The Search Principle blog

Just for the pure sharing-fun of it, for the socially-collaborative nature of it – I edited the Wikipedia entry on Google scholar today.

Some incorrect, outdated information hampered the entry; yet, my ‘wisdom of the crowds’ editing predecessors were not way off. The entry has links to websites and further reading at the bottom; even UBC Google scholar blog. But it’s not complete; go add your two cents (sense).

This is my first foray into Wiki-editing. It’ll be interesting to see if the Wikipedians edit me. Hey, shouldn’t Wikipedia allow tagging the entry, for search variants?

ps. Any ideas how I’d cite the entry using Vancouver or AMA style?

Post-technorati trend tracker, Niall Kennedy, left his live.com post yesterday, stating Microsoft was suffering from a kind of “general paralysis“. The summer of discontent includes the exodus of others like Robert Scoble (escaping to PodTech.net), and Bill Gates himself (to his own foundation).

But searching the Web – and its attendant pot(s) of gold – has never been Microsoft’s strongsuit, or even a major interest. Microsoft’s Vista seems to be their raison d’etre these days. In fact, in search, Microsoft consistently finishes behind Yahoo and Google, and this despite its attempts at transparency, and good public relations. Somehow, live.com just isn’t catching on.

So – what’s up with that? In April, the release of Live and Academic Search held out a lot of promise for Microsoft, but these setbacks have not helped matters. This summer, I have spoken at conferences, given search workshops to physicians and residents – but, no one even knows that Live.com exists. “What is it?”, doctors ask.

In medicine, at least, we don’t need Microsoft’s Academic Search. Its medical content is limited, we can’t tell if our favorite websites are crawled and we don’t know if it crawls PubMed. In Google scholar, we can at least make an educated guess about content – but not so with Microsoft.

Readers: until you hear from me otherwise, stay with what I said here. I wrote it in April but it still applies today. Maybe this is the summer of my discontent? Dean

Before I get to HealthLibWiki, let’s start with medical librarian bloggers. The Krafty Librarian was among the first (correct me, if I’m wrong); and, I believe that Denise at LibrariansRx was close behind (though, she has left health libraries, and Trish is here). We now have David Rothman, and even a new medical maven, Alexis Eastbrook in the U.S.

UBC Academic Search – Google Scholar blog has become a general search blog, a place where I can explore some of the larger trends in the delivery of reference and information services in academia, and hospitals. However, biomedical research depends on search in a way other disciplines do not. And, you’ll have surmised by now that findability in medicine is linked to improved health, which is why it matters.

My colleague Greg Rowell and I have been gathering evidence to support our overhaul of LIBR534. We want this course to be a reflection of the state of the art of health libraries. Though we are not professional educators, we know what works in our teaching; we are health librarians with considerable teaching experience. Together, we augment each other’s knowledge base to include hospital, academic and clinical medicine. Greg also has experience in consortia, like eHLBC.

We are entering an age of augmented intelligence – the wisdom of crowds (or, at least the wisdom of groups). With clinical decision support tools like DynaMed and UpToDate distilling large amounts of the evidence and wikis freeing up baseline knowledge across the health disciplines, the retrieval and supply of health information has never looked so promising. Neither has working with other health librarians.

This may be the perfect time for HealthLibWiki. Once developed, I may stop blogging! (We’re asking ALL of our students to start blogging as part of their first assignment. How much fun is that? Time for successors, I say.)

Search trendspotting is a dicey business.

But one trend I’m watching is right out of a mystery novel. The Hermitage jewel heist – how many of you saw that one coming? Reports out of Russia suggest that the loss may just be a cataloguing problem, and that the KGB were dismayed by disorganization in the vaults. Perhaps curators merely lost the $6.3 million dollar cache, in the last 25 years?

Closer to home, the Globe reported that the Library and Archives Canada has its own catalogue woes: A catalogue in distress: the Library and Archives of Canada admits it needs help. A valuable map from the 16th C. may not have been described properly, and thus no one could find it. What other national treasures cannot be found, one has to wonder? (The subtext is also that professional MLIS-holding cataloguers are being replaced by technicians – read the comments.)

All this comes at the end of a week highlighted at UBC in an interesting presentation about Web search by Dr. Amanda Spinks. What I found compelling about her research: searchers are using more words per query, according to her datasets (that did not include Google); and, users are expressing more complex information needs.

Are we in trouble, or is it just me? As catalogues are dumbed down, there’s a push to adopt overly-simplistic user interfaces (googlization), while users express complex queries; meanwhile, library administrators push standards down on description and subject analysis.

Is it any wonder we are having problems finding things?

When I was a library school student in the late 1980s (second youngest in my class), I was in dire need of many things – not the least of which was mentoring. True, a few influential librarians entered my life: some, like Ronald Hagler, Keith Bunnell and Jim Henderson (@ McGill Health Sciences Library), are still around. Jim wrote about Google scholar in the CMAJ, for example, and the article is widely-cited. Even Rita Vine (another search watcher) and I crossed paths in those early days.

But they weren’t mentors. Now, many years later, I’m hitting my groove – and maybe I’m even ready to say I’m a mentor. There’s really nothing like the charge you get – the pure joy – of helping out library school students. And useful – I hire them to staff the UBC Biomedical library at VGH during the evenings, and weekends.

I always wanted to be a medical librarian. And I can relate to the enthusiasm that SLAIS students express. What are the names of these former students? Some from recent years: Melanie Wise, Karen Rojem, Shad Turner, Eugene Barsky, Andrea Freeman, Jeremiah Saunders, Dawn Bassett, to name a few.

