New JAMA Users Guide

JMLA Case Studies in Health Sciences Librarianship brings to our attention a new series of Users’ Guide articles:  How to use an article about genetic association. The first article provides background information; the second discusses judging the validity of a study; and the third discusses applying results to the care of patients.
Attia J, Ioannidis JP, [...]

Fun facts

Just for fun, I was checking out our stats in the new 2009 Statistical Abstract.  Table 596 (Employed persons by occupation, sex, race, and Hispanic origin 2007 data) shows that librarians are now 215,000 strong  – up a bit from the 1998 figure of 208,000. We remain just over 83% female and are ever-so-slightly more [...]

Healthy computing

I work at a couple of reference desks where we share workstations, so they’re not quite customized to my personal characteristics. They’re mostly OK, but one is set up with the monitor too high, and I sometimes have neck pains from trying to find the right spot to read the screen with my progressive lenses. [...]

Visual search displays

Biomedicine on Display points us to  search-cube, a search engine powered by Google, Thumbshots.org, and Symmetri.  Results are displayed as a 3D cube, weighted toward images.  A search for “Michigan Health Sciences Library Association MHSLA” displays images from this and other blogs as well as the front pages of the MHSLA website and MHSLA blog.  [...]

Google Reader tutorials

YouTube hosts a number of short tutorials to help users get started with Google tools.  Google Reader Help Channel currently offers video tutorials on three topics: Getting Started, Reading Feeds and Sharing Items.  The page also includes links to other Google channels.  Terrific resources if your institution doesn’t block YouTube. Mine does.
via davidrothman.net
Remember that hyperlinks [...]

Online CE: Social Media

MLA’s Task Force on Social Networking Software is offering another free online series:  Dig Deeper with Social Media.  Starting Jan. 19, the series will offer a short week-long course each month on the topics of media sharing, web collaboration tools, wikis and blogs.  Find the courses and details such as technical requirements at  Dig Deeper [...]

Snow day – catching up on library blogs

Glad to be in here, not out there, as the snow continues to fall…
I don’t offer “virtual reference” as such, as a solo librarian, but I found David Lee King’s post, Ask-a-librarian services need a reboot, thought-provoking.  How do we prioritize service requests? And how do we advise our patrons of likely wait times without [...]

TED talks

I started this post a week ago…but I keep getting distracted when I go to the TED Talks site.  So plan on taking some time to explore when you follow this link!
A decade ago, I attended a couple of lectures given by futurists who predicted trends based on a seemingly random selection of news clippings.  [...]