Pharmacy Librarian

Mobile Technologies/Informatics and Special Populations (PY1)

2011-04-07T11:01:00.000-07:00

I recently gave a lecture on two topics for the 2nd semester lab course. The first half of the lecture was about informatics in pharmacy and mobile technologies in particular, and the second half was on information resources for treating special populations. Here are my slides:

(apologies if something went wonky with the conversion to Google).

I also gave a prereading assignment, a lab assignment, and a homework assignment. Here's the skinny on the homework:

In prelab we talked about pharmacy informatics – including the use of mobile devices – and information resources for special populations. For this assignment you will critique Micromedex OR Mobile Micromedex (your choice and based on your access to the mobile app or mobile web version), and write a short description of a change to Micromedex that you would make to better serve clinical pharmacists.

You should pretend that you are a clinical pharmacist in the labor & delivery, maternity, and/or NICU wards at Durham Regional Hospital in north Durham. DRH has provided access to Micromedex on laptops at the nursing stations and in the pharmacy, and has a limited number of smartphones available during clinical rounds for the healthcare team to use. The Micromedex vendor representative has asked pharmacists at DRH to provide feedback on their product, with the aim of enhancing the web and mobile apps to make them more useful to clinical pharmacists. You should write up a short (750-1000 word) description of what you would change or add to Micromedex with a discussion of why it would be useful in the clinical setting.

When the semester is over I'll try to get up some examples of what the students come up with for this!

MLA 2010: EMBASE Lecture

2010-05-24T11:39:00.001-07:00

Raw notes from the MLA 2010 EMBASE Lecture. It was fabulous!

DDMAC: Divison of Drug Marketing, Advertising and Communications
Overview of what the FDA does, including confusing org charts for FDA. DDMAC is one of many centers under CDER (Center for Drug Eval & Research)
Mission: protect public health, blah blah blah; guard against false & misleading information in drug information
- regulatory authority under Federal Food Drug & Cosmetic Act
-- drug promotion must not be false or misleading, have fair balance, be consistent w/the approved product labeling or the package insert, only include claims substantiated by adequate & well-controlled clinical studies
-- certain class of drugs ("GRAS") didn't have to prove efficacy, just safety. all now have to do both
- implemented by CFR 202.1 (prescription drug advertising) and several that deal with preapproval promotion and accelerated approval drugs
- New FDAAA enacts various laws about direct to consumer ads (2007)

Review of DTCA by DDMAC
don't have to submit for prereview; submitted at time of initial publication/dissemination. law prohibits prereview except in some cases
review for enforcement and advisory commentary

Fun examples of bad ads to justify regulation

Difference of FDA vs. FTC regulation of advertising
- remember that FTC is supposed to enforce fairness in use of airwaves. FTC takes OTCs, devices, supplements, consumer package goods. FDA has prescription drugs (human & animal), restricted medical devices, biologics, vaccines, tobacco

Ads must provide an accurate and balanced picture of the drug product (factually true, including populations that can't take it, contraindications, side effects, relative likelihood of success, concomitant therapies, not leave anything out - in "plain language")
This includes both labeling, advertising
3 types don't need to disclose risks; one does
- help-seeking/disease awareness: talk about disease state but don't talk about particular drug therapy
- reminder - mention name of drug only (no indication, dosage, etc.) not allowed for things with boxed warnings
- institutional - ads for particular services/hospitals
- product claim - must include info about the drug in a brief summary (subject to regs)
further distinguish between print and broadcast ads: print must include all risks, but broadcast only has major side effects & contraindications and then have "adequate provision" for finding out complete risks (doctor, phone number, website, easly available print)

Evolution of DTCA - timeline explodes in 1980s and 1990s
- 1980s - first ads, voluntary moratorium
- 1990s - mostly reminder ads
- 2000s - product claims with risks

Demonstration of various asthma/allergy ads across time (fun!)

[Jonathan asks, "So are children considered a side effect?" about the patch ad]

Graph showing number of promotional pieces. Most still professional, not consumer - rising by 4-8K per year total. Majority of items and spending on professional advertising [question: will this change w/new regs regarding swag? Unknown]

oversight program for DTC is advisory
enforcement - various levels: untitled letters, warning leters, injunction/consent decree, seizures, criminal action, civil monetary penalties
common violations - inadequate communication of risk info (usu missing content or presentation odd), misleading communication of indication, misleading product efficacy claims

examples of violative ads

[grr, argh, discussion off topic and ranty]

examples of violative ads with correctives

examples of other things DDMAC does (lots, various, went fast b/c so many interruptions from audience)
lots of interesting research going on about distracting visuals, informed decision making, risk communication (impact of coupons is one - sounds cool), copy testing of individual ads
[Jonathan adds: more info on DDMAC website]

notices, etc. are posted on DDMAC site by year (have to search for DDMAC)

very amusing spoof ad for Tequila (closer)

December Awareness Campaigns

2009-12-03T09:55:00.000-08:00

Having "celebrated" World AIDS Day on December 1st, I wanted to post the monthlong awarness campaigns now:

AIDS Awareness
National Drunk and Drugged Driving Prevention
Red Ribbon Safety Campaigns for the Holidays
Safe Toys and Gifts Month

World AIDS Day

2009-12-01T13:25:00.000-08:00

December 1st is World AIDS Day. I don't really have anything pithy or topical to say about today, other than this: the Health Sciences Library is displaying one square of the AIDS Quilt. I wasn't prepared for my emotional response to the square - a mixture of sadness, hope, and laughter. Sadness because the six men memorialized in the square are all dead now from this infection. Hope because AIDS is rapidly becoming a chronic disease rather than the nearly immediate death sentence that it had been, and because I have heard that there are indications that the rates of infection are stabilizing and slowing. Joy because there was such obvious love and care put into crafting each of the pieces remembering the six men, and that love is on display for all to see.

If there's a square on display near you, go see it. But be ready.

Wordle image of this blog

2009-11-02T11:52:00.001-08:00

Tuesday Tip: Impact Factors

2009-10-27T12:52:00.000-07:00

I can go on and on at great length about the ISI Impact Factor, including about it's reliability, applicability to interdisciplinary research, validity, and overuse. But I don't really want to (that rant is getting a bit old) - instead I'll present just the facts:

The Impact Factor (IF) is a journal-based metric of "value" that is calculated by the Institute for Scientific Information and reported in the ISI Journal Citation Reports.
The IF purports to be an indicator of the average number of citations an article in a journal receives within two years of publication. There is also the 5-year IF and the Immediacy Index (average number of citations within a calendar year).
The actual formula for the 2008 IF is (#citations in 2008 to 2006 and 2007 articles)/(number of 2006 and 2007 articles).

