I decided to sit down and figure out my schedule of what I plan on doing and seeing while at MLA. I futzed around for an hour with the Online Event Planner and I just couldn't get it to remember the right events (despite clicking on the add them to my itinerary button). So I am going old school. I printed out (sorry I know we are supposed to go green) the PDF of the schedule from the Preliminary Program and wrote in the sessions I wanted to attend.

As I looked at the various sessions, I noticed there were several things that I am interested in attending. Unfortunately I can't attend everything due to prior commitments and/or two programs of interest scheduled at the same time. Thankfully there will be other MLA Bloggers attending and writing about their programs, so hopefully I will be able keep informed.

One event I plan to attend is the Bearded Pigs. They will be playing Sunday night, May 18, from 8:00 to 11:00 in Crystal C of the Hyatt and thankfully I have no other conflicting plans. If you are new to MLA or just haven't heard of the Bearded Pigs, they are musically talented medical librarians who put on a great gig at the annual meeting.

If you are up for a little rock and roll and meeting some people, you should check them out. Here is the information.

Sunday night, May 18, from 8:00 to 11:00 in Crystal C of the Hyatt
Cash bar.
You can show your support and buy a Bearded Pig button $2 each prior to the event and $3 each after. If you see one of the pigs prior to the event ask for one.
All are welcome to the "Informal professional networking event with rock band and cash bar." Any proceeds remaining are donated to the MLA Scholarship Fund

Labels: MLA2008

If you were ever curious as to how medical librarianship might work virtually in Second Life, you might want to check out the final project report from the Alliance Library System. The project, "Providing Consumer Health Outreach and Library Programs to Virtual World Residents in Second Life," provided outreach to virtual medical communities, health training and information for residents of Second Life, links to consumer health resources, one-on-one support to residents, and part-time staffing for HealthInfo Island.

You might also be interested in an April 2008 article "Real World 101 in Second Life: A Discussion with Carol Perryman/Carolina Keats" UNYOC/MLA Newsletter p8-12.

It is May Ovid is making Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology available as their resource of the month.

Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology is designed to meet the growing demand for tightly focused information in areas at the cutting edge of cardiology. It will include outstanding investigations of a more focused nature that have been selected through the same rigorous review process, subject to the same high standards, as articles in Circulation.

You can Try it now at Ovid

On a personal note...
Is it just me or has Ovid started sticking more of its journals as free resources of the month rather than its databases? I would like to see a database or perhaps a journal collection listed as Ovid's resource of the month rather than one little journal. I usually try and follow and post each month on Ovid's free resource, but I think if they are going to get into the habit of listing only one journal as a resource then I am not going to post about it. What used to be a nice opportunity to freely use and learn about a database, has kind of lost its usefulness for me.

A few months have gone by and we have been able to look at and use Ovid's new interface for some time. In previous posts, I created a list of people who posted their own online documentation or training videos. For the most part these were people who focused on Ovid Advanced. Now there are some people and libraries out their who have chosen to use Ovid Basic and I thought it might be a good idea to list a few of them.

Some guides and information on Ovid Basic:
Librarians' RX - How to Use OvidSP’s Basic Search
St. John's Libraries - How Does Basic Search Work?
University of Ulster Library -OvidSP a Basic User Guide
CABI.org - Simple Searching CABI Abstracts Using OvidSP
University of Salford - OvidSP
Himmelfarb Library Blog -Natural Language Searching in MEDLINE (and more) on OvidSP

Hopefully this might be helpful for people in libraries that have decided to go with OvidSP Basic.

Do you know what library resources your doctors are accessing through your hospital's electronic medical record? Most librarians do not. Unfortunately most librarians have been shut out of the electronic medical record roll out. There are numerous reasons why this is unfortunate, one of which is the library's license agreements. The license agreements for electronic resources vary. Some are extremely complicated. Some prohibit off campus access and ILL. Some have strict definitions of what is an authorized user.


Why should you be concerned about your hospital's electronic medical record system and the library's electronic resources? Because there are some electronic medical record systems that allow doctors to add their own links to information resources. You got it, doctors can add links to your resources and access them within the medical record, making these electronic resources available off campus. Depending on your hospital, this could also mean that private practice doctors (i.e. for profit entity) could be accessing resources as well as other unauthorized users (according to the license agreement). Simply put, these doctors may be authorized to access the medical record, but they may not be authorized to access the library resources within the medical record.


Believe it or not this is already happening. Depending on the electronic medical record system, doctors can add links to library resources within the medical record. Online journals, textbooks, drug guides, society websites, and point of care databases (such as UpToDate) all can be added as information resources accessible within the electronic medical record. A doctor (and anybody else with electronic medical record access) can use these resources from his home and his medical office building. Depending on the resource this may be a violation of the library's license agreement.


Librarians not only need to be aware of what resources their doctors find helpful to answer clinical questions but they also need to know the licensing implications. Your hospital IT personnel are going to be concerned about the security of patient data, and rightfully so. Most likely they will be completely unaware of the software and vendor license agreements the library has and the implications for use within the electronic medical record. After all, imagine what would happen if one of your doctors added a link to UpToDate to use within the electronic medical record thereby enabling UpToDate to be available from off campus? I can probably speak for many librarians in saying that would be very bad.

***Update***
I know not everybody reads comments in blog posts and Marie made a comment that made me realize that I left off something VERY important.

It may not matter if you restrict your resources to a specific IP range! The doctor viewing the electronic medical record is already virtually sitting on your IP range, and your resources are available to him off site. I know of instances where libraries have tunred off proxy access and limited access to specific IP ranges to certain resources not licensed for off campus access, yet the doctor was able to use them off campus while he was within ERM.

Twitter is a micro-blogging application. Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write and publish brief text updates (in Twitter, 140 characters or less). These updates can be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group. People can update and post these messages by text messaging, instant messaging, email, or a variety of other methods. I have been playing off and on with Twitter and other micro-bloggers such as Pownce to see what uses they might have (if any) in the medical library world.

I was intrigued when I read the Travelin' Librarian's post, How to create a Twitter conference feed. He has micro-blogged three conferences and created a Twitter RSS feed so people who are not at the conference could read posts from attendees. He shares how to twitter a conference based off of his previous experiences. While he admits his system may not perfect he thinks that the major bugs have been worked out.

It is an interesting concept. However, it seems a majority of us are just getting a handle on managing regular blog reading and RSS feeds, plus I am not sure how interested most people would be in a play by play sort of information that micro-blogging gives. Still it is an interesting perspective and there are some very active twittering medical librarians. There is already an MLA2008 account on Twitter for people attending the conference. Some industrious librarians have started a pubmedbootcamp which is an experiment teaching advanced PubMed searching skills via a twitter group.

Other than it being fun and another quick way of connecting with peers, I am not yet convinced micro-blogging is ready for prime time in the medical library world. It will be interesting to see how MLA2008 and pubmedbootcamp turn out. If they are successful, it offers new opportunities for some librarians to share information.