Blogging:
You have just one week left to apply to be an Official MLA Blogger for the Annual Meeting in Hawaii. If you are going to the meeting and are interested in blogging, please consider applying. Your colleagues who are unable to attend will benefit from your experiences. Being an Official Blogger is a great way to get free wifi courtesy of MLA for the duration of the conference. Not traveling with a laptop? Don't worry, you can still be an Official Blogger if you don't have your own laptop. Hurry, the deadline is April 24th!


Follow the blog using the following RSS feed http://feeds2.feedburner.com/mla2009


Twitter:
The Official Blog is just one way to follow the events at MLA. A Twitter account has been set up for the meeting as well. The MLA 2009 Twitter account is mla2009. Following MLA 2009 on Twitter is very easy.

You can follow without signing up for a Twitter account. You can either go to the website http://www.twitter.com/mla2009 and watch the posts, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed at http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/15206900.rss.

If you want to interact with people, comment, or pose questions then you will need to create your own Twitter account. Simply go to http://www.twitter.com and join. Once you have joined and created a username go to Find People and type in mla2009. Click on the icon and then click Follow.

Just a few days before meeting mla2009 will "follow" all of its followers. That will allow everybody following on mla2009 to see each others posts and to view what is going on at the convention. If you plan to post about the convention please try and remember to use the hashtag #mla09 before you type. The hashtags index the thread so that it can be found and easier to follow.

Note: The Twitter website does not automatically refresh, so you will either need to hit the browser's refresh button every once and a while or you might want to look at some Twitter clients like twhril or TweetDeck which make managing your Twitter account a little easier.

Flickr:
Are you going to the meeting and are you planning on taking a lot of pictures? Please consider uploading to the MLA 2009 group on flickr. This will allow us to pool all of our photos into one group so everybody can see them.

Anybody can view the photos if they go to http://www.flickr.com/groups/mla2009/

If you want to post your photos to the group here's how:

• You must have a flickr account
• Once you have a flickr account and logged in you must join the group
• Click the Groups tab and then Search for a Group. Search for MLA 2009
• Click on the MLA 2009 Group and then click "Join?"

Once you have joined the group it is very easy to post your photos to the group. The easiest way to add a photo to a group is to go to your account home page and click on your photo stream. Then click on the photo you want to send to the group. Next, click the "Send to Group" button (located above the photo, between the photo title and the photo). Then choose the group you want to send it to, and you're done!

If you are sharing photos on the MLA 2009 Group please remember to tag them all with the term mla2009.

If you aren't going to the meeting this year, we will miss you. But at least you have some options for staying in touch and following some of the activities and staying up to date. Additionally if there is anybody else on the NPC or any of the Section Programs who is doing something online that will allow folks at home to follow along to, please leave a comment.

Labels: Annual Meeting, Blogs, Hawaii, Social Software, Tagging, Technology

Saturday I spoke about the promises and perils of web 2.0 technologies in special libraries. I focused on all of the ways special libraries are using technology and the common barriers that librarians encounter trying.
I think showing examples of what others are doing can be extremely helpful. It helps others see new applications of the technologies and perhaps can get them thinking about how some things might work in their institution. One size does not fit all, not every technology works with every library, but just seeing what others are doing can get the mind going. In preparation for the talk, I looked around the web to find examples of what other libraries are doing. I took screen shots of what was I thought was interesting and I added them into the presentation slides.
Librarians are busy! Most use these technologies in three ways general communication, current awareness, and reference.

Here are just a few of the examples I found of how librarians are using blogs, wikis, Twitter, IM, tagging, videos, etc.

Communication:
Many libraries use a reference desk wiki or blog for internal or external communication such as listing the desk schedule, active issues, tick sheets, product reviews, policy changes, user education, and news and general information.

• Jenkins Law Library - Their home page includes an information/news blog front and center. People can easily subscribe to these feeds by clicking on the orange RSS box.
• medlibs and mla2009 - I haven't found anybody specifically using Twitter to communicate to library users I have found quite a few examples of peer to peer communication or chat collab. Medlibs and mla 2009 are two examples of librarians twittering back and forth sharing information and collaborating on ideas. The principle is similar to the listserv medlib-l but conversations are short.
• Courthouse Libraries BC - They have produced YouTube videos demonstrating research techniques and strategies.
• Cleveland Clinic Health System Libraries Wiki - The nine hospital system is using an external wiki as their web page for employees to use when they are off campus. It is still in beta as some of the kinks are being ironed before it is officially live and marketed to patrons.