And some interesting trends and implications:

There is quite a lot of debate about what constitutes an "article" and how the numerator and denominator of the above ratio relate to each other. That is all I will say about that.
Because the IF only looks at two years worth of articles, there can be quite a lot of fluctuation in a journal's statistic from year to year. One good article can cause a significant increase in the IF, but only for a short period of time.
Academic disciplines have different ranges for their IFs. Nursing's range peaks around 2.5; Medicine peaks around 50. This is largely because any given article in a nursing journal has fewer citations than any given medical article.
Implication of the above: you cannot compare journals across disciplines for "quality" based on the IF. You can only compare journals within a narrow discipline, and even that is a bit shaky.
Journals with a high proportion of review articles will tend to have a higher IF than comparable primary research journals. This is because review articles have a broader appeal and get cited more.
Implication for editors: If you want to up your IF, add reviews. Not book reviews, mind you, systematic or nearly systematic reviews.
Data seems to be piling up that open access journals get higher IFs than closed journals, probably because more people can (and do) read the OA journals and then cite them. An offshoot of my thesis research showed that print journals without online equivalents suffer in terms of use when they compete against online journals; I believe the same is happening with OA vs. non-OA journals.
Implication for publishers: If you want to up your IF, make your content either truly OA (immediately free), or open archives after a short embargo.

The IF has been popular particularly among tenure committees because it seems like an easy way to measure the quality of publications that faculty are using. There are a lot of reasons that this is a questionable practice, not least the problem of the inconsistency across academic disciplines. I'll be giving a brown bag at the Scholarly Communication Working Group about the IF later in November, and will post some alternatives and workarounds to the IF at that time.

NB: The Wikipedia page about the IF is actually pretty interesting. It just touches on the topic of course - I've moderated several papers at ASIS&T about this, and continue to follow the debate out of general interest.

Evidence Based Practice Lecture (PY2)

2009-10-27T08:58:00.000-07:00

Today was my annual evidence based practice lecture to the PY2 Drug Info & Lit Eval class. I'm gradually evolving this class so that it's more interactive and less heavy on the content. I feel like this year I did a much better job with the amount of content included (the old need to know vs. nice to know!), but some of my examples were a bit out of order. Here are the slides:

Note that they're very similar to last year, with a few exceptions. First, I cut out a bunch of unnecessary content including the hierarchy of evidence (they got this with a previous lecture, plus the online tutorial) and a few of the resources. Second, I added in some clicker exercises. This was all a success!

Not so much of a success: I am totally not wearing my teaching clothing. I'm wearing a sweater and a hat, and so I was both slightly less professional than I prefer to be and hot. And very, very bright red. Also, I had carefully printed out my slides so I could do live work with the Cochrane databases but still remember the weird details about each - and then the course coordinator absconded with the printout when she cleaned off the table after her lecture. Oh well, it was fine.

I have a DVD to give to the SILS class for whom I did a guest lecture a few weeks ago. I'm hoping we can figure out how to stream the video so the students don't have to come in to the library to watch it... will have to talk to Bob about that.

Library Office Hours: A Concept

2009-10-20T10:42:00.000-07:00

I just spent about half an hour looking through some of the posters at the SLA All Sciences Online Poster Session. This is a nifty-concept online "conference" in which presenters post PDFs of their posters and then are available via fora to answer questions and have discussions with "attendees." I have been advocating in some of the ASIS&T SIGs for years that we should do this - and now SLA has gone and done it so I have an actual example to point at!

One of the things I've noticed is how many of the posters mention creating library office hours for outreach to their patrons. When I attended MLA in Phoenix a few years back (2006?) I asked at the public services roundtable if anyone had heard of this kind of service. Everyone said no, but they would love to see outcomes. So, in the fall of 2006 I started my own office hours. I've been running them online and in-room since. The UNC HSL now has three librarians with office hours; myself for the School of Pharmacy, Lara Handler for the School of Medicine, and Mellanye Lackey for the School of Public Health.

We have all found office hours to be useful and productive. In fact, we wrote a paper for MRSQ talking about secondary positive outcomes from an office hours outreach. Here's the citation:

Handler, Lara; Mellanye Lackey; KTL Vaughan.(2009) "“Hidden Treasures”: Librarian Office Hours for Three Health Sciences Schools." MRSQ: Medical Reference Services Quarterly. 28(4): pages TBA.

In theory a preprint should be online at dLIST, though I'm not finding it. Will post when it's available!

Open Access Flyers from the Health Sciences Library

2009-10-20T06:24:00.000-07:00

This is Open Access Week, and librarians around the country are doing various activities to celebrate and promote open access and scholarly publishing/communication evolution. The Health Sciences Library has rebranded some flyers from SPARC that may be helpful for our faculty (all in PDF):

SPARC is the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. Many faculty don't realize that this (open access in particular, and scholarly communication more broadly) has been a particular interest of mine since graduate school. Part of my postgraduate fellowship at NC State was in the Scholarly Communication Center (now the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Center) working on copyright and scholarly publishing issues with Peggy Hoon. I am glad to see that the library community is evolving the message as well as means of discussion here - it's not really an economic argument, but rather a moral and social one - and that the general scientific and medical communities are really starting to come on board.

It occurs to me that another helpful link is the DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals. This is a good place to go to find journals in your subject area that are considered "open." Another resource is the Sherpa/ROMEO website, which collects information about journal copyright policies for their authors and rates journals according to how "good" they are on a spectrum.

What does success look like? (SILS Guest Lecture Part 2)

2009-10-16T12:33:00.000-07:00

The need to know from my lecture at SILS was the whole concept of "Need to know vs. nice to know." I think this idea is one that most faculty could explore a bit more in their teaching - it comes up a lot in various guises and environments. I was in a discussion about clickers in the classroom (blog post coming about that too!), and Need to Know became an issue. Yes, ten minutes of active learning introduced to your class means you have to drop ten minutes of content. That would be the lowest level of Nice to Know. Anyhoo, I've already ranted about that and don't need to continue.

The second, and perhaps surprising, main topic of my discussion on Thursday was the question "What does success look like?" At the HSL we're constantly asking ourselves this question for pretty much every project, program, or activity that we do. The point of this question is to remind us that every activity must include an assessment and evaluation component to a: be successful and b: translate that success to future successful programs.

You can also think of this from an Evidence Based Practice framework (paraphrasing mine):

Identify the problem.
Research prior knowledge/information/data/discussion about this and similar problems.
Appraise the evidence in light of your context.
Apply the info and context to solve the problem.
Evaluate the outcome.

So, every piece of "practice" should include some means of evaluating whether it was successful, so that information can then become a datum for subsequent activities. Assessment, good!

But how can a librarian doing a series of guest lectures really assess the teaching performance? Here are several things I do:
During class:

One-minute papers as a check on homework understanding and completion.
Use audience response system ("clickers") to get real-time feedback on content understanding
Ask at the conclusion the "reference interview" question: "Have I taught you what you wanted to learn today?" In educational circles this is sometimes posed as "What is muddy? What is clear?"

After class:

Homework! Some classes let me either have a portion of lab or give a homework assignment. Upside: this is the classic way to see if people have learned the baseline that you wanted them to learn. Downsides: you have to grade them (ew) and what do you do if they didn't learn?
Most of my guest lectures come with an exam question at the end of the year. Upside: "Yes, this will be on the test" often works to get students to pay attention. Downside: What do you do if the students get it wrong? Writing good exam questions is an art that I have not mastered - I'm either too hard or way too easy. If you only have one Need to Know then you may be able to come up with only one question, but really, you probably want to see if students retain more than one thing.

