Brief note on article about research assignments (link to post on Alchemical Thoughts)

First, the rant: Another day, another crappy day using Blogger. As if things were not bad enough (it would not save the draft I typed originally. I honestly do not know what's up with the "save, won't save" nonsense), apparently when you type it in MS Word (especially newer versions of Word), the process injects all sorts of XML bullshit into the code that Blogger does not recognize. This naturally drives the system nuts, and I have to either spend time going through the code to remove it or just post the item elsewhere and link it here (assuming of course this gets through). Thank you Mr. effing bastard Bill Gates for making your software more invasive, bloated, and annoying than it has to be. Thus endeth the rant.

You can find the actual post with my thoughts on a recent piece out of The Chronicle of Higher Education over here. Apologies to my two readers for making you jump another hoop.

It's just reader's advisory

This article on "The Fine Art of Recommending Books" by Laura Miller, writing for Salon magazine, is basically describing what a good librarian skilled in reader's advisory does: match a reader with books that meet the reader's needs. We ask questions; we assess the reader's tastes and mood to find the next read, and we sometimes may do a bit of research to find it (be it online or from a guidebook for instance). We do it in a way that is more personal and thoughtful than any online algorithm. I would say it is a skill and an art. The article also highlights librarian extraordinaire Nancy Pearl. I think the only thing Ms. Miller left out is actual recommendation websites such as Library Thing and GoodReads (this is the one I use personally to keep track of my reading). Sure, she mentioned Amazon's robots, but that is just not the same. Many online communities now exist for readers to share their books and reading experiences in more relaxed settings. Still, an interesting little piece worth a look. I think I would use it also as springboard to promote what we librarians already do.

Article Note: On Read/Write Web and Online Research

I drafted the piece over on the scratch pad, Alchemical Thoughts. You can find it here. You can comment there or here. Apparently Blogger can't handle anything longer than three sentences.

The citation for the article:

Houghton-Jan, Sarah, Amanda Etches-Johnson, and Aaron Schmidt, "The Read/Write Web and the Future of Library Research." Journal of Library Administration 49.4 (2009): 365-382.

Read via Interlibrary Loan.

Article Note: On electronic biomedical resources, other than MEDLINE

Citation for the article:

Pickett, Keith M., "Reaching Beyond MEDLINE: A Beginner's Overview of Electronic Biomedical Resources." Journal of Hospital Librarianship 8.4 (2008): 398-410.

Read via Interlibrary Loan.



The article is basically a short overview of some electronic resources, both for pay and free, that are relevant to those in the health sciences. Why would you be interested in some of these resources? The article gives some reasons:

• MEDLINE does not index everything. For example, it misses things like books, book chapters, and a grey literature.
  
• MEDLINE "practices 'selective indexing,' in which only a percentage of articles from some journals are indexed and some journals are not indexed at all" (M. Knapp, qtd. in 399).
  
• Also, different databases use different systems of controlled vocabulary. For example, PsycInfo (APA's product) uses its own Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms. You can get additional relevant results if you are able to learn how to take advantage of thesauri and subject terms in a database.
  

I am just going to highlight the free resources for reference purposes:

• BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com). This is a open-access publisher with a portfolio of 208 peer reviewed journals. Most of the material is freely available. In other words, according to the website's "About" page, all the research they publish is open access, but they also serve as an access portal to others that are subscription-based.
• ClinicalTrials.gov (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov). This is a site of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). From the site, this site " is a registry of federally and privately supported clinical trials conducted in the United States and around the world. ClinicalTrials.gov gives you information about a trial's purpose, who may participate, locations, and phone numbers for more details."
• Scirus (http://www.scirus.com). This is a search engine for scientific information. Interestingly enough, it is maintained by Elsevier. It claims to be "the most comprehensive scientific research tool on the web. With over 370 million scientific items indexed at last count, it allows researchers to search for not only journal content but also scientists' homepages, courseware, pre-print server material, patents and institutional repository and website information."
• TOXLINE (http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/sis/htmlgen?TOXLINE). This is National Library of Medicine's resource of toxicology literature. TOXLINE in fact is short for Toxicology Literature Online. This resource is actually part of a larger collection of resources from the NLM's Division of Specialized Information Services that also includes things like TOXNET and ChemIDPlus.

If you need to learn more about how to do Biomedical Research, you need a little refresher of what is available, or you become a librarian who has need to do health sciences research (say you become your academic library's new health science's liaison but you don't see yourself as a health sciences person), then you should read this article and keep in handy.

Link to Article Note on the Future of Reference in Libraries

Since for some reason Blogger is being unresponsive in terms of saving the text of the post here, I have posted the note over at the scratch pad. You can read the post over there, and if you want to comment (but do not have or want a Vox account), you are welcome to put your comments here. My apologies to my two readers for the inconvenience of making you go back and forth.

The citation for the article itself:

O'Gorman, Jack and Barry Trott, "What Will Become of Reference in Academic and Public Libraries?" Journal of Library Administration 49 (2009): 327-339.

Read via Interlibrary Loan.

Link to the posting.