Abbreviations.com is a nifty site for looking up the meanings of (appropriately nough) abbreviations, acronyms and initialisms.
Because people working in a medical environment have great need of this sort of service, the site has a section just for medical abbreviations in 6 categories: Hospitals (939 entries), Human Genome (941 entries), Laboratory (1002 entries), Oncology (743 entries), Physiology (6402 entries) and Veterinary (1835 entries).
Deligio is the neatest new vortal I’ve seen in at least weeks.
Deligio is sort of a del.icio.us for software. Users submit bookmarks indicating the location of software available for download on the Web along with descriptive tags. Users can then search for software using these tags If, for instance, I wanted to find free audio software for Macs, I’d search by the tags “freeware, “mac” and “audio.”
On Feb 12th, Doris Samojluk posted to MEDLIB-L an updated checklist for finding free full-text articles online. I tucked it away for later reference, but there was one resource I didn’t see mentioned that I thought should have been: PubMed Gold
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Created by MLIS student Shawn Thomas, PubMed Gold is an alternative search interface for PubMed that simultaneously uses Google to search for the full text. I wouldn’t use this to replace the checklist, but I’d certainly add it.
PedRad.info is a Pediatric Radiology information, publication and communication platform. Find interesting and typical image findings of the child and the juvenile age. Publish your own peer reviewed cases and teaching files. Discuss with other colleagues about peer reviewed pediatric radiological cases and introduce indeterminate findings. Read Pediatric Radiology news around the world of the pediatric radiologist.
LibWorm is being moved to a new server over the next couple of days. This should result in improved performance when you use LibWorm.
While the server migration is going on, you may notice a few records disappearing (and then reappearing) or feeds not working, but this is temporary and should last only a very short while.
Our first several completed and certified monographs are now up. Once a monograph completes the review process it is “locked down” to be protected from malicious edits. Our certified monographs are:
This progress would not have been possible without the amazing efforts of a handful of fourth-year professional Pharm.D. students at the University at Buffalo. Their user pages are linked from the above records and I encourage everyone to visit them.
More news to come soon.
Didja’ see it? Stew overcame the biggest problem with Wikis for health information:
Once a monograph completes the review process it is “locked down” to be protected from malicious edits.
And from the certification header on a monograph, evidence that despite this necessary lockdown of content, it still maintains some benefits of communal review and critique:
This document cannot be edited without being unlocked by the PubDrug admin. Edits or updates may be recommended under the Discussion tab for this document.
I am absolutely not qualified to comment on the content of these monographs, but this seems to me like an impressive start to the PubDrug project. Congratulations to all involved.
…and not just because Meredith mentions LibWorm in Chapter Three, either! I’m going to order it because Meredith’s writings on technology (at both her own blog and at TechEssence) are smart, clear and practical- and they don’t leave out the human element. I expect her book will have similar qualities.
I won’t go so far as to recommend that others purchase a book that I haven’t myself yet read, but I will say that I am definitely ordering my copy the instant I can.[1]. [Other biblioblog chatter about this book]
I will also need to buy a copy of Phil Bradley’s new book, How to Use Web 2.0 in Your Library[2]:
Like Meredith’s book, Phil’s has a companion Web site, and also mentions LibWorm (curiously, also in Chapter Three). I subscribe to Phil’s blog and routinely learn new things from him, so I can’t be without this book. I just hope it gets published in the States, too- the exchange rates from Pound to Dollar and shipping from the U.K. are probably going to be painful.
Lastly, I’m going to order a copy of this book [3]:
While I don’t yet have any indication that it mentions LibWorm ( ) and I’m still not yet wholly comfortable with the term “Library 2.0″, everything I’ve read that Casey and/or Savastinuk have written on the topic has been thought-provoking, required reading. I wouldn’t miss getting my own copy for any reason. [Other biblioblog chatter about this book]
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[1] - It goes without saying that if Meredith wants to send me a copy, I will of course devour it and write a detailed review.
[2] - Naturally, the same offer is extended to Phil.
[3] - Ditto for Michael and Laura.