Another assessment that I do is to write for myself a short report about the class. What did I feel went well? How did the students respond to the activities, readings, jokes, etc? What did I get questions about? Where on the assignment did they trip up? How could I do this better next year? Sometimes I'll write things like this on the blog (here), and sometimes in a document that I include in the folder with the class materials for next year. A little self-reflection is a good thing. If your lecture is videotaped this can be a good time to watch yourself with a critical eye. For instance, I know that I talk too fast, move around too much, and click my tongue in a really annoying fashion, all because I watched a tape of myself teach. It was horrible, but I survived. I don't do that level for every class, mind you, just every once in a while.

I've also had peers watch me teach and give feedback - which can be very helpful if a bit daunting. I don't know why it's scarier to have my friend Adam watch me teach than it already was with 155 students and Maryann, but it is. Maybe because he's there specifically to critique me?

So how did I do in the SILS lecture? Well, as I mentioned in Part 1, I deliberately went into it with a fuzzy outline of content and talking points. I think it could have been better - for instance, why oh why did I kill so many trees by printing out those curricular objectives? - but towards the end I was really happy with the discussion that ensued. Some students were clearly bored out of their minds, but a few others were really engaged (hi Adam!) and continue to discuss the topics elsewhere later.

Plus, one of the questions really got me thinking. Essentially, it was what do you do about students from earlier versions of a class that improves over time? If you teach a dud of a lecture, what do you do? The reality is, you can't do much. I guess you hope that students will return for additional help or do self-study when they discover their gap - and that's all well and good for library and information science topics that I teach. You could argue that a student isn't particularly likely to kill someone because their PubMed lecture wasn't great (though the case at Johns Hopkins may be a counterargument!). But what if a pharmacy student gets a bad lecture in, say, vaccinations? It's a horrifying thought!

Need to Know vs. Nice to Know (ILS Guest Lecture Pt. 1)

2009-10-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

On October 15th I guest lectured in Rachael Clemens and David Carr's user instruction course at SILS. I enjoyed it quite a bit, even though we ended up talking about totally different stuff than I meant to. Well, to be brutally honest, I went into the class deliberately vague about my content, but wanting to get across one big point. I ended up focusing on that point as well as one other. People seemed amused, if not totally engaged until the question time at the end. It's always fun to teach the MSLS students - so totally different than my normal PharmDs.

The main point: Need to Know Vs. Nice to Know

The traditional approach to didactic instruction is to identify all the information that an expert in a subject knows about that subject, and then to lecture students until all of that content has been mentioned. This generally results in hours of class time spent with hundreds - if not thousands - of PowerPoint slides, bored students, and poor educational outcomes. If students manage to retain information long enough for an exam it's likely that they will a: forget it soon thereafter and b: never manage to apply it to real situations. The active learning movement has been trying to counter the straight lecture idea by incorporating student participation into class (facilitating peer learning, just in time quizzing, etc.). The main complaint of faculty, though, is that if they pause long enough to do a student exercise then they won't be able to get all of their content across.

This is where "need to know vs. nice to know" comes into play. Once I figured out this concept it totally freed me up to play with how I ran my classes and lectures. The simple truth is this: only the "need to know" has to be covered in class. Everything else (the "nice to know") is supplementary. If it's interesting and/or works to make the need to know more applicable, include it. Otherwise, make it available to students by other means. Just focusing on the need to know means I can spend much more time dealing with higher levels of instruction (according to Bloom's Taxonomy) and less time doing rote memorization and dull information transfer lecture. How liberating!

I applied this concept to this year's orientations. Instead of spending 15 minutes going on and on about library services, I had both the PhDs and PharmDs fill out a puzzle (which I created online at Discovery Education's Puzzlemaker). Yes, I had less time to talk, but then again it would probably be a generally good thing for the world if I talked less. The need to know from orientation? There are two: "When in doubt, ask a librarian" and "KT Vaughan is an approachable person who will help me." The nice to know? All the different stuff the library can do and be for students. I achieve the first need to know by making it the solution to the games - and the second was achieved simply by having the games. My sense, particularly among the graduate students, is that this worked - I feel like I'm getting a lot more contacts from PhD students this fall than usual.

Tips on Presenting Scholarly Posters

2009-10-12T11:57:00.000-07:00

One service that I am happy to provide for graduate students and faculty in the ESOP is poster review - in which I take a draft copy of a scholarly poster and do some informal "peer review." I recommend formatting and language changes, as well as suggest alternate ways of arranging and presenting content. One of my favorite classes to teach is also the poster design class. I like to think of my philosophy of poster design as the "wine and cheese drive-by" model. In my experience, most poster sessions are during a time when people have food of some sort - often during a reception. This means that people looking at the posters have food and maybe drinks in their hands, and have at least part of their brains occupied by eating and not spilling. Another thing to keep in mind is that most people are inherently xenophobic - which in this context means that most people wander through the poster hall looking at posters but not really wanting to talk to the presenters.

There are two problems here: One is the quality of most posters and the other is the behavior of the poster presenter. Normally I teach and review just for the former, but I believe the latter requires practice as well. Poster presentation skills are often taken for granted, but they are crucial to the success of a poster. A mediocre poster that is presented in a great way will be much more "successful" (by whatever rubric you choose to use) than a fabulous poster presented poorly, in my opinion.

So how do you combat the food plus shy tendency of attendees to avoid you? Here are some tips for how to best present your poster:

Make eye contact with passersby. People are much more likely to stop if they have been "snared" by eye contact. Be aware that most people will try to avoid eye contact if at all possible.
Approach every person who even pauses at your poster, with an open, welcoming phrase like "Please let me know if you have any questions."
Once you have their attention, have a one-minute speech ready to tell them about the most exciting thing on your poster.
Smile.
Dress professionally; wear comfortable shoes (you'll be standing for a while).
Make sure your energy level is high - but don't be manic.
Have something to drink so that your voice doesn't give out. Avoid food, though, since it's harder to swallow food quickly when someone approaches you than to swallow liquid.
A busy poster will attract more viewers than one with a bored presenter. Consider asking friends to stop by occasionally as "plants".
This is a professional presentation, not a social hour. Make sure every interaction you have, even with your plants, appears to other potential contacts as if it were a "real" question. Even better if they are all real questions!
Have business cards ready to hand out. I no longer print copies of my posters; instead, I post them online before the conference, and print out stickers with the title, authors, and URL for the online version. I stick those to the backs of my cards, and hand out the card (making sure I tell people to check the URL on the back). It's much more popular than handouts and uses fewer trees.
Check the conference guidelines for the posters. Occasionally conferences will have tables available by the posters. If you're demonstrating something that might have online or other computer-based content, Make a supplement to your poster that can run on a laptop. I suggest making it internet-free, since you never can tell if conference spaces will be networked.

