Finding and Re-purposing Datasets
Thursday, April 25
11:30 am – 12:00 pm
HSEB 3100 D

For questions on the content of this workshop, please contact Daureen Nesdill: daureen.nesdill@utah.edu

For more information about the workshop series or to suggest topics for Eccles Express, please contact Jessi Van Der Volgen: j.vandervolgen@utah.edu

Need to find the right image for your presentation? Once you find it, do you know how you can use it? This short workshop will cover Fair Use, Public Domain, Creative Commons and other issues in the use of images for teaching and presentations.

Please join us for Eccles Express:

Thursday, April 18
11:30 am – 12:00 pm
HSEB 3100 D

For questions on this workshop, please contact Nancy Lombardo: Nancy.Lombardo@utah.edu

Resources:

Digital Images – where to find them and whats legal
Using Digital Images URLs – Handout

The Updated NIH Public Access Policy
Thursday, April 11
11:30 am – 12:00 pm
HSEB 3100 D

For questions on this workshop, please contact Abby Adamczyk: Abby.adamczyk@utah.edu

Thursday, April 4
11:30 am – 12:00 pm
HSEB 3100 D

For questions on this workshop, please contact Jessi Van Der Volgen j.vandervolgen@utah.edu

Through this new initiative, EPA is challenging the academic community to find innovative and creative ways to use TRI data to promote more informed decision-making and action on the part of communities, manufacturers, and government. Project ideas may range from one semester to multi-year research or coursework as long as the projects increase the knowledge, use, and understanding of TRI data and other related information. Priority will be given to projects related to one or more of the following topics:

• Pollution Prevention and Sustainability
• Stakeholder Engagement
• Technology and Data Mashups
• Environmental Education

Institutions whose project proposals are selected will serve as TRI University Challenge partners. Partners will receive direct non-monetary support from EPA TRI staff experts, and, depending on the outcome of their project, may receive national recognition for their project as well as speaking opportunities at conferences and events. Applicants who are not prepared to submit project ideas this spring are encouraged to submit project proposals during the next open application period.

Sample project ideas and evaluation criteria are posted on the TRI University Challenge website: www.epa.gov/tri/university.

Informational Webinar

Join us for a webinar on March 6 at 2:00 p.m. EST to learn more about the Challenge and ask questions about getting involved.  Register at:  https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/420376090.

Application Deadline

EPA will be accepting TRI University Challenge applications between March 18 and May 13, 2013. Award applications must be submitted electronically to Scott.Zachary@epa.gov by 5:00 p.m. on May 13, 2013, to be considered. Applicants will be contacted regarding their application status by June 14, 2013.

For questions not answered during the webinar, please contact Zachary Scott at scott.zachary@epa.gov

Help spread the word about the Challenge to your friends and professional contacts in academia.

ORCID is a free tool that allows you to gather together the outputs of your research under one unique identifier. It will give you the ability to make sure that the articles, data sets, etc. that you published are the ones attributed you, and are linked together.

“ORCID aims to solve the name ambiguity problem in research and scholarly communications by creating a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers and an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID and other current researcher ID schemes. These identifiers, and the relationships among them, can be linked to the researcher’s output to enhance the scientific discovery process and to improve the efficiency of research funding and collaboration within the research community.” http://about.orcid.org/about/what-is-orcid/mission

Currently, ORCID only supports published works, but in the future it will expand to include grant and patent information, as well as a list of institutional affiliations.

Visit the ORCID website for more information and to register for an ID.

We recently started a month-long trial of Data Citation Index and we want to know what you think. So check it out and send feedback, either through the survey linked below, or by emailed your comments directly to abby.adamczyk@utah.edu

Data Citation Index Trial: http://wok2trial.isitrial.com.ezproxy.lib.utah.edu/UofUtah/client.cgi
Database Trial Survey: http://campusguides.lib.utah.edu/survey.php?survey_id=2354
More information about Data Citation Index: http://wokinfo.com//products_tools/multidisciplinary/dci/

Enjoy the opportunity to learn about new resources for collaboration, discovery, data sharing and data management and participate in discussions about how these resources can add value to your research community. This forum features a keynote address by Victoria Stodden entitled, “Open Data, Open Methods, and the Promise of Large Scale Validation.” Participants will also hear from developers of tools such as VIVO, eagle-i, REDCap, and the Data Management Planning Tool. See http://nnlm.gov/2013escience/ for full details.

