Today I found the most wonderful mashup through a quick search on Programmable Web. I found it by browsing the reference category. I suppose the word, FREE, caught my eye. The site is called Librarian Chick; and it’s site where you can search for free audiobooks, eBooks, and educational resources using the Google Ajax Search. I was very excited to find out about this resource, which has an incredible number of links to web sites that I’d never even heard of. I could have used this when I was subbing at my local public library branch yesterday. Someone came in looking for an audiobook of Midsummer’s Night Dream, but it was checked out. I did a search on Librarian Chick’s site and found various versions of this play for FREE! I even saw some medical library resources while I was browsing. This a a wonderful way to use this technology. And I like the fact that it seems pretty easy to be able to create a mashup. On another note, I think it’s great that people are creating mashups of PubMed/MEDLINE data. These mashups are a good way that the users themselves can get in on the action to create a tool that brings them the information they want in the way they want it.
Category: Medical Librarianship
Podcasting and YouTube
This past week I played around with podcasting and YouTube. It was really fun picking out podcasts to listen to. I subscribed to a few. I can easily see health sciences students listening to podcasted lectures or tutorials. The University of Virginia’s History of Medicine podcasts are a wonderful way to introduce listeners to the historical/cultural aspects of health and medicine. I liked the very short helpful podcasts created by the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Library as they’re good for quick reference.
YouTube was interesting to explore; but I’m not so sure if I would choose this medium over others for delivering library information or instructional-type content. I found a tutorial demonstrating searching in the Cochrane database but I found the video quality not as clear as I would like, which got worse when I enlarged the video to full screen. But I did see an old National Library of Medicine video that actually looked pretty good. And that video introduced me to a source that I’d never heard of–public.resource.org. It’s an Internet archive of government-created videos (e.g. training, history, etc.). Check it out.
Online Web Office Applications
This past week I tried Google Apps and Zoho. I had already tried both. In Google Apps, I had used the word processing and spreadsheet programs and liked them. I tried Zoho when I was looking for an online database application, so this time I tried its presentation application. I really like the design templates that Zoho offers; however, I had a difficult time with Zoho. Using Safari, I received a warning that Zoho wasn’t compatible with my browser; but I decided to try it anyway. The templates didn’t display as shown and getting all of the tool bars to show up was impossible–even after resizing the window, the objects palette was still cut off the right side. Using Zoho in Firefox was a lot better, and I was able to view the objects palette. But the display still did some unexpected things. I liked Zoho’s look but it was frustrating to use. That was surprising to me since I had no such issues when I used Zoho’s database application.
Web-based office applications are definitely very useful for collaborating on documents, and I’ve used them to work on documents and share them with other staff. Having offline access to these documents is something that would be useful for those times that Internet access isn’t available. I’m glad that Google made this improvement.
Social Networking Sites
This past week I played with social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn). I must say, I didn’t think that I would enjoy this as much as I did. It was a lot of fun; and I even connected with friends and colleagues that I didn’t even know were using these sites!I absolutely love the library sites I visited on MySpace. If I were a teen in Denver, I would think I had the coolest public library around. Plus, I was really impressed by the number of teens who interacted with the site. The Brooklyn College Library site is cool as well.Having previously worked in a hospital library, I know that the residents use Facebook and MySpace a lot when they’re on a break. I know that there are some worries about privacy, but IT does doesn’t block those sites in the medical library. However, they are blocked in the community library (patients and visitors use this library). The medical library there has no plans to use these sites as far as I know.Where I am now, the library uses an internal wiki and has an application on Facebook that members can “subscribe” to search their database without having to leave Facebook. They really have been exploring ways to reach their users, which is great. I also like the way my professional association (Medical Library Association) has used Facebook for its annual meeting. Although I can’t go, I really liked being able to see who was going. Some people who responded also had their pictures, so I could actually put a face to names I’ve been seeing for a long time. I really liked it as a networking tool.I didn’t do much with LinkedIn. I think because I had spent so much time on Facebook and MySpace, I just got a little tired! I signed up but haven’t done much else. Overall, I’d say that it was great playing with these sites. I’m still using MySpace (I already had an account) and Facebook (I just created a photo album).
The Value of Blogs in Medical Librarianship
I’ve been taking advantage of blogs in my work as a medical librarian for a while. I subscribe to quite a few and read them daily (sometimes twice daily) to keep up with what’s happening in the medical librarianship field as well as in technology advances, health policy and health reform. In the organization where I work now, there is no intranet, so a blog may not be doable unless we added one to our web site. Whether visitors to our web site would participate (or whether our own staff would participate) is another matter. Since many in the org tend to be technophobic, I know that I have to move very slowly to implement new things.
WONDERLUST 