Yesterday, Dr. Freund sent me this hilarious piece on the semantic web. Perfect for April Fool’s. Here’s a choice thought:
“[the] Semantic Web can best be viewed as a product you’d see advertised on late-night TV, much like the Flowbee haircutting system, which “uses the suction power of your household vacuum to draw the hair up to the desired length, and then gives it a perfect cut… every time.” Huzzah 🙂
A few people have asked me if I am going to weigh in (again) on the Anna Kushnir-PubMed event. I’ve e-mailed Anna asking her to respond to a few questions. My goal is not to make her love PubMed – MEDLINE (or libraries) as much as I do. My goal is to touch base with her, chat her up. Do some digital outreach. Hopefully she’s not too stressed about her dissertation (and defense) to respond to my questions. Perhaps we can learn something.
The hospital library community is small in North America, and even smaller in Canada. One of the most important voices on health library blogs these days is American librarian Michelle Kraft at KraftyLibrarian.com. I have never met Michelle but she seems to be level-headed, perceptive and caring – here’s today’s post about the Anna thing. It’s well-thought out and I agree – this is a multifactorial problem.
But we can do far worse than extend ourselves to stressed out researchers, even if it amounts to nothing. That’s my service orientation. My feeling is that a library service (and career) is built one patron at a time. (I also think we need to be teaching more than information retrieval – see here). By the way, Anna did accept my offer for help from the beginning! (Note to self: never say the user is broken.)
I hope to post my interview with Anna Kushnir this week.
I am moving up on this list. I guess a little controversy helps. (Thanks to those) Think about where we’d be if I did a little promotion – Dean
Oh, I love it…”The job of librarian would be no less challenging, Captain!”
This morning, I spoke to Dr. Luanne Freund‘s LIBR530 class at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies about health libraries, my position, and some of the trends and issues as I perceived them in the information age. Luanne seems like a great new faculty member whose research interests kind of dovetail with mine. Information retrieval, user-interfaces, IA (information architecture), search.
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Some of the questions/ highlights during the class:
1. Do you need a medical background to work in health libraries?
“No, I don’t believe it’s a requirement. I believe that the CHLA/ABSC did a survey a few years ago and less than 25% of those Canadian health librarians who returned surveys have science degrees. I also believe that if you want something badly enough, and are willing to work for it, you can make your way into the profession. We definitely need talent, energy and enthusiasm though – that’s a must!”
2. How did you get interested in blogging?
“Totally by accident! In 2004, I had been reading Michelle Kraft’s blog, and felt inspired to blog but I didn’t start until 2005. (Michelle was among the first hospital librarian bloggers. Now there are many prominent health and hospital library bloggers, including David). My users were complaining to me about using PubMed, how unintuitive it was, and how they loved Google and Google scholar. So, I used the blog to track developments in Google scholar. Now, I’ve made friends in the blogosphere internationally, and feel I am part of a larger discourse. It’s great.”
3. Why did you start the UBC Health Library wiki?
“Sheer madness! Seriously though, it was connected to teaching health information sources and services, LIBR534. My thought was that I could share everything I knew about health libraries, our users, our unique Canadian context and invite collaboration with anyone interested in the wiki technology. We just went over 500,000 page views last week, and I now think we are up to about 45,000 page views a month. Since much of the content was written by the wiki advisory team, and myself, I wanted to include SLAIS student volunteers, which has been a great beginning for expanding our outreach to emerging library leaders.”
Based on my minimal twitterizations, I wrote this microblogging entry – more than 250 hits in two days. You gotta love that wiki!!~ Dean
Allan and I discovered a blog recently called the Semantic Library, authored by an Australian librarian by the name of Fiona Bradley. In this interview with Talking with Talis, she describes in simple language what the semantic web means to her and touches on the ambiguity that surrounds it. Between the interview, my Twitter linkup with Fiona, and her blog – we’ve got a new transnational collaborator and thinker about the semantic web and librarians’ potential roles within it.
From the interview:
“Libraries really do have a role to play on the semantic web. Now is the time when all the semantic applications are being developed. Librarians like ‘end products’, something they can see and use immediately. But with the semantic web we can have an impact on shaping how they are developed. How the languages will be written, the standards and other aspects of it.”
I’m ::hearting:: Fiona, in a big way, today.
References
Beyond the OPAC to the semantic web.
The Semantic web and Web 3.0 on the UBC Health library wiki.
and pharmacists, other health workers and Canadian health librarians…
References
1. Apple’s iPhone for Physicians – Applications in Medicine. March 2008
After the fracas from last week, I decided I needed to embed myself digitally where I could more openly converse with bloggers and microbloggers. I signed up for a Twitter account, and away I went. I found this whole exercise of observing the “twitterati” quite fascinating. I’ve written an early stub for the UBC Health Library wiki. Take a look at the entry on microblogging.
Are microblogging tools a complete waste of our time, and our intellectual and psychic energy – or, are they useful tools for librarians? Please contact me if you want to know more, or add your two cents to the wiki entry. It’d be nice if Darlene Fichter, Stephen Abrams and other notable Canadian 2.0 types would join in this discussion.
Check it out:
http://www.ebscohost.com/2.0_flash
One can see a general move to bolder, simpler designs, easier navigation and a more Google-like experience. Who knows? Maybe even better.