The Search Principle blog

Healia’s Tom Eng e-mailed me (and, I’m sure, others) about Healia Communities in beta, a consumer health site with all kinds of web 2.0 bells, files of information and discussion forums/ whistles. What do I think? he asks.

My initial observations:
– home page seems a bit intimidating and busy; is less more?
– a good example of user-interface brilliance (saw on Rothman’s Twitter page)
http://hcl.harvard.edu/index.html

– Is the Healia home page too long? I think it might be.
– Is it clear to web users where “they can begin“?
– “Join now” is a good feature, but what if you don’t want to join now? 🙂
– Are the images used representative of the diversity of health consumers?
– Will this affect branding?
– Would a few more images reflecting multiculturalism, diversity and teens be useful?

What do you think? When I saw the Harvard College Library page, my first thought was paradigm shift. I really loved the 1638 watermark, too.

Jon Brassey (of TRIP) weighs in on the web 3.0 thang. Have a good weekend, Dean

After I posted “How can I become a medical librarian?” a few brave souls e-mailed me to discuss the issues of competencies, expertise and – the triple threat – knowledge, skills and abilities. One library assistant whom I’ve known for years (and who works as a director of a public library branch in a remote area of Canada) said that she has a separate category for the triple-threaters. You know, those library professionals who are at the top of their game, extremely capable and for whom everything turns to gold. Think Roger Federer. Barack Obama. Michelle Kwan – only in libraries. Another way to refer to these library professionals? Without peer. Sui generis. They are the exception to the rule that you need an MLIS to work as a professional librarian, and they deserve to be acknowledged for their contributions. To win the gold.

By way of introduction, read Anna’s most recent post on her blog:

“Thank you everyone, for all the advice and attention. I think my point may have gotten a little buried in my rant. I don’t think I should have to be, or enlist the services of, a medical librarian in order to do a simple search on a literature search engine. PubMed should be an intuitive search engine such as Google, or others. I don’t know of many researchers, either MDs or PhDs, who have had extensive training in computer science or search algorithms. I am going to go out on a limb and say that I am representative of many other biomedical researchers in my struggles with PubMed. I am trained in Cell Biology and Virology. PubMed should be tuned to my needs and my skill set. I should not have to tune to it. Harsh as it may sound, PubMed is most useful for biomedical professionals, not for medical librarians or for computer scientists. Yes, if I devoted an afternoon or more to learning the system I dare say I would become a proficient, but my question stands – why should I have to?”
– Anna Kushnir, Nature Network blog

Are there lessons here for both librarians and researchers? Medical librarians are talking about this issue on their MEDLIB listserv – take a gander.

My feeling is that cell biology and virology searching is particularly tricky on PubMed and on the other Entrez tools. For example, I know that certain virus-related searches (Anna’s area) can only be keyworded. Could this be the reason why Anna is struggling with PubMed and why she feels that literature reviews are particularly challenging there?

It must be extremely difficult to cumulate the literature where you have to work around lack of MeSH and keyword variants proliferate. Hey, isn’t that what Allan and I were talking about here?

Today, at the new School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS) computer lab, we held the health librarian Student Interest Group‘s first MEDLINE search ‘unconference‘.

Ever heard of an unconference? So cool. Such fun: no set agenda, whoever arrives participates and when topics run dry, the event is over. We ran the session for about 1.5 hours.

The new Ike Barber Learning Centre is a great open venue for bringing MLIS and MAS students together for a peer-to-peer (P2P) learning session. Even though I was there to help students, crack jokes and step in where and when I was needed (not often, I can tell you) the students set the agenda and led the session.

The IKBLC building is a sleek, spacious new building on the UBC campus, and a hotbed of student collaboration and learning – a wonderful and appropriate setting for our extemporized session on OvidSP searching. I had a blast!

I brought with me some old search questions from 2003 but we didn’t have enough time to explore them. Instead, we reviewed MeSH indexing, Ovid’s mapping feature, explode and focus, the basic search tab in OvidSP (and natural language searching) and the circumstances under which these features might be used. In short, the rudiments of MEDLINE.

Why was the unconference successful? The P2P piece was essential but it was also an exercise in constructivist learning. In constructivism, the learner interrogates, probes problems and finds a safe place to learn based on what she already knows. This is the kind of informal learning we should use to teach information literacy and sharing information with each other as professionals.