This is a joint videoconference session with presenters and participants in Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Portland (OR).

Date: March 15, 2013 9:30am – 2:30pm. Lunch is provided.

Location: Dolores Doré Eccles Broadcast Center on the campus of the University of Utah, 101 S. Wasatch Dr., Salt Lake City, UT

Registration: Free, but required. http://nnlm.gov/2013escience/#reg

Contact: Claire Hamasu for more information. chamasu@RML4.utah.edu, 801-587-3412

Hosts: NN/LM MidContinental Region, NN/LM Pacific Northwest Region, Oregon Health Sciences Library.

Eccles Health Sciences Library is excited to pilot a new series of short, drop-in workshops. These 30-minute sessions will provide an introduction to the topic and present steps for getting started that you can put to use right away. Bring your laptop to follow along as we demonstrate and provide assistance with these tools.

The Eccles Express series will run on Thursdays in February at 11:30am in the Health Sciences Education Building, Room 2120 (Alumni Hall).

February 7: Data Management 101
Presented by: Abby Adamczyk
Not sure what to do with your data once a project is complete? Need to collaborate and share data with a researcher at another institution?  Get help and learn about resources and tools to help manage your research data.

February 14: One, Two, Three – Cite!
Presented by: Amy Honisett
Organize your citations, format your paper, and share with colleagues – for free! Join us for a short session to learn about three free citation management tools that can help you get control of your work.

February 21: Measuring Your Impact
Presented by: Jessi Van Der Volgen
H-index, G-index, i-10 index, altmetrics… confused? Learn about established and emerging tools for measuring author impact and steps for measuring yours.

February 28: Research Networking 101
Presented by: Peter Jones
How do you connect with research colleagues at the U or at other institutions? Come discover some of the time-tested techniques and new tools being developed to enable research communication and collaboration.

We hope to see you there!

Questions? Contact Jessi Van Der Volgen: j.vandervolgen@utah.edu

Trusted Clinical References

• Evidence-Based Medicine Guidelines
• Pocket Guide to Diagnostic Tests

Literature Support for Evidence-Based Practice

• Unbound MEDLINE
• Links to full-text articles that are available via University of Utah journal subscriptions
• Clinical Search provides a filtered search of the MEDLINE database so you can choose to see only results having to do with therapy, diagnosis, etiology or prognosis

Grapherence – A Visual Journal Exploration Tool

• Interactive search capability that visually represents the influence and interrelationships of journal articles

uCentral is available to all University of Utah faculty, staff and students via the web without registration. You may also register for a free personal uCentral account that allows you to personalize the interface and download content onto your mobile device.

Read more about uCentral or watch this brief demo and learn how to get started using this exciting new tool!

For more information about accessing and using uCentral contact Christy Jarvis; 801-581-3031.

Read the comments and articles in Nature and Scientific American about PeerJ and open access publishing.

Among participants with low HL, 28.8% self-reported as being uninsured, compared to 16% of people with adequate HL. For those respondents who reported being employed full time, ” those with low HL were less likely to have been offered employer-based health insurance than those with adequate HL (19.9 percent versus 11.4 percent).” And while participants with low HL were just as likely to be employed full-time as those with adequate HL, they were less likely to have been offered health insurance by their employer.

This study has implications for federal, state and local public policy, such as the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Using the results as an estimate of HL levels in the U.S. population as a whole, about ten million of the thirty-two million people who will now have access to medical care under ACA will have low or poor HL, and probably many more than that. How will we implement the ACA in ways that will accommodate persons with:

• Low HL
• Inadequate computer and information literacy skills (navigating insurance exchange websites, understanding online forms, weighing pros and cons and trade-offs, etc.)
• English as their second language
• Cognitive and physical disabilities

This also has enormous implications for libraries, especially public libraries. At a time when budgets are being frozen or slashed, and branches are being closed, libraries will be hard-pressed to meet the resulting increase in demand for computer and Internet access. Library staff will be asked to help patrons navigate the myriad choices being offered by these insurance exchanges with little or no additional training. And if a librarian helps a patron successfully navigate this selection process, could the library be sued if something goes awry with insurance, medical care, etc?