Current Awareness and RSS:
Librarians are using RSS to keep themselves and their users up to date on information. This is seen most often in table of contents feeds, saved searches on databases, new additions to the catalog, and news (from the library blog as in Jenkin's Law Library's home page).

• Ebling Library - They provide access to over 2400 RSS feeds to biomedical and health sciences journals.
• PubMed, Ovid, EBSCO, and Scopus - These databases and many others allow users to save their searches as RSS feeds which will help notify them of any newly published research on their topic.
• Lillian Goldman Law Library - New additions to the catalog are profiled on the library's blog page

Reference Aids:
Wikis and social booking marking tools make great reference aids. Libraries have created subject guides in wikis, subject guides within delicious, added tags within the catalog, and are helping users manage bookmarking the journal literature by using tagging sites like Connotea and CiteULike.

• University of Florida Health Science Center Libraries - Their LibGuides page contains subject guides, course guides and other resources browsable by Subjects and by Popular Tags.
• Health Sciences Library, Stony Brook - They use delicious as another tool to guide users to subject resources.
• Courthouse Libraries BC New Catalogue - (in beta) Doing a search in their catalogue brings up the usual results but also brings up a word cloud on the left hand side that shows you related terms, spelling variations, translations, etc. Clicking on the words in the cloud allows patrons to explore the catalogue contents from that perspective.
• Duke University Libraries - They have a nice getting started guide for Connotea and FAQs. They also have instructions for users to configure Connotea take advantage of Duke's full text article system, "Get it @ Duke.

As I mentioned these are just a sampling of what other libraries are doing out there with these new technologies. I am sure there are more great examples. If you know of another library doing something neat please be sure to comment to this post so that we may be able to learn from each other.

Labels: RSS feeds, Tagging, Technology, web2.0

(courtesy MidContinental Regional News)

For those of you in the MidContinental Region (Utah, Colorad, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri), Sharon Dennis, Technology Coordinator, and Rebecca Brown, Technology Liaison, are asking for volunteers to participate in a regional social bookmarking project. Social bookmarking is a Web 2.0 tool. Delicious is a social bookmarking site that allows you to bookmark a web page and add tags to categorize your bookmarks. Delicious can be used to tag any site that you feel is pertinent to your professional work and also of interest to medical librarians throughout the region.

If you are interested in learning more about this project, please e-mail Sharon at
sdennis[atsign]lib[dot]med[dot]utah[dot]edu or Rebecca at rbrown3[atsign]kumc[dot]edu.

Labels: Social Software, Tagging, Technology, web2.0

The school year has started and in our family that means that it is time to put away some of the summer play clothes and begin to make room for fall and winter clothes. Determine what will get packed away for next year, what will get donated to charity, and what will get handed down to the little brother.
The same is kind of true with my online world. Instead of packing up the sunscreen and swim suits, I am looking at my RSS feeds, SDIs, and del.icio.us account. I find that I need to do this once or twice a year to keep things fresh and current. Those of us who have SDIs on MEDLINE are well aware that we should look at them once a year after NLM has finished with their Year End Processing. The same can be said for RSS feeds and del.icio.us.