RefWorks tutorials on the open web

2009-10-06T11:29:00.000-07:00

The UNC Health Sciences Library provides support to the Health Affairs campus (and, honestly, to anyone else who comes by) in using various bibliographic/citation management programs including RefWorks and EndNote. We've been depending on the RefWorks tutorials (which are good!) for training, and haven't created one ourselves. I believe there is one in the works, though, which would be nice. In the meantime, here are some open tutorials that use video (love!):

RefWorks database tutorials (Refworks)
Refworks Video Tutorials (Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale)

October Awareness Campaigns

2009-10-01T07:11:00.000-07:00

I think most people are aware that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but it's also a popular month for lots of other health awareness, prevention, and treatment campaigns. Here are some:

Brain Injury Awareness (Brain Injury Association of America)
Celiac Awareness (Celiac Sprue Association)
Dental Hygiene (American Dental Hygienists' Society)
Domestic Violence Awareness Month
Down Syndrome Awareness (National Down Syndrome Society)
Health Literacy
Healthy Lung (American Lung Association)
Infertility Awareness
Liver Awareness (American Liver Foundation)
Lupus Erythematosus (Lupus Foundation of America)
Medical Librarians' Month (Medical Library Association)
Physical Therapy (American Physical Therapy Association)
Spina Bifida Awareness (Spina Bifida Association)
Rett Syndrome Awareness (International Rett Syndrome Foundation)
Respiratory Care Week - October 25-31st (American Association for Respiratory Care)

I'm sure I've missed some - if you know of more, please leave a comment with a link to the sponsoring organization. Thanks!

MyNCBI - Saving Collections for PubMed

2009-09-30T06:51:00.000-07:00

I got a peek at the new PubMed interface today. It's pretty slick, but means I'm going to have to do a total redo of how I teach this database to the pharmacy students. For one thing, getting to the details of the search is a lot harder now, though the citation matcher and clinical queries are hard to see. You have to know to go to the advanced search for both the details and limits. I guess my beef is that in simplifying the main search page they got rid of the useful features like the tabs. The "send to" area is a lot less noticeable now, too.

But enough whinging about the new PubMed. Like everything else I'll get used to it and will develop new techniques and tips for searching. As will all the rest of us, I suppose. If you want to play around with the preview, it's online at http://preview.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez.

Yesterday's office hours were about MyNCBI, the personal space available for all of the NCBI/NLM databases. These include PubMed, of course, as well as the genome, nucleotide, and protein databases, etc. The original purpose of MyNCBI was to take over the old Cubby functionality and expand it to allow for automatically emailed updates to saved searches. Lately, however, MyNCBI has been further enlarged to be able to save "Collections" of PubMed (and other databases) records. In the last year MyNCBI users have also been able to share their collections via RSS feed, stable URL, and code that can be posted in HTML and blog pages.

For example, here's what a link to my collection on development programs to support scholarship by clinical faculty looks like:

View my collection, "Faculty Development Support for Scholarship" from NCBI

The link becomes a "search" in PubMed, showing up in the default Summary display. This is an easy way to share articles within lab groups, journal clubs, or among collaborators on a paper. The latter is what I'm using the above link for. If you want to be able to share a collection in this manner, it's important to specify that the collection should be Public (default is Private). Links and code are in the MyNCBI Collections area, under "sharing" for each collection that you've created. I have several collections - but most are still private simply because they're storage areas for random topics of little interest to anyone else.

Tuesday Tip: Using and Finding Images

2009-09-22T11:17:00.000-07:00

Today in office hours I'm talking about finding and using images for educational use - that is, student presentations and faculty lectures - and professional talks. These are two different beasties, from a legal perspective, and I'm getting good questions from students and faculty alike about what they should do.

Here are my top questions:

Q: Do I have to cite the source of my image?
A: Yes! Technically you should cite everything that is not an original creation or thought - this includes ideas, data, phrases and other quotations, and images (including photos, charts, graphs, etc.). When you are working on a presentation - so, we'll assume you're using PowerPoint - it is sufficient to do an internal citation, and then have a slide of references at the end. When you actually give the talk you don't even have to show that slide - it can be placed after your concluding slide - but you want it available if someone asks. If you prefer, you can do a tiny citation under the photo giving the location of the original image.

This essentially a plagiarism question, and thus in the academic honesty arena. From a legal standpoint, the real question is this one:

Q: Can I use any image in my presentation for free, or do I have to get permission from the author/creator first?
A: Technically, you should ask permission first, unless the image has a specific license allowing reuse. You may be able to make a fair use argument to use images in class presentations that are not ever made public (either online or in person). However, if you will be posting your slides online or are presenting at a public venue (probably including conference talks), it is safer to make sure you either have individual permission to use a specific image or that you use images that have a blanket allowance for educational reuse. The previous statement is open to discussion!

Q: Where can I find images that are copyright-free?
A: Lots of places! The HSL is working on a guide to sources of free, usable, online image/movie/music files, and I hope that it will be done soonly. In the meantime, try these:

Google Images - In the advanced search, the "Usage Rights" pull-down menu has several options for levels of reuse.
Flickr - Under the Explore tab, select "Creative Commons" to browse images tagged with different levels of use and modification acccording to the CC standards.
HEAL: Health Education Assets Library - a repository of images specifically for educational use. There are also other multimedia files here in addition to images.

Confused about copyright? HSL has an online tutorial for copyright issues relevant to health affairs students and faculty.

Delicious/hslpharmacy

2009-09-11T21:05:00.001-07:00

Delicious/hslpharmacy

PubMed Collection: Faculty Development & Support for Scholarship

Posted: 11 Sep 2009 08:26 AM PDT

Collection of article citations from PubMed on the topic of support and development of practice faculty scholarship and professional activity (research, publication, etc.). Focuses primarily on pharmacy with articles from nursing, medicine, dentistry, and allied health.

Drug Industry Document Archive

Posted: 11 Sep 2009 07:56 AM PDT

This archive is one that will be of particular importance to those with an interest in public health, public policy, and the general activities of pharmaceutical companies. The Drug Industry Document Archive (DIDA) was created by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and it contains over 1500 documents related to pharmaceutical industry clinical trials, publication of study results, pricing, marketing, and relations with physicians. Many of these documents were previously secret, and were only made public as a result of lawsuits filed against a number of prominent pharmaceutical companies. First-time visitors may wish to start by clicking on "The Documents" link on the homepage. Here they can read about some of the crucial lawsuits that generated the documents featured in this archive.

PHCY401 Information Skills

2009-09-07T12:20:00.000-07:00

I did my annual PHCY401 Information Skills lecture on 8/31/09, with everyone in the class taking an assignment in their lab session (a total of four full sections; eight instances in our lab, the Davis large lab, and online via Adobe Connect in my office hours). While the slides this year weren't significantly different from last year, I did have two major changes:

1: I used the audience response system (TurningPoint, I believe) that the ESOP has instituted this year. All PY1s and PY2s were required to purchase "clickers", and we've been encouraged to have them use them in lecture. This was a great way to incorporate active learning and realtime feedback into my lecture - I think it went very well and I look forward to using it in October/November on the PY2s in the DI course.

2: I converted the assignment to a multiple-choice, Blackboard-based "quiz". This made it much easier to grade, without (I think) much loss in learning outcomes. Out of 30 questions total, I had 18 questions based on the lecture and doing literature searches in PubMed, ISI WOS, the e-Journal finder, the catalog, and Google advanced search. A further 12 questions were taken (with a few changes) from the Finding Health Information: A Path Through the Maze. It was pretty clear which students didn't pay attention to (or take) FHI: APTtM, since they missed most of those questions. The mean and median grades were roughly 25-26/30, which is right on my target.

