The Search Principle blog

Today, I read that physical and occupational therapists are starting to use Wii for patients in order to help them regain their strength and balance – and they are calling it wii-habilitation. Unlike traditional physiotherapies, Wii puts patients through a range of motions, gives them visual feedback of various kinds and even a score to improve upon. How cool would it be for patients to use these technologies linked to a medical library? Nintendo doesn’t market Wii’s potential use in rehab, but games of all kinds could expand treatment options for patients. (See my wiki stub on gaming.)

I’ve had my mind on writing a theoretical piece on gaming in health libraries for months. The idea of bringing more game (and wii) into the library is linked to the question of what are we going to do with our physical library spaces as we move more of our services online? There will come a point where our physical collections will be taking up valuable real-estate in our libraries, and we’ll need to find innovative ways to deliver information services and attract in-house hi-tech users.

Here’s Hilde Colenbrander, UBC Library’s Institutional Repository (IR) Coordinator, a smart librarian I’ve collaborated with over the years in teaching Google scholar.

UBC Reports has just published an article “How Information Gets to be Free“. It’s about the UBC Library’s IR which we call cIRcle – circle.ubc.ca.

I am quoted in the article as is open access advocate John Willinsky, who divides his time between Stanford and UBC.

My only reservation with IRs is that we need to develop a more coherent way to search for materials that are strewn across the hundreds of IRs worldwide. At the moment, we have the CARL/ABRC search service for Canadian materials, OAIster for North American (and some European) materials, and Intute for the United Kingdom.

Yes, Google scholar crawls some IR material but selectively.

Allan Cho over at Allan’s Library sent me this interesting editorial from the improbably-named Elsevier title the Journal of Web Semantics [preprints].

The editorial is entitled “Semantic web and web 2.0” and introduces a bunch of papers on the topic, using the idea of the ‘social-semantic web‘ – conflating web 2.0 and 3.0.

For the record, ten papers are a part of this issue, and refer to the semantic web as web 3.0. Are they synonymous? Your thoughts? – Dean

Some excellent reportage and editorializing in the January 24th New England Journal of Medicine on the state of American health care, universality, cost-sharing plans and other useful topics. What I find so interesting about the healthcare (no space in Canada) discourse in the United States is that the country is so divided in their beliefs, attitudes and feelings around this important topic. – Dean

Articles:

1. Health Care in the 2008 Presidential Primaries – http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/358/4/414

2. The Amazing Noncollapsing U.S. Health Care System — Is Reform Finally at Hand? – http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/358/4/325

3. Golden Gate to Health Care for All? San Francisco’s New Universal-Access Program – http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/358/4/327

Google is a search behemoth with a huge market share (60%+). And yet its reputation in the library and information field is in decline – why? Because its search products are not as good as they once were, and are losing ground with the information needs of endusers. The information age is more complex than the pre-2000 Pagerank algorithm bargained for.

That said, what I find interesting is that the library blogosphere has remained nearly silent about the possible merger between Microsoft and Yahoo. Google’s offer to come to Yahoo’s rescue hasn’t registered either. What’s going on here? This should be important to librarians.

By the way, industry data shows that Google has a 60 percent share in the Internet web search market in the United States, whereas Yahoo has a 20 percent share. The two search giants would have a combined share of 80 percent if they merge.

That’s a monopoly, people. Once Google finishes digitizing all books at the University of Michigan (one of its Google print partners), won’t their users have access to all of this information, 24/7? What kind of impact will this have on their physical libraries and collections? Who needs libraries after all this?

See Librarians a dying breed???

So,there’s talk now that Google will take some of its umpteen billions (earned this year from, yes, web advertising) and help its friend Yahoo from being a victim of Microsoft’s hostile takeover.
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From the Google blog, and David Drummond, Senior Vice President:

“The openness of the Internet is what made Google — and Yahoo! — possible. A good idea that users find useful spreads quickly. Businesses can be created around the idea. Users benefit from constant innovation. It’s what makes the Internet such an exciting place.

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.”

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What makes Google think that pairing with Yahoo isn’t akin to a monopoly – and greater dominance of the search (ad) market? And since when did Google have a monopoly on openness and innovation on the Internet?

Gimme a break.

One of the more exciting moments for me as librarian-blogger was the 2006 invitation I received from Microsoft to go to Redmond, Washington for the unveiling of its release of Academic Search. Those were heady days. Academic search looked good, and consequently Microsoft seemed to be taking search more seriously. I really had high hopes for what I saw of Academic search but it has been a terrible disappointment. Few academics even know it exists.