While the concept of insurance exchanges seems like a good idea, without adequate preparation and support,  it may not succeed, and in a short time opponents of health insurance reform will renew their calls to “repeal Obamacare” as it is currently mis-labeled. To help people successfully access this yet-to-be created system, why not:

1. Involve librarians in the planning and organization of the insurance exchanges themselves
2. Provide additional funding to state libraries and the National Network of Libraries of Medicine to train staff at public libraries on how to assist patrons through this process.
3. Provide additional funding for computers and high-speed Internet access.

Librarians already have too much on their plate, so some things may need to be set aside as a result. But we will cope while doing our best to serve our patrons.

How else should libraries prepare for this next challenge? What have you, our fellow librarians, learned from other endeavors that would assist us in preparing? Tell us!

• a short booklet aimed at researchers explaining the relevance of information literacy to their work, and
• a two-page pamphlet version of key information from the booklet.

Included in these materials is a diagram of “Information literacy lens on the Vitae Researcher Development Framework using the SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy.” IL for the researcher involves the ability to:

• Identify an information need for answering a research question,
• know the Scope of gaps in their current knowledge that need filling,
• Plan strategies for finding needed data and information,
• Gather data, information and other needed resources,
• review and Evaluate the research process and resulting data
• Manage information so it is organized both professionally and ethically,
• apply and Present research results by synthesizing new and old information to create new knowledge, and disseminate it in multiple ways

As discussions in our regular “Librarians Meeting” indicate, academic libraries supporting research need to move from a ready-to-help-librarian model, to a partnership with researchers where we bring our expertise at organizing and finding information to the research planning process. Our challenge is to build collaborative relationships with researchers at our institutions so that as they begin planning research, we can facilitate the process so research information and results are well-organized, and packaged for reuse. Eccles Library is dedicated to supporting the medical research community, and has on staff a dedicated Research Librarian, Abby Adamczyk.

Are you a researcher planning a new endeavor? Have you ever considered partnering with a librarian during the planning process? Tell us about it!

From 2006 – 2008, families in a six-site nationwide study participated in a program to enhance parenting skills. Participating parents were monitored for “depression, health- and healthcare-related practices, and surrounding family conditions at baseline and 6-month intervals for up to 36 months.” Data from this study, available in a publicly-funded AHRQ/NIH database, was recently analyzed, and while participants began with reduced health literacy skills, “after 1 year of enhanced home visitation, vulnerable parents were better able to manage personal and family health and healthcare, especially if depressed.” While the sample size (2,572 parent/child dyads) was modest, the findings demonstrate one way we can improve parental health literacy levels even among depressed parents.

In addition to demonstrating the benefits of home visitation in improving health literacy, this study provides support for those that argue for making publicly-funded research data available to all. While no less important back then, health literacy was not the burning topic in 2006-2008 as it is today. Principal investigators had no idea that their work could or would be used in this way. If this data was locked behind a publisher’s pay-wall, this study might never have happened. Because it was publicly available, it could be re-used to test new ideas and ways to help people today.

Researchers must have open access to as many data sources as possible in order to find new ways to help those in need. Access must take precedence over ownership and control when the health outcomes of vulnerable populations (in this case, children) is at stake.

What data sources should be made accessible that are not available right now? Or, what publicly available data/studies/etc. would you like to see analyzed in new and creative ways? Tell us about it!

Reference:

1.    Smith SA, Moore EJ. Health Literacy and Depression in the Context of Home Visitation. Maternal and child health journal. Nov 26 2011.

This is not a call to break up or bring down big-name publishers. They provide services that libraries have come to depend on. But if research is funded by public funding — gathered through taxes or charitable contributions — then the public should have complete and prompt access to its results, good or bad.

Publishers counter with (among many claims):

• Their work provides added value to the research, and
• The current one-year embargo is not enough time to recoup the investment made in adding value.

