Published by rwatstein October 5th, 2008
in internet, research and reference.
The Internet is an accepted place to turn for research, and nowhere has this become more apparent than in the fields of medicine and health care. A veritable explosion of available medical information seeks to meet the needs of both professionals and the public. In fact, many professionally-oriented health care sites have evolved to meet consumer needs, and consumer-oriented sites often include professional literature. Although sites for consumers and support groups make up an important and extremely useful segment of health care web sites, I will concentrate on the needs of the professional researcher. For example, legal researchers, who often have to consult medical sources, usually do not have a medical library at hand. We can appreciate that the Internet provides free access to a great deal of the medical literature, either in full text or citation/abstract format, and that it offers relatively good search capabilities. Medical journals, dictionaries, textbooks, indexes, rankings, images – all can be found on the Net, and much of it is free. The sources include publishers, government agencies, professional organizations, health libraries, and commercial entities. The following is not intended to be an exhaustive list, but rather notes on databases that I have found to be reliable and useful.
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Information might want to be free, but that doesn’t mean the editors at Encyclopedia Britannica plan to let it run roughshod. While acknowledging its need to step into modern times, Britannica also is holding fast to the idea that experts make it better. You may not know this, but Albert Einstein wore an editor’s hat at Encyclopedia Britannica, as did George Bernard Shaw and more than 80 Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners. But it’s that other encyclopedia, the online one, where vandals and anonymous editors allegedly run rampant, that’s been getting all the attention lately. As hyped as Wikipedia may be, it’s hard to deny that an open source information repository that gets updated several thousand times a second is well suited to present times. I’m talking about an era defined by two phrases: instant gratification and user-generated. So where does a 240-year-old encyclopedia like Britannica fit in today? How does it face up to the criticism that it is expensive to access, closed and outdated? For starters, by being accessible, collaborative and continuously updated.
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Published by rwatstein September 27th, 2008
in online resources, internet and reference.
The September 2008 V6N9 issue is available. The Awareness Watch Featured Report this month features World Wide Web Reference. These resources and sites bring you the latest information and happenings in the area of reference resources that are about the World Wide Web. This extensive report lists hundreds of reference resources that deal with the world wide web on a daily basis that can be used for research as well as for the creation of new world wide web entities using the latest technology available.
Awareness Watch Newsletter
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Published by rwatstein September 21st, 2008
in libraries, library services and reference.
New York Public’s Best of Reference committee member Lauren Lampasone looks back on the changes in the reference resource world since the pre-Google days of 1996. Anyone remember AltaVista?
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Published by rwatstein June 1st, 2008
in research, archives and reference.
Until recently, if you were a historian and you wanted to write a fresh account of, say, the Battle of Leyte Gulf in World War II, research was a pretty straightforward business. You would pack your bags and head to the National Archives, and spend months looking for something new in the official combat reports. Today, however, you might first do something very different: Get online and pull up any of the unofficial websites of the ships that participated in the battle - the USS Pennsylvania, for example, or the USS Washington. Lovingly maintained by former crew members and their descendants, these sites are sprawling, loosely organized repositories of photographs, personal recollections, transcribed log books, and miniature biographies of virtually every person who served on board the ship. Some of these sites even include contact information for surviving crew members and their relatives - perfect for tracking down new diaries, photographs, and letters.
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ChaCha is a free cellphone service that lets you ask any question answerable via a web search, using almost any cellphone, by simply making a voice call. Just dial (800) 224-2242 and state your question. In a few minutes, you’ll get an answer via text message from one of 10,000 hired “guides”—students, stay-at-home parents, retirees, and others—who look up the questions on the Web and reply. They get paid 20 cents per answer. (Perhaps libraries should have thought of this?)
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Published by rwatstein April 27th, 2008
in digital, publishing and reference.
The future of reference and e-book publishing remains strong, according to Rolf Janke, Vice President and Publisher of Sage Reference. According to the publisher, the prospect of reference and e-book publishing remains strong despite continued concerns from the publishing industry over the growing popularity of social networking and online peer-reference sources such as Wikipedia.
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Published by rwatstein February 25th, 2008
in reference.
A formal agreement between the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO; www.gpo.gov) and a network of 20 depository libraries has relaunched and expanded the scope of a virtual reference service called Government Information Online: Ask a Librarian (GIO; http://govtinfo.org). Be careful about using the dot-org. Typing “govtinfo.gov” will switch you to the USA.gov site. That may not be too much of a mistake in time. One of the primary strategies of the GIO service is to promote its existence through links from other leading dot-gov sites, such as USA.gov and Thomas. The engineering of such linkages falls mainly to GPO. The depository library participants, led by the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and managed by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC; www.cic.net), will handle providing the free chat- and email-based virtual reference service.
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Published by rwatstein February 9th, 2008
in web 2.0, research and reference.
“The purpose of this study was to determine the effective behaviors of reference librarians during the chat reference interview, with particular emphasis given to whether the service users would feel more satisfied when librarians adopt the behaviors recommended in the revised “RUSA Guidelines for Behavioral Performance of Reference and Information Services Providers.” The data analyzed for this study consisted of 422 chat reference transaction transcripts and corresponding user surveys obtained from a public library system that participated in a nationwide chat reference consortium.
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Reference publishers have a lot to answer for these days: the seemingly arbitrary nature of pricing; head-scratching choice of subject matter; slapping “revised” on a book in which the only update is the style of typeface; the list goes on. Having received my MLIS less than a year ago, some might consider me “young” to the profession, but my chronological age is somewhat more advanced. The truth is, I have spent most of my life up to my receding hairline in reference books, forever tilting at the windmills of my own ignorance by reading encyclopedia entries like others read novels. Along the way, I’ve had ample time to consider some seemingly foolhardy attempts to sell books.
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