So, Microsoft’s $45 billion dollar bid for Yahoo is really an admission of search defeat. In the search wars, Google and Yahoo out-distance Microsoft, and are continuing to gain ground. Third place is an uncomfortable spot for the software giant.

The question is: why is Yahoo so vulnerable right now? Its stock has fallen to $27.85 billion, representing a $20 billion loss in three years. With the U.S. in recession, the sub-prime mortgage fiasco wreaking havoc with the economy and a failing American dollar, Yahoo either needed to restructure, lay off thousands of workers, or bail.

Today, the markets – and capitalism’s inexorable march forward – have provided the answer. The takeover bid is Microsoft’s realization that the future of the web is search, and web advertising. MS can compete in the online advertising/search market but only through acquiring Yahoo.

My advice to Microsoft: create better tools than anything we have seen from Google or Yahoo. Get more young, savvy librarians involved. Consider building semantic web search tools. If you need somewhere to start, get into verticalization. Build a medical portal. Call it Microsoft Medicine. The benefits to human health would be worth it.

These days, it’s a privilege to be able to meet (and collaborate with) library school students. I started to teach at my alma mater – UBC’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies – several years ago, and I have had numerous opportunities to interact with bright, enthusiastic future librarians.

As many of you know, I’ve worked with Eugene Barsky on a number of papers, presentations and even collaborated with him on delivering a CE session at one our national conferences. Eugene has had a lot of success as UBC’s first physiotherapy outreach librarian, he has won some awards and even pitched an idea for a series of articles on web 2.0 for the JCHLA.

In February, Eugene will be moving into the Science and Engineering Division at UBC Library as a tenure-track reference librarian, in the new Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Although he is leaving the health portfolio he has held so successfully, he will be able to bring his ideas, energy and experience to his new position.

Eugene is today’s rising star. Good luck Eugene!

Open medicine – one of Canada’s premier open access medical journals – published a paper yesterday entitled Toward a definition of pharmaceutical innovation, which includes contributions from a local health librarian, Devon Greyson. In addition to raising the profile of health librarians, this brief paper reminded me that our future can be summed up by the words “embed and publish”. Simply put, health librarians need to find new, innovative ways to embed themselves among researchers and clinicians, and work to publish our research as librarians right alongside our faculty and clinical colleagues. Our future is embeddedness in context, not waiting for reference questions to cross our desks.

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By the way, I think that Devon is one of our rising health librarians in BC. She is doing some great work for faculty at the UBC Centre for Health Services and Policy Research. In addition to being a community activist, Devon presents her work at conferences, leaves ‘a paper trail’ (publishes) and blogs. She teaches a women’s studies course at a local community college.

I can’t claim to have had Devon in LIBR534, but she is today’s rising star. She is one of many health librarians making a difference.

In the last few years, I have found myself at the nexus of a whole lot of discussion about the future of medical libraries, the impact of search engines in medicine, and how the changes to the web affect us as professional librarians. My blogging has pushed me into an arena of discussion, led to invited talks, and even requests from major medical journals to write op-ed pieces. I admit, the fun part was being interviewed by major papers.

But I confess: I’m feeling like I am no expert. I’m nothing if not curious (and driven) to understand what’s happening, both to the web and my work. But I cannot seem to take a reliable position vis a vis the web, and how it is transforming what I do.

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There are a number of issues. For one, I’ve been searching for some adequate practical position about where technological changes fit in terms of my teaching. Now that I am armed with learning theories from my sabbatical, shouldn’t I be able to buttress my positions through a practical reading of what’s happening? I oscillate between feeling that librarians are facing a crisis of confidence and identity in the digital age and the confident assertion that our future is promising (especially our teaching, and information literacy efforts).

Over the past year, I’ve identified a number of trends during my sabbatical: 1) the de-emphasis of physical libraries and collections (and the idea of ‘place’); 2) digital information production has reached unprecedented levels because of web 2.0 tools, much of which clogs the airwaves with spam and unreliable content, and 3) end-user findability seems low to me because of poor search skills and information literacy, but also due to the failure of librarians to be relevant in the context of web search.

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Consequently, I am on the look out for reliable and/or promising ideas, something that will help to crystallize some of my thinking and writing about the future of the web. For now, I am digesting this excellent overview to Resource Description and Access (RDA). Of course, RDA is the new set of rules to supercede AACR2 (why don’t we call it AACR 3.0? – just kidding). What concerns me most about the new code is that it is not bold enough or as closely aligned with web 3.0 as I would like to see.

This quote from the article above pretty much says it all:

“At a Dublin Core conference, Mikael Nilsson of Knowledge Management Research , Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, described the new rules from his point of view as basically “stenographic conventions for constructing value strings“.

You gotta love that. I look forward to your thoughts, and ideas.