Because the assignment was multiple choice, we had far fewer questions this year. I think next year I'll only need one proctor per session, rather than the two that we've traditionally had. Since the proctors are the librarians, staff, and GAs from User Services, this will make my colleagues very happy! I used the Captivate video to give instructions again this time, which also worked nicely. The third minor change was that Dr. Dinkins added me as an instructor to the PHCY 401 class, which meant I didn't have to enroll all the students in a separate class and then have someone copy over their grades. Much easier and a serious time advantage!

Delicious/hslpharmacy

2009-09-01T21:55:00.001-07:00

Delicious/hslpharmacy

Pictogram - FIP - International Pharmaceutical Federation

Posted: 01 Sep 2009 07:10 AM PDT

Description and downloads for the MEPS Pictogram Project: "This project has been undertaken by MEPS to give health professionals a means of communicating medication instructions to people that they have no language in common with and / or who may be illiterate. MEPS members provide emergency relief and humanitarian aid relief where such a means of communication may well be required."

Delicious/hslpharmacy

2009-08-31T21:05:00.001-07:00

Delicious/hslpharmacy

ScienceBlogs : Medicine & Health

Posted: 31 Aug 2009 06:46 AM PDT

Feed page for the various ScienceBlogs classified under medicine and health.

Delicious/hslpharmacy

2009-08-20T21:12:00.001-07:00

Delicious/hslpharmacy

50 Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom | Teaching and Learning Excellence

Posted: 20 Aug 2009 09:16 AM PDT

PharmD & PhD Orientation 2009

2009-08-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

This year I decided to try something new with my orientation to the PhD and PharmD students. Taking a cue from an AACP presentation, I found the Discovery Education site, where I could make word games in HTML/RTF formats. For the PhD students I did a word jumble, and for the PharmDs I did a word search.

I have to say, the PharmDs were much more willing to play along with my game - but I've had great feedback from the PhDs about how much they enjoyed my orientation. I've also had more consults and questions from PhDs than usual for this time of year, suggesting that they remember that I'm approachable and available. That's pretty much the goal of orientation!

Here are my slides from the PharmD orientation (pretty much the same as last year). I don't use slides with the PhDs, since I don't have much time and it mostly becomes Q&A.

AACP 2009: Sessions from L/ER

2009-07-23T07:44:00.000-07:00

Innovations in Teaching: Curricular Integration of Information Competencies for Students and Preceptors at Remote Sites was the first of two sessions produced by the Libraries/Educational Resources Section. Speakers were Mariana Lapidus and Irena Bond from the Mass College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and Rae Jesano from the U of Florida. Unfortunately slides haven't been added to the AACP site yet (for either section program).

I didn't realize that MCPHS has such a distributed suite of campuses with several different types of PharmD programs. It understandably makes providing information competency instruction difficult. They are doing a lot via Blackboard, which makes sense. Irena and Mariana gave good talks, but nothing hugely earth-shattering. Rae's situation at Florida is likewise very multi-campus oriented, except that she is it when it comes to the librarian services. Discussion quickly got onto a question of access to resources by preceptors and other off-campus faculty, which is not of particular importance to me since we've solved this issue with the AHEC Digital Library.

The second L/ER session, Retaining Rights when You Publish: Meeting Funder Requirements and Increasing the Impact of Your Research, was very interesting. Which was good, since it was very early in the morning in a room that was way too large, a weird shape, and cold. All griping aside, Scott Lapinski (an old friend from ASIS&T days) from Harvard Countway and Ellen Duranceau from MIT gave an excellent presentation that largely focused on current issues in copyright law for academics including the NIH Public Access Policy. I noted that some publishers have supplemental policies regarding open archiving that they may not tell you unless you ask (I recently had this experience with Taylor & Francis). I was sad that the bulk of the audience were members of the section; this would have been a very good session for publishing faculty. Scott and Ellen were clear, concise, not inflammatory, and generally great speakers.

AACP 2009: Governance

2009-07-23T07:01:00.000-07:00

This year I am serving a term as the secretary of the Libraries/Educational Resources Section for AACP, and was sworn in as the Chair-elect of the section for 2009/2010. As such, I got (!) to go to the Council of Sections meeting Saturday afternoon. It was an interesting meeting, not least because there was some concern over the way the peer review of posters was conducted. It appears that reviewers are not taking advantage of the comments section to give justification for their decisions. When a poster is rejected, this becomes an issue. We spent quite a lot of time discussing what can be done about this. My personal view (which I held back until now!) is that we accept far more posters than we should for the conference. It's an acceptance rate of about 90%, which is, imho, way too high. This year there were 500 posters split between two one-hours sessions - not enough time to see them all, and way too many in the space that was provided (which also had physical issues such as poor lighting). Other things discussed at the Council were several task forces including one on preceptor training, which is of interest to libraries.

I missed the welcome session for the Section. This year we had the Membership chair (Jill Nissen) and Awards chair (Vicki Killion) run it, which I think was a great idea. It made me sad to miss it, but since it's at the same time as the Section meeting there wasn't much choice.

The business meeting for the section went well, with no real controversies. I'll get draft minutes up eventually (note to self: get e-copies of reports from committee chairs). This year Vern (Duba, Chair) asked people to list their favorite guilty pleasure websites. It was amusing, but we all agreed that it takes a long time to go through introductions. I think next year we may shift that to the welcome reception, and have more time at the business meeting for discussion. One member suggested that it would be nice to have conversation time somewhere during the conference, so maybe that can take the last 15 minutes of the business mtg. in the future.

The Basic Resources meeting went smoothly. We learned that Leslie Bowman will be stepping down as Co-editor this year, and wish good health to Barbara Nanstiel (who couldn't make the conference at the last minute). I proposed a new section on pharmacogenetics & pharmacogenomics, and with only minor changes (most of which I suggested!) it was accepted by acclamation. That was a lot easier than I had expected!

The Banquet was lovely - I got to sit between Kelly Scolaro and Pam Joyner at the UNC table. They are two of my favorite people at the School, so you know I had a good time. Unfortunately a number of our faculty skipped the 'do' this year, which is too bad because a: the food was actually pretty decent and b: we won an award for the student recruitment video that Carla White-Harris produced.

PHCY 402: Functional Health Literacy Lecture

2009-03-04T07:57:00.001-08:00

Two weeks ago I gave my annual lecture to the PY1s on consumer health information / functional health literacy. It went very well this year, in part I think because I incorporated a lot more activity on the students' part. They read actual language from a pregnancy test insert, then amended language. The actual language is written at a 15th SMOG level; the amended is at a 7th grade SMOG level!

I also had them watch a video from the AMA called "Low Health Literacy: You Can't Tell by Looking" (link here), and then write a quick reaction paper to it. Most of the students got at least some of the main concepts - lots of people have low literacy, there's a lot of shame involved in not being able to understand the doctor, pharmacists have a responsibility to their patients by using more understandable language, etc. - and a few could use some attitude help. But overall I'm very pleased with this exercise.

Here are the slides:

Here are the instructions for the assignment that I gave them (due this week). It's a patient handout for the drug that they're covering in both lab and biochemistry class this semester. We'll see how the finished handouts look!

