The Search Principle blog

I’ve been reading for a course I am taking about how to acquire a profession’s fundamental knowledge-base, partly in support of LIBR534 but also in order to understand how adult learners learn to be professionals. Life is short. Learning is long.

Health librarianship, particularly as we envision it, encompasses a continuum of three broad stages of development (Bines, 1992):

1) the acquisition of health librarianship’s knowledge-base;
2) relating new knowledge to a body of problems, questions and cases;
3) applying knowledge in supervised practica or internships, an iterative process.

The sequencing of phases I-III does not always follow a linear pattern; some of our students have a health background; some have medical library experience; and, some have NO background in either. They are learning from ground zero. For them, the classic pattern as described above will probably be their likely learning path.

The biggest challenge for all health librarians is to keep up with the information age, and especially with search tools and interfaces. To be a health librarian, let’s face it, you need to love search. It’s central to our work, and will be for the foreseeable future; oh yes, and teaching others how to search.

The news that Google is about to acquire YouTube.com is no surprise to Google watchers: participatory and community-oriented, YouTube is the quintessential Google 2.0 resource. Again, to conflate searching, Google and the future of the Web 2.0 is so obvious as to be almost not worth mentioning. Among the leaders of social interaction on the Web, who are more popular than Google and YouTube?

Notice, though, that free content at YouTube is not always free at GoogleVideo. Google’s acquisition means monetization, but let’s hope Google understands the power of free over fee. Free is the catalyst in social networking. By the way, free audio and video content need to be brought together and linked to the journal research in medicine. Look at what is happening at NEJM and JAMA, for example.

A portal for all of these sources of medical information AND search performance via Google is badly needed. Where did I get that idea?

The U.S. Pew Internet American Life Project has published Riding the waves of web 2.0 – a timely, useful overview to some of the head-scratching confusion caused by overuse of the 2.0 moniker on everything blog, wiki and podcast these days.

The Pew Internet polls and papers are extremely useful, and provide a lot of insight into the socio-cultural aspects of the Web. But, alas, this analysis has some of its own problems.

First, the report is too short – six pages of mostly graphs, with a few measly references in the bibliography. (Wikipedia’s Web 2.0 entry is there.) Isn’t social software more influential? The Pew memo also fails to connect the rise in popularity of Wikipedia over Encarta due to the popularity of Google over MSN. Further, the authors don’t connect Web 2.0 with the excitement of search, and the web-changing openness it kick-started. Participation is incremental. Openness followed search.

Finally, Flickr and Wikipedia wouldn’t have been possible without the experimentation around free participatory, dynamic content software offered by search engines (and not just Google). That, for me, is the key, take home message of riding the wave.

Well – I would say that, wouldn’t I?

My new philosophy about finding relevant information: “It’s all grey, until you find it.” The problem is not always poor findability, but rather weak search skills. We can all stand to improve our search skills, even if we are so-called expert searchers.

This week, the sharing of good search skills is the focus of “The Web’s deep, dark edge: finding the grey literature in health“, a presentation at the B.C. Ministry of Health.

Diane Helmer and I have usually given these workshops together, so I’m trying to focus on searchability in general, and not grey lit applicability in medicine. (See my wayfinder on acupuncture & addiction).

It’s no small wonder that Diane and I usually cover this content in a full-day workshop. Searching for grey literature requires a lot of background about trends in publishing, and creative sleuthing – and not just using the traditional search tools.

Dr. Joanne Fox at the UBC Bioinformatics Centre is speaking to our library school students tonight about bioinformatics. I am happy to share her presentation with you. I’ll report back to readers about her talk, and what bioinformatics might mean for health librarians, and the future of search.

A community is like a ship: everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.—Henrik Ibsen

<a href=”http://migrator.rab.olt.ubc.ca/googlescholar/2006/08/Here-is-UBC-HealthLib-Wiki/”>Another ship metaphor. The UBC Health Library wiki was the topic of a half-page story in the Ubyssey newspaper last week. No one [barely] noticed. They even interviewed Brian Lamb. We’ve been operational for three weeks, and just went over 3000 visitors. No one noticed. Barely.