In testimony before Congress, one publisher argued

“The cutting-edge research in psychology published by APA is rarely obsolete within a year and may have a shelf life of five to 10 years or more. Furthermore, only 16 percent of the eventual ‘lifetime’ usage of APA journal articles—in the form of downloads—occurs within the first year after publication.”

The best rebuttal to this argument actually came in the form of a comment on the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: publishers “neither pay for the intellectual content they publish (authors get no payments including no royalties), nor do they pay for the intellectual effort of the peer-reviewers – all of that professional/academic expertise is given to them for free.”

In addition, is the “added value” anywhere close to the prices publishers charge for access to this information? Now there is an area ripe for research!

One argument for open access is seldom, if at all, being made, and for this author, it is the most compelling: lives may hang in the balance. Some people cannot wait one, five or ten years for the publication of research that will lead to life-saving medical advances. Loosely described, building up collected knowledge of research is like arranging a box of dominoes so they are all standing on end, and next to one another. Arrange them all in the right way, and a single tap will send them all cascading into one another, until all are knocked down.  Researching and determining steps to treatments to take down conditions such as diabetes, various cancers, treatment-resistant diseases, and a myriad of other maladies should occur promptly, and benefit the many, not be delayed for the profit of a few.

“there has also been criticism that this concept has been poorly defined, that it stretches the idea of “literacy” to an indefensible extent and more specifically, that it adds little to the existing concerns and intervention approaches of the better established discipline of health promotion.”

She goes on to select one definition of health literacy (Nutbeam, 2000) and using the concept of “critical health literacy” to determine its usefulness in improving the health of communities and individuals. This article concludes that the concept of critical health literacy connects ideas across multiple domains, yet retains “a key focus on the interaction between individuals and information about health” and how information can be used to improve health outcomes.

While much of the research around the topic of health literacy has be quantitative in measure, qualitative research is also needed to address the “socially situated nature of health literacy, involving interpersonal relationships, emotional involvement, and issues of power and resistance” (Chinn, 2011). Knowing how people utilize their personal networks to assemble an understanding of their health situation has the potential to increase the effectiveness of health literacy outreach efforts.

But we cannot stop there. It is also important to know what individuals and organizations benefit from poor health literacy, and what roadblocks and hurdles – legal, political, and more – are being put or kept in place to maintain the status quo.

What questions do you think researchers should be asking about critical health literacy? Where should academic institutions, libraries, non-profit organizations and others be focusing their resources to address this timely issue? Tell us about it!

References:

Chinn, D. (2011). Critical health literacy: a review and critical analysis. Soc Sci Med, 73(1), 60-67. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.04.004

Nutbeam, D. (2000). Health literacy as a public health goal: a challenge for contemporary health education and communication strategies into the 21st century. [Article]. Health Promotion International, 15(3), 259.

The challenges faced by young people with various forms of cancer are difficult, to say the least: taking a variety of medications such as antibiotics, antiemetics, stool softeners, plus eating healthy when peers and the culture surrounding them are enjoying copious amounts of junk food. Roxxi the nanobot powers-up by following a real-life cancer regimen, and then she sets off to battle cancer.

Does this virtual-ly active role in battling cancer translate into increased motivation and empowerment for the young person playing it? According to a 2008 randomized control trial published in the journal Pediatrics, this video game intervention “significantly improved treatment adherence and indicators of cancer-related self-efficacy and knowledge in adolescents and young adults who were undergoing cancer therapy.”

For those who enjoy them, video games provide hours of satisfying play and escape from day-to-day challenges. A recent study examining the brain activity of patients who played this game provides a glimmer of how it translates into better adherence to the regimen necessary to battle cancer. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging technology to observe the reward circuits in their brains, 57 patients were assigned to either play or watch the Re-Mission video game. The result, as reported in a press release:

“Active involvement in video game play sparks positive motivation in a way that watching and hearing information does not,” said Steve Cole, Ph.D., Vice President of Research and Development at HopeLab, professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-author of the article. “All participants in the study received the same information. It was the active participation in gameplay that made the big difference in motivation. This study helps refine our ‘recipe for success’ in harnessing the power of play in the service of health.”