I subscribe to about 150 feeds. That is a lot, but there are quite a few feeds in that list that are probably dead. The blogger stopped blogging long ago and like that favorite pair of jeans that I can't quite fit into I am reluctant to give it up. Usually these dead blogs didn't just cease all of a sudden, posts gradually became more infrequent until one day they stopped all together. There was something that attracted me to each blog, it could have been funny, insightful, or it covered a topic of my interest. I hold on to the feed out of hope that the author will some day begin posting once again. Just like those old jeans in my closet, the dead blog feeds hang in my Bloglines account taking up space and adding to the clutter.
In addition to the dead blogs are active blogs that I really don't read any more. Sometimes they have served my informational needs and I no longer need them. Most often my though, I find that my tastes have changed and I am not as interested in them as I once was. Like the totally cute green sparkly high heeled shoes that I had to have last year, they have been pushed to the back in favor of my new interests. Not to say that the blog or the green sparkly shoes aren't still great, I am just not as interested in them any more. Should I keep the blog in Bloglines on the off chance that it piques my interest again, or should I remove it from my collection like I did to make room for the sleek little patent leather peep toe pumps?
There is also the matter of organizing this information. My Bloglines is simple, it is broken into 4 main categories, medical library stuff, library stuff, fun/humor, and searches. Every blog within the category is arranged alphabetically. It is in much better shape than my closet. My del.icio.us account is my dirty little librarian secret. It is almost in worse shape than my attic was a year ago. As a librarian I love the concept of adding tags and organizing my Internet sites. I love how I can call them up on any computer and share them with friends and family. As a librarian you would think that I would stick to my own controlled vocabulary style and have some method to my madness. Alas, this is not the case. While my inner librarian took control and organized the attic, it was snoozing big time when it came to del.icio.us. I have about 100 or so tagged items and my top tag (NIH) only has been used 6 times. The next closest term is web2.0 used 4 times. There is no rhyme or reason as to why I did or didn't use the tag social_networking for things I indexed with terms like twitter, wiki, blog, or blogging. Yes, I have blog and blogging as tags, why I did this I have no idea. The best way I can describe this mess is that my del.icio.us account is my Internet attic. I find a page and if I love it I put it in del.icio.us. I know I will use that page, but probably not often enough to immediately type its URL from memory. That is why I put it in del.icio.us. I find that I am usually in a hurry when tagging something so I just slap a few tags (often just one tag) on there and save it. Since the items are usually displayed in order of when it was tagged, the most recent are in front while the older and increasingly no longer used items creep to the back. Only after I try and retrieve a long ago tagged item, must I remember where stored it. Is it under blog or blogging? What about web2.0? I fear that in order to straighten this mess out that I will have get down and dirty like I did with the attic. I will look at each tag and figure out what the item is, whether it should be kept or removed. If I am keeping it, then it needs to assigned some predetermined terms and assigned a location (bundle).
Finally you can't forget about your searches. At this time of year I am on the look out for a winter coat for son. I scan the Sunday ads and my email account for sales and deals. Right now it is a winter coat, last November it was a new dishwasher. My needs change with my life. My current awareness searches change as well. Many of my personal current awareness searches are created from PubMed, Medworm, LibWorm and a few other places, the RSS of the search is saved and I read it in my Bloglines account. I find that each year as new trends emerge and others lose favor, I must adjust my searches so that I can stay on top of the information. For example, what good is it to have a current awareness search on Ovid CINAHL when it has moved to EBSCO? Probably just as effective as ads and sales on infant clothes going to my email account when I have six year old and a two year old.

Virtual house cleaning is important in managing the information overload. If you don't do it every once and a while you are going to be met with a ton of information and you won't know what to do with it nor will you be satisfied with what you have. Just like opening the closet to find that among all of those clothes, you can't find anything to wear.

Labels: Social Software, Tagging, Technology, web2.0

Hardin Medical Library has recently begun applying tags to images from UIHC (University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics) -example images from the Dermatology Department and the College of Dentistry.

Sometimes I feel like I have been accidently recruited into a large team building scavenger hunt exercise when I am asked to look for a good medical image online. I have previously mentioned how I think tagging medical images online would be one way to possibly help organize and retrieve good medical pictures. However, I have seen little development in this area, which is a little surprising to me. The only reason I can think is that many medical images are located in pay databases such as images.MD which wouldn't take too kindly to having there images tagged, displayed, and freely. But what also is a little surprising is that images.MD doesn't allow people to tag images. You can save images to your account but you can't tag them with your own words or notes. I personally think that would be a helpful feature.

Why should we stop at tagging only our personal and fun photos on sites like flickr? Tagging could make finding medical images much easier. What would be cool is if there was a site similar to flickr only dedicated to medical images.

Labels: Social Software, Tagging, Technology