SLAIS student Megan Wiebe and I are formatting our poster for PNCMLA: Expert searching for grey literature: using wiki technologies. It’s still early days, but I just don’t know whether this whole experiment will work. Will the wiki be useful? Will health librarians use it? At the moment, the UBC health library wiki is the push I’ve needed to write my own book; most of the content on the wiki is mine. Bling. Gone.

The new, dual professionalism for librarians requires us to be teachers. My goal in taking courses on globalization and adult learning is to establish a knowledge-base in pedagogies, and to bring that knowledge to my information literacy efforts. Search is affected by global change which I have written about <a href=”http://migrator.rab.olt.ubc.ca/googlescholar/2006/08/Glocalization-in-Search—Is-this-Search-2.0?/”>here, and here, and here.

My goal during my 2007 sabbatical is to understand emerging knowledge-based societies, and their implications for learning. Some of the specific research goals that I plan to pursue:

– To read widely about post-industrial digital and knowledge-based societies;
– To understand how new e-information and technologies create learning opportunities for all, despite varying resources, geographies, cultures, economies and religio-political affiliations of participants;
– To research how radical, new forms of social software can be used to create new forms of learning, and hence knowledge;
– To research and write about open-access publishing (and search) to improve evidence-based medicine;
– To contextualize knowledge to inform my teaching, and professional practice.

1. Entrez, NLM’s cross-database search – type in your search terms, and presto!

2. Google scholar – scholar.google.com

See GS search on Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome or classic Google.

3. NLM Gateway – http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/

See search on Klippel -Trenaunay syndrome

4. SUMSearch – http://sumsearch.uthscsa.edu

See search on Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome

5. TRIP Database – http://www.tripdatabase.com

See search on Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome

Tonight’s LIBR534 class is about searching. No surprise there, except that the exercises will require librarians-to-be to use the grey power between their eardrums (no Googling). We’ll also get all of the students to break into small groups to discuss fairly-involved reference questions that require lateral thinking, across the print and digital, the bibliographic and full-text landscapes. In the meantime, try these:

Brain teaser reference questions

1. What is the circumference of the earth? | possible e-answer |

2. What is the caduceus? What is the rod of aesclepius? | possible e-answer |

3. Address for the Deer Lodge Centre in Winnipeg? Dr. P. Forsyth in Calgary?

4. The abbreviation PDD-NOS – what does it stand for? | possible e-answer |

5. What does the word toxoplasmosis mean? | possible e-answer |

6. The brand name for the drug paroxetine? | possible e-answer |

7. What is Morgagni-Stewart-Morel syndrome? | possible e-answer |

8. What is the normal range for hemoglobin in men? Women? | possible e-answer |

9. Where is the trigeminal nerve? What is its function? | possible e-answer |

10. What test is used to determine Cushing’s syndrome? | possible e-answer |

11. What does an elevated hCG in the blood signify? | possible e-answer |

Try to resist Google – I dare ya. Health librarians are the best search engines, if we know our sources.

Surely, I jest. Actually, not as much as I should on this blog. Blogging is not (yet) evidence-based, though I’d like to see our students search for the evidence, and talk about its attendent challenges. (Info-glut, for example) At the moment, however, there is evidence of other things. Levity. Brevity. Wit. Perhaps a new direction for this blog? (And, recurrent themes of forensics and decapitation, but more about that later.)

Our SLAIS student bloggers in LIBR534 stand in contrast to the University of Alabama’s 1000 word-a-post bloggers.

Dr. Steven MacCall assigns posts of 750-1000 words each to get UofA SLIS bloggers into the health library literature. So far, we haven’t asked our students to read anything critically except maybe a few news stories (old vs. new media), but we hope they will start to read articles from JMLA and the journal, Medical Reference Services Quarterly. And don’t forget the now open-access JCHLA/JABSC.

We’ve thrown our students into the deep end of search, and now ask them to take time out to read the literature; maybe even blog/ abstract some articles. But, please, not a 1000 words.

Some interesting posts this past week from LIBR 534:

1. Allan’s library – “The new web”

2. Byte my book – “Browsing the new way”

3. Consumer health forum – “Heal thyself with Healia”

4. Health Info-Chick – “Worker pulled through woodchipper”

5. LIBR 534: Rooth’s blog – “The Salt Lobby vs. Big Pharmaceuticals”

Steven, are we creating a new generation of medical library bloggers? Hope so, Dean