Many libraries have embraced gaming as a way to connect to patrons. Imagine a library with a collection of video games with the artistry of the biggest sellers that promoted healthy living, and help young people cope with life’s challenges. Such an image gives this librarian hope that we might begin reversing the epidemics of obesity and other preventable diseases in this country.

Have you or someone you know played Re-Mission? What other health-inspiring video games would you like to see? Tell us about it!

Program Description:  The FURTHeR system has been developed to assist the research community with questions related to finding clinical cohorts for research purposes. This system is available to anyone with a University ID, is approved by the Institutional Review Board, and makes de-identified data available from your desktop via a web link. More data sources will become available as the system is expanded. Come and see if it helps you with your questions.

Presenter: Joyce Mitchell is the Associate Vice President for Academic Health IT. Faculty and staff from the Academic Health IT office have been working with their counterparts at ITS and the Utah Population Database (UPDB) to make this system possible. Joyce Mitchell is also a Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine.

For more details, visit the LIFT Forum page.  Program can be viewed from off-site via links from the web page; and available on demand after the program.

The LIFT Forum is co-sponsored by the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library and the Media-on-Demand committee.

Questions can be directed to: Jeanne Le Ber; 801-585-6744

“seeks to map and explore what we know about the ways in which young users of age 18 and under search for information online, how they evaluate information, and how their related practices of content creation, levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns affect these activities” (from the Harvard Law School’s Youth and Media blog).

This report looks not only at patterns of information-seeking behavior, but also the influence of context and demographic factors. It offers four key findings for consideration:

1. Search shapes the quality of information that youth experience online.
2. Youth use cues and heuristics to evaluate quality, especially visual and interactive elements.
3. Content creation and dissemination foster digital fluencies that can feed back into search and evaluation behaviors.
4. Information skills acquired through personal and social activities can benefit learning in the academic context.

And it summarizes their findings in a clear and understandable infographic, shown at right (click image to view full size).

It is no small surprise that context and other social cues strongly influence the information-seeking behavior of youth. Humans are innately social creatures, and need connections to others to survive and thrive.

You can read a one-page summary, an executive summary, the full report, or listen to a podcast version courtesy of the aforementioned blog.

What do you think of this report? What did it get right/wrong? Tell us about it!

Schedule

Monday, February 27, 2012:

• 9:00-11:30AM — Sequences, Genomes and Maps
• 1:00-3:30PM — Proteins, Domains and Structures
• 3:45-5:00PM — Individual Consultations

Tuesday, February 28, 2012:

• 9:00-11:30AM — NCBI BLAST Services
• 1:00-3:30PM — Human Variation and Disease Genes
• 3:45-5:00PM — Individual Consultations

More information is available on our website, or by contacting Abby Adamczyk, Research Librarian, at . See you there!

[Chisolm] “is one of a growing number of medical professionals who, despite the present-day climate of strict patient privacy regulations and oversight, see the benefits of using social media to supplement their work and interact with colleagues, patients and the general public.” She connects with others using her Twitter accounts @whole_patients in order to “demystify psychiatry and psychotherapy for patients and doctors,” and @psychpearls , “which is targeted to learners interested in ‘clinical pearls’ about psychiatry.”

She and a colleague, Tabor Flickinger, a clinical education fellow, are designing a curriculum to train students at the School of Medicine in the use, benefits and potential pitfalls of using social media in medicine. In December 2011 they received an Osler Center for Clinical Excellence small grant award to run a pilot study with medical students during their third year clerkship of 2012 – 2013.

The format of the pilot study will be a voluntary online addition to clinical activities during the eight-week Internal Medicine Clerkship. One group of students will participate in a blog where they can write about and discuss their clinical experiences. Another group will serve as a comparison cohort; they will be studied but will not participate in the blog (from the Hopkins Gazette article).

No doubt many forward-thinking medical institutions, such as the University of Utah, will be watching for the results of this study.

Are you using social media in your practice (medical, psychiatry, or whatever)? How helpful has it been? What have proven to be the pitfalls? Tell us about it!