I suspect this won’t be our last unconference at SLAIS. I’d recommend the format as an alternative to programmed, ‘sage on the stage‘ presentations and those that make everyone nervous (and subsequently bored).

Yesterday, digitally-embedded on the blog (far left, I’m using Google talk now – much better than Meebo), I took some questions from an anonymous librarian in Canada with an MLIS (as opposed to a librarian without) – and the question came:
How Can I Become A Medical Librarian?

Whenever I get this question, I always remember the courage it took me to ask librarians I looked up to how I could become a librarian. I wasn’t sure I’d be taken seriously or even laughed at. So, I take these questions very seriously, and want to be as encouraging as I can. I also try to encourage those who don’t have the MLIS to apply to great schools in Canada and the United States because there are many.

The truth is that having the MLIS or MiSt is not a guarantee for lifelong admission into professional librarianship. You must work hard. Discussion on the blogosphere in the last week affirms my sense that many in our field want to recognize “equivalent experience” and those working in libraries for many years. Work experience = MLIS.

Do I think this is a bad augury? Not really, we have always had gifted library people working in our ranks who haven’t had the pleasure of doing an MLIS. ::grin;; But I’m trying to sort through it, to be honest. There are fiercely talented library professionals with and without the advanced degree. Conversely, in academic health libraries, I know librarians who have PhDs and second subject master’s degrees. Talk about disparity. (How does AHIP view or handle this issue, do you think?)

In any case, to get the ball rolling look at MLA’s sample job description for a director in a small or one-person medical or health library. I don’t see any mention of the ALA-accredited degree stipulation that is common in most postings. Perhaps it’s time I dragged myself out of the neanderthal middle ages and looked at this issue more holistically. The truth is our profession needs talent, and a way to use it to its full.

In the meantime, I hope that the UBC Health Library wiki is a good way to start to explore some of the issues that we feel are central to our work in this extremely rewarding field. I welcome you all to use this tool as we try to make it relevant for those asking these larger questions about our future.

First, what is search engine optimization (SEO)? See wikipedia entry.

I believe that most search companies will have to change their business models in web 3.0. Allan and I point out in our Web 3.0 article that semantic technologies may change the whole findability issue on the future web. In other words, we won’t rely so much on Pagerank (link popularity) or other quantitative methods to get us to the documents our users need. High-quality, ‘expert’ content will reign supreme.

The question I have is how does web monetization change? Will it be ad-centric? Any ideas? Here’s the piece on search engine optimization and whether it dies in web 3.0:

Does SEO Die on Web 3.0?
http://www.seo.com/blog/google/does-seo-die-on-web-3-point-0/

It’s only one metric of progress of the UBC Health Library wiki – just went over 500,000 page views on the weekend. Many thanks to our library school volunteers. Have a great week everyone.

Dean

ps. My neighbor Samuel died peacefully yesterday. May he rest in peace. (Thanks for your thoughts.)

Great music. Wonderful athletes. Pure escapism. (Some bad costumes 🙂 Those of you who know me, know that I ::heart:: skating almost as much as library patrons (and workers). But this weekend, I found more than a year’s worth of inspiration in the lyrical skating of Scott Moir and Tessa Virtue (silver medalists – so beautiful it hurts, watch it here, and weep) and Jessica Dube and Bryce Davison (bronze! – remember a year ago she had her face badly slashed by her partner’s blade?).

Even better than all of this excitement was Jeff Buttle‘s gold-worthy performance (below), putting him atop the world, after so many setbacks, losing his Canadian title and taking hits from all sides. Through adversity, there is achievement.

Top o’ the heap. Thanks to the wonders of a Youtube video snippet – here is a performance worthy of world champion, Jeff Buttle!

Anna Kushnir is a PhD student at Harvard. Her post about the deficiencies of PubMed caught my eye, and my post seems to be a popular one at the moment!

In her last comment, Anna asks a great question:

“Another PubMed question/issue – initials confuse PubMed, as do searches for the last names of multiple authors. What is the best way to search?”

My top suggestions:

1. Try popping in the author’s last name and initials in the Single Citation Matcher.

2. Right from PubMed‘s homepage, try: lastname – space – initials. By the way, is this you? You can remove “Harvard” for more papers….

3. From the PubMed homepage, there are neat little files of information (and viewlets) that help you understand what PubMed needs from you when you type stuff in. Click the “author file” for information about how to search for authors.