Congrats Assoc. Prof. Pomerantz!

2009-02-28T19:29:00.000-08:00

Congratulations are in order for Dr. Jeff Pomerantz, who just received tenure and a promotion to Associate Professor. It is well-deserved!

PS: You need to update your homepage!
PPS: No, not this Jeff Pomerantz!

Library 2.0: Assessing Needs, Goals, Outcomes

2009-02-06T07:35:00.000-08:00

This afternoon I'm participating in a panel sponsored by the Duke University Libraries on Library 2.0. The other two panelists are Paolo Mangiafico, Director of Digital Information Strategy for the Duke, and Jeff Pomerantz, Professor of Library/Information Science at the UNC-CH School of Information and Library Science.

My piece of the panel is to discuss what libraries are actually using in the Library/Web 2.0 arena. I'm concentrating on a few techs (OPACs, chat, blogs, wikis, social bookmarks, social networks) in the context of four questions: What need do we see? What technology might help fill this need? How do we assess success/failure of this tech in the context of the need? What are the outcomes of techs that have survived assessment?

Here are my slides (warning: they aren't particularly helpful, as mostly I'm using them to remind myself of which tech I'm discussing next), and below are links to the exemplars that I discuss.

HSL Ask a Librarian - Used to show off the latest chat tool, LibraryH3lp
Carolina Curator - Example of professional library news/information blog
PharmLib Wiki - Community wiki for pharmacy librarians
Meet Your Librarian: Kate McGraw - Staff page for the Dental liaison; shows Delicious tag cloud
UNC HSL on Facebook - Library Facebook page

Science Online: Sessions 4 & 5: History of Science, Arts & Science

2009-01-17T07:26:00.000-08:00

Web and the History of Science

Interesting discussion, on the whole. I admit I was totally distracted by trying to derive the pattern for Scicurious' cardigan and thus occasionally lost the thread of the talks. Unfortunate that it mostly turned into a "how we do this" and not so much of the real social and scientific outcomes of blogging on the history of science. Interesting that they all three focus a lot on the "weird science" aspects of the HOS. Having been very interested in the history of biology, in particular, and nearly pursuing that to a greater extent, I was hoping for discussion of how understanding the past - and communicating the past - can influence the future. But it was fun to hear interesting stories and see fun photos.

Art and science — online and offline

Again, an interesting discussion, but not full of hard content. There were a few audience members who dominated the conversation, most of whom I wasn't particularly interested in hearing from. I got most of a baby hat knit during it, and yet even when the conversation turned to handicrafts/arts and science, no one noticed the science knitter sitting in the middle of the room clacking away on her double-points. It was a bit odd, but I didn't feel like talking so I didn't.

Science Online: Session 3: Semantic Web in Science

2009-01-17T07:22:00.000-08:00

Semantic web in science: how to build it, how to use it

unprocessed notes

scientists don't share well: IPR, funding, inertia, incentive structures, web doesn't work well for data
need URIs for concepts - reason for failure to date of semantic web is lack of DNS type of mediator
RDF: Resource Description Framework (subject predicate object) - combination of literal and reification statements
also uses OWL: Web Ontology Language allows for meaning to be retained when taken out of context

what are the IP implications of publishing open results of data queries from databases with differing copyright restrictions?

Uses: DNS for life sciences, API to public domain of data, enhanced document markup, activity center analysis
"It's all about the query" - trying to get companies to make wysywig editors for semantic web coding

see slides for various other search tools and collections of ontologies
various links to other things...

Science Online: Session 2: Video for Research

2009-01-17T07:17:00.000-08:00

Not just text – image, sound and video in peer-reviewed literature

Very interesting session focusing on SciVee and the Journal of Visualized Experiments. Audience was surprisingly anti-message on this one, I thought it was really interesting to think about how communication via visual media is often much more effective than in print. Also, raised questions in my head about facilitating learning among different styles of learner rather than just the readers.

Science Online: Session 1: Open Access

2009-01-17T07:14:00.000-08:00

Open Access Publishing: Present and Future

unprocessed notes

Overview of what OA is: ROAR/ROMEO gold/green/grey

OAIster - search as if one big archive http://www.oaister.com/"OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources. We provide access to these digital resources by "harvesting" their descriptive metadata (records) using OAI-PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting)."

Citation advantage to OA - seems to be gaining evidence (article just came out)iHOP: information hyperlinked over proteins (text/data mining)

scalability ex: Genbank, financial implications of journal prices compared to other economic indicators ("toll-access" journals)
problems/questions: so why are "toll-access" journals proliferating?lots of duplication of content, effort, repositoriespoint: title of journal goes on your CV, so reputation counts - OA just don't have that repuation - assessment, evaluation, value, "impact"
real problem: how do you publicize your research and make sure it is used? second real problem: how do you evaluate people based on the quality of their research?
distribute by preprints (example of ArXiv)

so much of this is not new! why can't I get into a discussion of OA that doesn't remind me of discussions from 10 years ago?

Scientists Comment on Their Libraries

2009-01-09T13:51:00.000-08:00

New publication:

Vaughan, K.T.L. and Hemminger, Bradley and Pulley, Meredith (2008). Scientists Comment on Their Libraries: Successes, Shortcomings, and Dreams for the Future. dLIST: Digital Library of Information Science and Technology. Deposited Jan 7, 2009. Available online in MS Word 2003 format.

Abstract:
A survey was conducted of 969 science researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This long survey concluded with three questions requesting users’ perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the campus libraries, and what single improvement the libraries could make to support scientific research and education. While the scope of these questions was more limited than large-scale surveys such as LibQUAL+TM, the results largely confirmed information from a local implementation of that survey. In addition, an interactive visualization tool was developed to help with analysis of the resulting comments. A summary of the major findings, recommendations for library improvements, and overall conclusions is given.

Subjects:
Library Science
Reference Services
Medical Libraries
Academic Libraries
Management
User Studies
Library Statistics
Information Science
Science Technology Studies
Information Seeking Behaviors
Libraries

Transferring Knowledge: Resources for Good Design

2008-12-09T07:27:00.000-08:00

The UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health has an executive MPH program that is very popular with professionals around the country. They receive most of their coursework online, but come to campus for a week every trimester or so. The Health Sciences Library offers a one-day class on information literacy (this is not the official title) based on the MASCOT model of information: Mastery of the process; Ask the right questions; Search the right databases; Critically evaluate the information & the search; Organize the information; Transfer the new knowledge.

This year (as in past classes) I am responsible for the T section of the day. I'm taking a bit of a different tack this year. In the past we've focused primarily on how to design a scholarly poster. This time I'm taking a broader view of talking about various different types of scholarly and professional communication (papers, posters, talks, and websites), including the unique strengths and weaknesses as well as what makes each good/bad. All that in about 30 minutes.