Would you sign up for such a program? What ways has texting and communicating with others electronically provided you with support to get through rough times? Tell us about it!

Because this reflection is not usually written into the curriculum, students don’t learn enough from their mistakes or even the good things they did. Having a research log helps students become better researchers in the future and, most importantly, helps them to develop a “system” that works for them.

Farkas goes on to share her system for doing research, including her favorite software tools:

1. Collect items of interest using Delicious and Instapaper.
2. Use mindmapping to brainstorm everything that might be of interest related to the selected topic
3. Turn the mindmap into a research question and an outline for the paper. Farkas uses pencil and paper, but for those who prefer there are a variety of mindmapping tools available as well.
4. Conduct the research, saving all interesting articles as PDFs in Dropbox. If a PDF of an item is not available, it can be printed to PDF using your computer’s built-in software or a tool such as PDF Creator.
5. Update the outline based on new information gathered.
6. Read and mark-up the PDFs using iAnnotate on her iPad, and save to Dropbox.
7. Import the relevant PDFs into a Mendeley (citation management tool similar to Zotero) library, checking that the resulting citations are accurate.
8. Write the literature review with marked-up content from the PDFs and other sources, and the rest of the paper.

Readers are encouraged to read Farkas’ blog posting in full as her writing is reliably thoughtful, thorough and encouraging.

What system do you use for doing research? Do you reflect on what you learn each time you conduct research? What important lessons have you learned? Tell us about it!

The website template is available in two formats, one using simple HTML (MyRA 1.0) and one utilizing Alfresco and Drupal (MyRA 2.0). The simple HTML version contains links to resources available to University of Utah researchers. These links can be replaced and customized with the associated links relevant to each institution. The more dynamic version utilizes Drupal for front end display and Alfresco for enterprise content management. This version requires local instances of these two open source programs.

For more information and instructions on how to download the templates, please visit the MyRA Web Portal Project website.

This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, under Contract No. NO1-LM-6-3504 with the University of Utah Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library.

This investigation was supported in part by the Public Health Services Grant number UL1-RR-25764 and C06-RR11234 from the National Center for Research Resources.

Specific improvements include:

• A revamped homepage, which offers better navigation through the site as well as direct access to resources such as the Users’ Guide and NIH Public Access information
• Redesigned Advanced Search and Limits pages
• An updated search results format
• Direct access to images in PMC articles
• A new organization and updated appearance for PMC’s informational pages, including drop-down menus for navigation links

A tour complete with screenshots is available in the latest bulletin.

Researchers with project proposals that have been scored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) but not funded are invited to submit their abstracts. Also, projects that have been peer-reviewed but not funded by a NHC member patient advocacy organization may also register.

Their conclusion? “iResus improved junior doctors’ CASTest scores during a standardised simulated cardiac arrest scenario when compared with those applying purely their own knowledge and experience.” In addition, participants “stated that the iResus ‘app’ was easy to use, increased their confidence in making decisions, and that they would be prepared to use it in real clinical emergencies. From their own perspective, they did not think using such an ‘app’ would be unprofessional or indicate poor training.”

The iResus medical app is free in the iTunes store. iMedicalApps has a review of the app itself with plenty of screen shots to see what it looks like and how it works.

References:

Low, D., Clark, N., Soar, J., Padkin, A., Stoneham, A., Perkins, G. D., & Nolan, J. (2011). A randomised control trial to determine if use of the iResus©application on a smart phone improves the performance of an advanced life support provider in a simulated medical emergency*. Anaesthesia, 66(4), 255-262. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2044.2011.06649.x

Of the reviewed apps, only two are worth considering, namely Pubmed Clip and Pubmed on Tap. Of these, Pubmed on Tap is the most solid choice, with basically everything you will need onboard for a reasonable price. For a little more you can get Pubmed Clip, which has by far the best looking interface and offers some distinct features that set it apart from the rest. On the iPad it gave a lot of errors, but as an only recently released initial version, we expect it to improve with time [Both Pubmed Clip and Pubmed on Tap are customized for both the iPhone and iPad].