I’d also be willing to write a review for a publication if it means I get to keep a copy of any of these.
(I’m subtle, huh? My subtlety is inversely proportionate to my budget for discretionary spending.)
Wikipedia appallingly popular for health information
In a study from Envision Solutions titled Diving Deeper Into Online Health Search, 87.5% of searches for health information via Google or Yahoo displayed user-generated content on the first page of results.
“Of UGM indexed by search engines, Wikipedia was the most frequently cited resource. This wiki was referenced on the first page in 63% of searches”
Wow.
I’d never recommend Wikipedia to a medical professional or for consumer healthcare information, but I’m genuinely urcertain if use of Wikipedia helps or hurts health literacy. My first guess is that the very act of attempting to look up information is an okay first step, even if I’d rather that the consumer click over to MedlinePlus than to Wikipedia. The trick is that it can’t the consumer’s last step.
Any thoughts?
The report from Envision Solutions is all about searching for health information online and “User-Generated Media” (UGM).
UGM was defined as:
o Weblogs
o Online bulletin boards (either links directly to bulletin board content or Websites where they were prominently displayed)
o Wikis
o Podcasts
o Other UGM (i.e., Websites with content developed by individuals such as patients and medical professionals)
I’m not confortable with this definition. Look at Women’s Health News. Here’s a blog that examines news on women’s health topics and summarizes or points readers towards information. But the blog is written by a health information professional, a degreed medical librarian employed by a reputable academic medical library. She is legitimately expert at finding and processing this sort of information. What makes her a “user” and not a “publisher”? The fact that she’s not motivated by profit and isn’t government-sponsored? Couldn’t one say the same about Open Access journals? Are OA journals “User-Generated Media,” or are they disqualified from this label by virtue of their peer reviewe processes?
(Please note: I’m not being a smart-alec, I’m really asking and hoping someone has a good answer for this question.)
Maybe I’m just annoyed by this definition because it fails to recognize that tools like blogs and other “social software” are blurring the line between creator and consumer, developer and user or publisher and reader. Also, traditional media producers and corporations now own and run blogs.
It is as though Envision is saying “blog” equals “amateur”. Sure, that’s often the case, but not always.
I just learned today that Dissect Medicine is now available in both German and Spanish, and is working on a Japanese edition.
Dissect Medicine is currently available in English and German editions. It will soon be available in Spanish and Japanese. Each site is designed for the tagging and uploading of articles in the edition’s specific language, but registered users are free to access and use all sites.
I have nothing new to add on the story of school media librarians expressing hesitation about the inclusion of The Higher Power of Lucky in their libraries, but I’m using LibWorm to keep up with the ongoing (and often funny) discussion.
Tom Coates, a technologist from Yahoo Technology Development, kicks off by summing up the disruption in attitude that is affecting information providers. “It’s in your interests as an author, researcher or scientist to get your work read, so you slap it on the internet, but that is not in the interests of your publisher,” he points out.
[My emphasis]
[…snip…]
Coates divides Web 2.0 usage into two areas: “Collective intelligence and social software is one clump; the reuse and openness with data is a second theme of Web 2.0.”
Put another way, the first clump he’s talking about contains things like del.icio.us and Wikis. The “second theme” is exemplified by RSS and mashups.
Paul Miller, technology evangelist at library automation supplier Talis , adds: “The debate is how do publishers and scholars share data, yet formulate a business model?” For Talis, Web 2.0 is anything but disruptive. “The library market is not growing,” Miller says. “We were looking at taking our information management knowledge out to new markets.”
[My emphasis]
Miller also says “[b]logs and wikis are buzz – they will go away.”
While I agree that they are subjects of a lot of buzz, they’re not going away. The buzz will die down as they (and/or their descendent technologies) become commonplace, but I don’t believe they will go away.
Update: Rettig has posted the final version of his video.
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I read with interest Michael Stephens’ endorsement of Jim Rettig, and it looks like Rettig (with efforts like putting a campaign message on YouTube) is really trying to reach “blog people.”
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) and I’m still not yet wholly comfortable with the term “Library 2.0″, everything I’ve read that 
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