These are the resources I'm using:

Good Paper Journal Club: Connotea Bookmarks - the GPJC is a Nature Journals club. These bookmarks are a mixture of papers about writing scientific papers and exemplars of good writing.
A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods - extremely cool javascript-enabled website with examples of lots of different ways to present data, concepts, and processes visually. From http://www.visual-literacy.org/ .
Desiging Effective Posters - Health Sciences Library's online tutorial.
Principles of Good Design for Scholarly Posters - HTML version of a handout originally created for a seminar to UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy PhD students in the Division of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy.
Advice on Giving a Good PowerPoint Presentation - by Joseph Gallian at the U.Minn-Duluth (math faculty, I believe). A bit outdated (talks about transparencies as alternatives to PPT slides) but with great advice on preparation and delivery.

NCLA Workshop: When is Online Teaching Right for Me?

2008-11-17T12:24:00.000-08:00

Tuesday Nov. 18th I'll be teaching a two hour workshop for librarians on when and how to move from in-room instruction to online instruction. This is based on the first afternoon's worth of a workshop I gave twice last year for the State Library of North Carolina's Master Trainer series. The workshop for NCLA just focuses on theory and not on any specific program (we only have two hours!).

If you are interested, materials for the course are available via Google Docs:
Types of Online Tools
Planning Worksheet for Teaching Online
Preparing to Teach Online (Synchronously): A Planning Checklist
Examples of Online Teaching

Unfortunately the quiz is in PDF format, and GoogleDocs doesn't support generalized sharing of that. If you're interested in a copy of the quiz leave me a comment with your email and I'll send it to you.

HSL Hiring: Instructional Assistant (Paraprofessional)

2008-08-27T11:08:00.001-07:00

HSL is looking for a new SPA (paraprofessional) Instructional Assistant, whom I will be supervising (thus the announcement here on the blog). The job is currently open, and closes I believe September 8th, so there's not much time. Information about the job. Here's a quick paragraph about duties:

This position provides user services: answers questions at the desk and by phone or online, circulates materials, creates borrowers accounts, responds to issues related to fines and information access, responds to building emergencies outside of regular business hours, and contacts appropriate campus personnel and library managers as needed. This position provides first-line and instructional support for knowledge transfer, for example: serves as a member of the Media Design Service Team, assists in the use of bibliographic formatting software, and provides help with library classes. This position assists with course reserves (print, multimedia, and electronic) and serves as backup for the reserves manager. The Instructional Assistant works closely with other members of the User Services Department and reports to the Media Design Services Coordinator.

As you can see, it's not just desk duty but also a fair amount of direct support for our EndNote and Media Design Services areas. The MDS is going to be "renovated" this year to be more focused on information transfer/scholarly communication opportunities created by multimedia and Web 2.0 applications - this position will be part of the team that does that renovation. Apply via UNC ApplicantWeb.

AACP2008: L/ER Session on Health Literacy and Cultural Competencies

2008-07-21T19:39:00.000-07:00

I am extremely conflicted about the session I attended today sponsored by the AACP L/ER Section. First of all, because of various schedule conflicts and illnesses, Vern had to scramble to get a speaker for this session at the last minute. Unfortunately I can't remember her name and I didn't get her handout (again, there were a lot of people there!). I believe she's an NLM Fellow somewhere in the Chicago area.

The reason I'm conflicted about this session is that I was hoping for some discussion about how to blend cultural competency and health literacy together in a nice, cohesive instructional package. I know there are schools out there that are doing interesting things with discussing the need for providing consumer health literature to multiple cultural groups - including why you would, how you evaluate them, how to write them, etc. Unfortunately, the speaker largely ran through a very large number of general consumer health sites, with a few drug-specific ones thrown in at the end out of deference to the actual group visiting.

The other reason I'm conflicted is that I talked to my lab faculty about the session later. We do a lot with cultural competency and health literacy in the lab classes, since their curriculum is a bit more flexible (as well as more practical), so can respond to interesting challenges like this one. They were thrilled with the new resources that they'd never seen, and thought the session was really interesting. I guess I need to work on making our website picks a bit more visible...

The best part of the session was when Vern led a discussion of what libraries/schools are doing to teach either/both of these in their professional programs. I would love to be able to gather that discussion (it might have been taped? I should ask Vern) and get it up on the wiki. It was really interesting to hear about other programs. For instance, one school has their non-native English speaking TAs - many of whom are from East Asia - do a role play with their groups. In the role play, the TA plays the role of the pharmacist while the students have to get information about critical diseases that they contracted while travelling abroad. It was apparently a total eye-opener for the students when they "got" how much verbal interaction is necessary in pharmacy consultations. How cool! I would have liked to hear more things like this.

It's clear that I like going to conferences to bring back practical ideas to implement at the library and the school. Luckily, I usually at least get that through conversations with my faculty and the librarians here.

Also today I went to a session on mapping informatics into the pharmacy curriculum. Every year they do a session, every year some librarian gets up to note that they ignore us, and every year they ignore us again. It's really frustrating! And then there was the editor's meeting for the Basic Resources List. The Section business meeting went pretty well. We gavelled in Vern as Chair, Sue as Chair-Elect, and myself as Secretary. A whole new year!

AACP 2008: L/ER Session on Marketing

2008-07-20T22:09:00.000-07:00

The L/ER section's first program, "A Bold New Marketing Plan: Communicating the Library's Role in Pharmacy Education" was this afternoon at 1pm. The speaker was Peggy Barber, who has been the marketing guru for ALA. Among her claims to fame? The READ posters. Now she's a partner in Library Communication Strategies. She was great. I'm hoping the promise to get slides up on the web pans out - because she ran out of handouts and so I shared with Jill.

Going into this session I was really worried that this would turn into one of those boring sessions in which someone harangues librarians about how the reason no one values us is that we don't promote ourselves, and then go on to suggest ways we could do cute things with bookmarks/displays/food to get more foot traffic. This was not that session (yay!). Instead, Peggy gave us lots of hands-on practice with developing pieces of a real marketing plan.

Her eight pieces of a good marketing plan:

Introduction
Communication goals
Objectives
Positioning statement
Key message
Key audiences
Strategies/tactics/tools
Evaluation measures

We worked through examples from the audience (mine was developing partnership relationships with the graduate program in the SOP) for the first 6 points, and then unfortunately ran out of time. If Peggy is ever giving a longer workshop close to me I'm definitely taking it.

AACP 2008: Opening Plenary

2008-07-20T21:12:00.000-07:00

Last year's opening plenary (by Daniel Pink) was so great that I had high hopes for this year's talk. Unfortunately Pink was so good - a natural speaker, funny, and with great visuals in his slides - that Jonathan Peck really had his work cut out for him. While I found his talk interesting, and potentially useful in providing yet another framework for thinking about teaching a group made up of people who are inherently different from each person in the group, he just didn't light a fire under my behind the way Pink did.

First, Peck is a futurist - a term that always makes me giggle - and the president of the Institute for Alternative Futures. Now, understand that I am a serious SF fan, and so my initial reaction to "alternative futures" may be a little off from what Peck means by this term. That, plus a hilarious book about future thinking that I had to review in library school (it included the Rumsfeldian statement that there are several kinds of futurists: past futurists, current futurists, and future futurists. hee), just got me off on a bad foot at the beginning of this talk. Couple that with the fact that his slides were nearly impossible to read from where I was sitting - pretty much dead center on all axes - and things didn't get that much better.

