I understand your pain BUT I do not share it

Here's a blog post from a Harvard Medical School PhD student complaining about the user-unfriendliness of PubMed: http://network.nature.com/blogs/user/U2929A0EA/2008/03/22/i-am-not-yelling-not-out-loud She's right, of course, PubMed is complex. But then so is her field of expertise, cell signaling and gene transcription. Why does she expect PubMed to be simple? You know why, because Google is simple, and Google sets the standard for search engines. But consider this: PubMed has powerful search features that allow for precise retrieval of information, for finding needles in haystacks, for separating the sheep from the goats, for executing complex search strategies. Those are things that Google does not do with the same consistency and predictability. So maybe this student would benefit from investing a bit of time learning the capabilities and complexities of the world's largest biomedical database.

Serious Stuff Here

Yes, joining Facebook really is part of an assignment for my Medical Library Association Social Networking Tools class. I had some peculiar responses to the Facebook invitations I sent, and they seem to be stratified by age group. One of my younger co-workers had invited me to join Facebook several months ago, so I was already signed up. My daughter responded to my invitation immediately, setting up her own profile and populating it with photos from her recent honeymoon in Austrailia and Bali. An older co-worker responded by asking me to send the invite to her personal e-mail. Ouch. A third older friend didn't respond electronically, but later asked me in a phone conversation if he'd have to put in personal information for all to see.

These are only 3 data points, but they seem to be pointing to an age-related phenomenon. Another experience I had with wikis: I tried to get the women in my family to participate in a creative writing wiki because, of course, we're all very clever and have interesting things to say. I was warned (by someone from the generation even older than mine) that this would be dangerous because of the identity theft problem. I know that sometimes kids reveal too much information and are pounced on by predators, but I think the new social networking paradigm asks people to examine their worldview from an Einsteinian perspective: Is the world essentially a friendly place or is it not. The answer to that may determine whether you're a social networker or whether you are not.

Flu Pandemic Wiki

When I first saw the URL I thought it was someone sniveling about their latest illness, but i went to http://www.fluwikie.com/ (yes, that's wiki with an "e") and found out it's an entirely serious site devoted to surveillance of H5N1 avian flu. It includes data from all sorts of national, international and statewide oganizations. It seems to be very authoritative, although I had a heck of a time figuring out who the editors were. I guess that's what makes a wiki so very wiki-like. It's very democratic...all contributors are equally authoritative, or appear to be.

On another note: it occurred to me that this site and/or others like it will probably become very important in the days and years to come. It's like they say about earthquakes and San Francisco: "It's not a question of IF, but WHEN."

Librarians With Laptops

Beware of librarians carrying laptops. They're like door-to-door evangelists, no offense door-to-door evangelists. They want to raise your information consciousness for your own good and the good of humankind. If you let them, they can totally take up an hour of your time helping you with evidence-based literature searching, setting up email current awareness alerts, managing your citation lists, or with whatever else you have going on in regards to medical literature. Luckily, there aren't too many of them, only Terri and Joy here at SFGH. Forewarned is forearmed.

Va-Room

As part of the Medical Library Associations online Web 2.0 class I'm currently enrolled in, I've been assigned to add at least one post to my blog each week for the next eight weeks. Nothing like hitting the ground running. Welcome to the reality school of blogging, where it becomes clear to us blogging bootcamp recruits that having a viable, dynamic web site means posting regularly. No waiting for inspiration to strike. No time management excuses or whining about higher priorities. No leaving your blog to languish by the wayside of the information superhighway. Just get it in gear and go.

Evolution in teaching

Interesting editorial in the Feb. 6, 2008 issue of JAMA. Written by an attending physician regarding how the information revolution has changed his approach to teaching interns and residents, he observes, " I increasingly find myself teaching less about the current state of information and more about how things have changed and how our understanding of an illness or treatment has evolved to where it is currently.... I am more likely to point out how scanty the evidence actually may be when making a decision." He sees his role as helping to integrate and synthesize overwhelming amounts of clinical data and interpret them in the context of the patient as a whole and complex individual. Here's the link if you want to read the article: http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/299/5/497?etoc