This September, a new exciting (and excited) crew is racing towards us. LIBR534 is focussed on expert searching, but also on building a knowledge-base for health librarians on MediaWiki. Hey, David – of course, it’ll be open, collaborative and editable by anyone. It’ll be the wisdom of crowds, but the expertise of librarians.

The old web is gone. Welcome health librarianship 2.0. A time for mentoring, wiki-ing …and sharing the love.

Reuters reported today that the SEC audit of Proquest has revealed accounting irregularities. Proquest is an information aggregator and online newspaper supplier with products in business and economics, not to mention science, technical and medical (STM) areas. One of its most recent acquisitions is Evidence Matters, a point-of-care decision-making tool for physicians.

Perhaps this is the end of Proquest’s problems. Apparently, representatives were well-received at ALA in New Orleans. However, one of my American librarian colleagues asked me “How do I know if my billing is correct?” How do I know that there aren’t other problems in the company? The Enron debacle has made a number of people twitchy – and not just librarians in Texas.

Among its many products, Proquest Digital Dissertations is a good tool that I use regularly to search for theses, and dissertations. However, freely-available tools like OAIster, Windows Live Academic Search and Google scholar are making self-archived copies of disserations more searchable, more findable. Perhaps a theses aggregator will be an unnecessary luxury in the emerging era of open access?

Finally, what was Evidence Matters thinking in selling out to Proquest? A product conceived and developed with the help of Canadian health librarians. Tut, tut.

American journalist Neil Versel from HealthITWorld has written a nice summary of Healia entitled “First Health-Only Search Engine Set to Launch“. It includes my comments and remarks made on UBC Google scholar blog, May 31st.

So, what’s up with the focus on health verticals in 2006? Bottom line: consumer health is big [ads!] business. Health information is plentiful on the Web, but searchers have a hard time navigating it to locate best evidence for decision-making. Healia attempts to filter for you – and does it as well or better than most tools (though it’s too American). Clinicians will not use Healia, but patients might.

Does Healia or any search engine stand a fighting chance against the dominance of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo? I’m sceptical.

What will we call it? Healthwikipedia? HSL-o-pedia? Aesclepi-pedia??

This fall, my colleague Greg Rowell and I are teaching LIBR 534: Health Information Sources and Services. Taking the plunge into interactive, collaborative writing, we’re working on the technical elements of starting a Mediawiki for our students.

This week’s New Yorker article entitled “Can Wikipedia conquer expertise” is an exploration of why collaborative writing works, and why it engenders turf wars, virtual pie fights and online internecine nastiness. The article is also, in a sense, a repudiation of expertise in the 21st C. wikisphere (ie. anyone is an expert).

Health librarians are experts but we need better ways to share our expertise with each other. And, we are more agreeable than Wikipedia’s gestapo. Our objective will be to build a health sciences librarianship wiki with an international perspective, but to emphasize issues affecting practice in Canada. For example, expert searching for systematic reviews and grey literature requires that duality.

The final project for our LIBR534 students will be to work in groups and collectively write major entries in the wiki. From there, any of our Canadian colleagues will be able to edit or create their own entries.

Unlike our American counterparts (who rely on MLA’s publishing arm) and British (CILIP and researchers like Andrew Booth), Canadian health librarians lack a coherent knowledge-base in our field – be it new technologies, the latest thinking in accreditation, evidence-based practice, systematic reviews, qualitative research, teaching – what have you. This will be a grand experiment – stay tuned.

Academic librarians are major players in the emerging knowledge economy. Increasingly, we are being asked to have a command of disparate wings of the knowledge continuum: open access, new modes of communication and publishing, digital resource discovery (and efficient organization), description and analysis of digital documents – and, information retrieval. And that’s just the start!

Our mastery of information trends in academe coincides with a pressure to teach; and, to be information literacy experts. I repeat the mantra to all SLAIS students: it’s important you strive to be teachers. Good ones. Why is Dr. Mary Sue Stephenson such an effective teacher? Can you be an effective reference librarian, but not know how to teach?

In my career, I’ve listened to dreadful presentations, lectures and search workshops (and even given a few). Between our work in delivering information and managing people, there is instruction. With the dumbing down (the “googlization”) of reference services in our libraries, there’s been a concomitant demand for teaching; librarians need to learn how to be good at it.

By deepening our understanding of pedagogies, studying how user groups learn and are motivated to learn, especially in online environments, we can make a start. As a health librarian, I feel I am insufficiently informed about my teaching, and I need more training. In fact, health librarianship needs to engage in more critical dialogue around teaching. Being a librarian will one day be synonymous with being a teacher – but, for now, this is our new double professionalism. For now, we need to be both.

Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle in the tour de search. With Google cornering ads and Microsoft the wide range of office applications, who will dominate the health vertical market? Microsoft is making gains on the competition, despite Google’s ever-surging profits. (Look at some of the numbers.)

Since visiting Microsoft in April, I’ve been disappointed at the lack of discernible improvement to Windows Live Academic Search, particularly with respect to medical content. So, what’s up Mike and Thiru? (By the way, Mike Buschman is a librarian. Good move Microsoft.) They seem to be quietly beavering away at their product, quietly making improvements and now this speculation – Windows Live HealthCare.

Let’s keep our ears open with respect to Windows Live Healthcare. Google has made an obvious false start with Google Coop – Health, and Google scholar is stagnating.

Will Mike and Thiru win this week’s mountain leg of the Tour de Search? Stay tuned.