoped never to be in this position, but here I am with my big mouth and my blog.
“I would like to re-emphasize the point I was attempting to make in my post. It was more a commentary on the user-friendliness (if that’s a word) of web applications for scientists, not a comment on libraries or librarians, who exist on a separate plane (to my perception) from a web application. I analyzed PubMed from the point of view of a search tool with a complex interface. I picked on PubMed because it’s the application I turn to most frequently, but I could have just as easily commented on EndNote, which is riddled with bugs, or Scintilla, which I love but find difficult to use, or Connotea, which has yet to reach its full potential. I have some experience with developing web 2.0 applications for scientists, such as JoVE (www.jove.com), Nature Network, and Scintilla, and am always keeping an eye out for how to improve them, how to make them work like a scientist would want them to. Right now, PubMed is far from perfect for scientists (perhaps better for clinicians?).
“The other tools I use regularly for literature searches are Google applications – Google and Google Scholar. They are far easier to use than PubMed and bring up more relevant hits, I think in part because they search the full text of papers available online (the proportion of which is higher each day, happily). However, the search result output is suboptimal. Author list and article titles are truncated and there is no clear way to sort the results by publication date, or any other parameter, for that matter. Google Scholar links directly into my school’s library system, allowing me to pull the full text of the paper with just a few clicks. This feature is far from perfected on Google and fails more often than not, but I love the idea of it and keep trying to make it work for me. Yet, Google is miles better than PubMed at locating specific articles.”
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4. One prominent and well-respected health librarian feels that your comments, even though they represent an N of 1, are symbolic of some inability of our profession to reach out to researchers. Is there any truth in that, do you think?
“As an n=1, representing only myself and my point of view, I can firmly state that I feel there is an enormous disconnect between medical librarians and research scientists. This was made clear to me by the reaction to my post. I think that the ways in which researchers use PubMed is markedly different from how clinicians use it (for exhaustive searches on one specific topic).
Additionally, in my program, throughout all the grant proposal writing classes and all the qualifying exam terror, not once was the medical library brought up as a resource. We were not taught to use PubMed, nor directed to the appropriate resources. I only heard about PubMed training classes this fall through some fliers throughout my building. Granted, my situation may be unique since I worked in an off campus lab for 5 years, far away from the library and all department and library-related activities.
Feel free to consider what I am about to say as ignorant or naive but keep in mind that I am a trained researcher. I have worked in labs for the last 12 years and until this “incident”, I was not aware that I needed to use the expertise of medical librarians as intermediaries between myself and PubMed. Knowing this, I feel that the need for assistance in my searches defeats the purpose of an *online* search engine. Again, this is a comment only on the design of PubMed as a website not on the services available to me at the library.
Reading through all the responses to my post, the discussions on listservs and on other librarian blogs, I am amazed that the consensus is that we, as researchers, need to become better adapted to the available technology, and not the other way around. As someone who has devoted a lot of time, energy, and thought to the development of scientist-friendly web 2.0 applications, I fail to see the logic in this point of view.”
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5. If you could design an ideal system for searching scientific papers, what would it do?
My ideal site would have intuitive headings and multiple options for narrowing each simple text search (no list of [tags] to remember), and it would search the full text of available papers, not just the abstracts. From my own experience, I think that more attention needs to be placed on searches for specific papers. That means having a separate search box for author names (and yes, I do know that I can type [au] after the author, but a separate search box is much more user friendly and requires for no explanation). I recently discovered the “Limits” tab on PubMed – while it is a step in the right direction, it is so tuned to clinicians as to be practically useless to lab researchers. Never mind the fact that I had no idea what the term “Limits” meant and never clicked on it until, ok, now. And on that subject – none of the headings on PubMed are intuitive.
Details of what? I am unclear how Preview/Index differs from History. These are tools many people would feel more comfortable using if they were tweaked to be made more intuitive. You should be able to easily specify whether you are looking for a review or primary literature. All that would take is a check box next to the search bar(s). Simply typing “review” into the main PubMed search box works sometimes but not others.
Sorting results: I would like to sort search results by most recent to oldest and in reverse, by oldest to most recent, and to sort the results by first or last author name. I frequently search for the name of the first author on a paper, but the search brings up tons of hits with my author of choice buried deep in the author list.
Typing publication year into the search bar along with the author name does not work. It’s fair for the search engine to assume that four digit numbers in the search box refers to ‘year of publication’ not page or volume number of publication and should bring up relevant entries.
I am a believer in moderated community tagging. I think readers should be able to tag papers with subjects/tags/MeSH headings. A neuroscientist may read a paper and mark it with completely different tags from those a cell biologist would use. As a Virologist, I work at the intersection of multiple disciplines: immuno-, neuro-, cell and micro-biology. No one person or expert could tag each Virology paper properly and fully. That being said, some oversight is necessary so that pranksters don’t label HIV papers as Hi5. (Forgive the Virologist joke). I could keep going but I’ll stop. I have a long day of agonizing over every word of my dissertation ahead of me.
Thank you very much for your questions and for your interest. I think that asking the end users of PubMed (researchers and clinicians) what they would like to see in web tools is a necessity and a way to streamline and perfect them.”
This is simply one of the best health sites on the web, in any category. I encountered it recently for a SLAIS student who asked about good women’s health websites. Why do I like it? Diversity, beauty, simplicity. As a Canadian health website it stands alone – go and see Women’s Health Matters.
One of the great things about its sound design is the melding of good content with ease of navigation. Helpful categories abound, such as popular searches, recent additions and a list of contributors. Even a toolkit to search for and appraise health information on the web, written especially for women. 10 out of 10.