Monthly Archive for August, 2009

What’s new in Medline Plus?

Published on August 28, 2009 in Comments and John Bramble. 0 Comments Tags: , .

MedlinePlus (www.medlineplus.gov), the authoritative online consumer health resource from the National Library of Medicine, has many great new features to help you locate appropriate materials that meet the unique needs of your community. The site, which debuted in 1998 with 22 health topics, now boasts over 800 topics and many new enhancements:

Enhanced Searching

MedlinePlus has new search capabilities to improve your searches. Results now have relevancy rankings and are sorted into two subsets: collections and clusters. “Collections” help you narrow your search by displaying results in 7 content areas. “Clusters” organize your search results into groups based on the most frequent words in the top 200 results.  The “remix” button displays the next cluster. You can target your search with phrase searching and Boolean logic.  “AND” is the default operator, for everything else use OR, NOT, -, +, and the wildcard *. MedlinePlus was designed to be user friendly, providing a variety of search mechanisms to meet different search styles. Many elements are repeated throughout the site helping users learn to search quickly.

    SEARCH TIP: Do you want to know what the hot topics are in MedlinePlus? Just click on the Search Cloud link on the lower right sidebar from the homepage—this displays the top 100 search terms entered into the MedlinePlus search box. The cloud is updated every weekday, with results appearing in alphabetical order and the larger the text size, the more often the term has been searched. Place your cursor over the search term to find out the exact ranking.

Continue reading ‘What’s new in Medline Plus?’

Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think

Published on August 19, 2009 in Ray Matthews. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Juan Lee just tweeted this from Socialnomics so you may have already seen it, but if not, it’s definitely worth watching:

“Social Media is Not a Fad” : http://bit.ly/3TVHoG

I hope you enjoy it.

The video is based on the new book by Erick Qualman, “Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business.”

The video is done in a way similar to Palmer DePaulis’ new presentation to the Legislature, Michael Wesch’s “Information R/evolution“, and the classic “Did you Know?” by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Brenman (rev. 1.0; rev. 2.0; rev. 3.0 ; rev. 4.0).

I think that it provides numerous implications for those of us in the business of creating online government services.

I’m particularly enthralled with Qualman’s idea that we need to disengage ourselves from building search tools and portals. Instead of people searching, Qualman points to the future as being one in which social media will deliver to people the news, information, products, and services that they want. This future, I think, is months not years away. You can already see this emerging in applications such as Facebook and Amazon.com.

What ideas in the video struck you?

Outcomes based training for libraries

Published on August 15, 2009 in Colleen Eggett and training. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Yesterday I went to a very interesting training sponsored by UALC:  Outcomes based measurement by Julie Todaro. She did a great job. There were many people there (maybe 100) from academic libraries in Utah. It was kind of fun to catch up with some of my old “cronies” from when I used to work at Primary. I miss all of those people a lot and wish I did more to connect with them. They always felt like friends to me (and still do).

It reminded me of the time I spent one week in DC doing OBE with the IMLS. I enjoyed that training as well. I went with Rose Frost and Juan Lee. It was a lot of fun.  Rose and I got split up on the metro one night. She went one way and I went another but we finally both got back to the hotel in one piece. Actully the IMLS training was very well done and really taught me alot on the topic. It was one week vs one day, and was so good. Much more in depth, actually.

This fall I plan to teach long range planning training to public library directors in Utah. I will use what I learned from Todaro, what I learned in DC, and what I learned from Sandra Nelson for the training. It will be based on the Planning for Results by Sandra Nelson.  It all has to do with good, meaningful reporting of what people want to accomplish in their libraries. I’ll have the training schedule up pretty soon, probably in 3 locations in Utah, and hope to get Craig Neilson and maybe others from USL to help out on the instruction. People have been calling me and emailing me about when it will start so I know there;s high interest among Utah library directors. When it’s posted you can register online at http://library.utah.gov/workshops