PubMed also has its own mobile version, but as these authors accurately point out, “Although Pubmed has a mobile version of its website, it looks outdated and is not the easiest to use.” The first page opens without any search box, but instead offers a list of links to select from. Clicking on “Search MEDLINE/PubMed” takes the user to a page with not one but three search boxes:

• Search with no filters
• Search systematic reviews
• Search via Clinical Queries

For a quick-and-dirty way of getting a site up, this actually has some merit if you are using a mobile device to find fast answers. Using the Clinical Queries search box with the “therapy” option selected, a search on “preeclampsia” comes up with 434 items. Unfortunately, there is no way obvious or easy way to narrow these results, which come 20 to a page, forcing the user to scroll excessively.

Perhaps with more practice, one could learn to use this site more effectively, but for now, a 3rd-party app appears to be a better solution.

As noted on the MCR News blog, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is marking the 50th anniversary of the creation of MeSH. What is it?

“MeSH is the National Library of Medicine’s controlled vocabulary thesaurus. It consists of sets of terms naming descriptors in a hierarchical structure that permits searching at various levels of specificity” (From the NLM website).

How is it used?

“The MeSH thesaurus is used by NLM for indexing articles from 5,400 of the world’s leading biomedical journals for the MEDLINE/PubMED® database. It is also used for the NLM-produced database that includes cataloging of books, documents, and audiovisuals acquired by the Library. Each bibliographic reference is associated with a set of MeSH terms that describe the content of the item. Similarly, search queries use MeSH vocabulary to find items on a desired topic (Also from the NLM website).”

On Thursday, November 18, 2010, at 2:00 pm Eastern (12:00 pm Mountain) time the NLM will be presenting a videocast (with captioning) by Robert Braude, PhD, on “The impact of the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) vocabulary on access to biomedical information.”

PMC Canada is the result of a three-way collaborative effort by the National Library of Medicine®, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI). Similar to United Kingdom PubMed Central, PMC Canada will include most of the health and life sciences literature available through the United States PMC. PMC Canada will also include research resulting from funding through the CIHR.

And as of April 28, 2010, they have added a manuscript submission system which supports the Canadian Institutes of Health Research system’s “Policy on Access to Research Outputs, which requires CIHR grant recipients to make their peer-reviewed publications freely accessible online within six months of publication.” PubMed Central Canada is available in both English and French.

The author, Meredith Farkas, is not just some librarian with a blog and a grudge. She has published the highly successful book Social Software in Libraries, given numerous presentations at ALA and other professional conferences, and traveled widely giving talks to groups on using social media and software in libraries. She was nominated a Mover and Shaker by Library Journal in 2006 for innovative uses of technology to benefit the profession and in 2009 was honored with the LITA/Library Hi Tech award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology. She is articulate and thoughtful, and her blog is at the top of this author’s daily reading list.

How should the library profession respond in this situation?

The current default in PubMed displays multiple items in the Summary format, 20 per page, and sorted by items recently added at the top. To change this, access My NCBI, click on “PubMed Preferences,” then “Result Display Settings.”

“The Krafty Librarian” blog correctly points out some of the shortcomings of this system in general:

The folks over at NCBI, NLM, and everybody else tinkering with PubMed to make it “more user friendly” for average users fail to realize the name MyNCBI means absolutely nothing to the average user. The average user is used to MyCart, MyFolder, MyResults, MySaved, etc. Think Amazon.com, that is what people are used to using, not cutesy names for things like MyNCBI. They don’t think MyNCBI is where they save stuff and where they can save filters for more tailored results. I think you would get more average people using the very strong MyNCBI features if you labeled it something else. Heck I would venture to guess most “average” users don’t even know about filters because they are hidden behind MyNCBI.

The next step that NLM could and should take in this area is to make the system sensitive to institutional users. Every online service wants you to create your own myWhatever account: iGoogle, myYahoo!, etc. Why not allow for institutions to set the display preferences for search results? The Eccles Health Sciences Library can link PubMed search results to full-text items in its collection, but the end-user has to be trained to manually change the display settings from “Summary” to “Abstract” to see these results. This presents the user with icons that link to our collection. If a user searches PubMed from an institution such as ours it should automatically display links to full-text within our collection.