The interesting thing that Peck talked about was a spiral of human development that stands as a kind of alternative to the Maslow's Hierarchy of Need (please forgive the Wikipedia reference). This is the Evolutionary Spiral, and he wrote pretty extensively about it in Pharma 2029: Pharma's Future Today. Hopefully his slides will be posted to the AACP website, but in the meantime this report stands as a good read to get the sense of what he said.

The Spiral is explained beginning on page 6 of the above report, but in the meantime I'll summarize. It was created by Glenna Crooks of Strategic Health Policy International. The idea is that people move along a spiral that alternates between a focus on "we" and "me" and moves from a focus on survival through belief in magic and faith (not necessarily religion - more like "you're the doctor and I don't understand medicine so I will put faith in your magic"), to a desire for gratification (both in the "me" personal needs and in the "we" community need for obedience), then to competition ("me"), and finally to holistic views of the "we" and the interdependence understanding of the most enlightened "me". Ok, this doesn't make much sense. I suggest you go read the report. It made a lot of sense this morning, and there were good suggestions for how to teach a class in which students may be mixed among several of these stages. The real benefit to this model over Maslow, I think, is that it is much finer grained than Maslow. Maslow spends an awful lot of time on basic needs - safety, housing, food - and I acknowledge that many PY1s spend August worrying about those. However, it get's a little shady as to how to apply the middle ranges of Maslow to teaching. I can get a handle around how to create an assigment that allows the "Competitive Me" group to learn alongside the "Righteous We" and "Gratify Me."

AACP 2008 Blogging

2008-07-19T22:13:00.000-07:00

After quite a hiatus from the blog I'm going to do some blogging from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) annual meeting. It's in lovely Chicago, IL this year, at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers. Interestingly enough, though the hotel is lovely (and cold!), the towers aren't really towery - especially compared to the actual skyscrapers around us. I get a serious sense of deja vu here, and am suspicious that the ASIS&T meeting in 2000 might have been in this same hotel. If so, they've renovated the meeting rooms in the last 8 years - which makes my story about meeting Julie Hurd in a joint foray to the ladies' room a thing of the past.

Anyhoo. Travel was rough getting up here - we were delayed quite a bit and then it took forever to get in on the van. The Dean and his wife were on my flight, as well as another faculty member from the School. I got in just barely in time for the Librarian's Welcome meeting, the first meeting of the Libraries/Educational Resources Section. There were a LOT of people there - maybe 30? - just goes to show that the increase in schools of pharmacy is resulting in growth in the section as well. Jill (Membership Chair) and Vern (Chair-Elect and Programming Chair) did a great job making everyone feel welcome and keeping a light feel to the meeting. Afterwards I dropped off my bag and went to dinner with the group. I enjoyed it - it was some fancy pizza place - but I'm easily amused. My roomie Christina and I are getting along fabulously. It's so nice to get someone with whom you are compatible! If all goes well I'll be asking her if she'll room with me next year too.

Tomorrow's schedule includes the first L/ER session, the opening plenary, and the opening of exhibits and posters. I have a feeling I'll scan through the posters pretty quickly - the ones tomorrow are all about practice, but Monday's are more in line with what I'm interested in.

VoiceThread Pilot at UNC

2008-05-14T13:41:00.000-07:00

Today I went to a demo of the VoiceThread product, which UNC plans to pilot over the next eight or so months. This program allows you to put up various types of media - PDFs, .jpgs, .ppt - and then narrate them. So far, not so exciting, lots of other things do that. However, the cool thing here is that you can then also allow other people to add comments, (using webcam, audio only, text, doodling) and the comments are assembled onto the original piece chronologically.

I'm trying to brainstorm ways I could use this at the library and at the SOP. Here are some thoughts:

- Digitizing exhibits and other visual materials, adding a comment about the material from the library's point of view, then allowing visitors to leave comments as well.
- Tutorials, etc., for self-study. People could add comments about what is confusing, then the instructor can come back and (hopefully) clarify.
- Course readings could be posted in PDF, then the instructor discusses highlights (with doodling!), then students can comment as well. (Props to Jeff, who thought of this first)
- Lecture, with times when students should comment, answer questions, etc.
- Virtual poster sessions!
- Videos of student presentations and/or patient interactions. Allow for self-assessment, peer-assessment, and grading.
- Drug identification exercises - what do we look at to figure out what this pill is?

I'm sure there are more, and maybe I'll keep a running list.

UNC HSL hiring GAs!

2008-05-13T13:24:00.001-07:00

The UNC Health Sciences Library is now hiring two new Graduate Assistants. One is in the User Services Department and will serve as a generalist, working in the information services and education services divisions in the department (and supervised by me). For this position we are particularly interested in a first-year student, but are accepting all applications. The second position is as the Bioinformatics GA, and is supervised by Barrie Hayes.

Postings are here for the generalist and here for the bioinformaticist.

Week 8: Mashups

2008-05-07T18:07:00.000-07:00

I have fallen a bit behind on the class, and of course this is the week that we're working with the one technology that I'm not as familiar with - mashups. Basically a mashup takes two or more different web-based programs (like, say, LibraryThing and Google Maps) and puts them together so that you get a new program (that might show you where people who have similar tastes in books to you live). They are cool but require more programming skill and knowledge than I currently have or wish to build.

This week we have actual assignments. Here goes:

1: Find a mashup and comment on it.
I actually really like eT BLAST. It's predicated on the BLAST program of similarity searching for genetic sequences, a concept I already understand, to return articles that are "like" a piece of text that you originally give the system. It worked pretty well for me - I've tagged it in del.icio.us for further study. The interface is a bit clunky - several of the "buttons" weren't showing their proper icons, and I couldn't get back to the homepage without using my browser's buttons, but it seemed to give me remarkably relevant results. I wish there were an option for searching Google Scholar (this might exist and I just didn't see it) in addition to PubMed.

It seems like a lot of the current mashups incorporate mapping to some extent. I'm not really excited about this - geography is just not part of my everyday world - so I rooted around in the ProgrammableWeb tag clouds until I came up with FlickrSudoku. This could keep me happy for hours! Is it educational? NO! But it combines random photos of numbers with web-based sudoku. I'm in heaven. ;)

2: Head over to Rollyo and search for privacy in the librarianblogs searchroll. What do librarians have to say about privacy?
Librarian bloggers (at least the first few I read in Gabe's searchroll) were largely talking about privacy in reaction to some political thing. It would be interesting to get a count of how many times "Bush" and "privacy" show up in the same blog, as a percent of times "privacy" comes up total.

I am not doing the optional assignment. I just don't feel the need for a Searchroll. My bloglines and del.icio.us do me just fine, thanks.

Week 7: Podcasting & Online Video

2008-04-28T08:11:00.000-07:00

Here's the question for this week:

Write a blog entry discussing how you felt about the experience of using YouTube and what you think about this service. Do you see any potential uses for Podcasting in the library? If so what and why?

This is a technology that we're exploring (and have been for a while) at the HSL. We'd love to have quick tips available as a monthly podcast - maybe with video. At the moment we have a growing collection of Captivate videos (all less than 5mins in duration) that we'd love to upload to YouTube and make available without having to go through our IT gatekeepers. I've got a grad student exploring this - also with putting these videos in our Facebook page.

In short, yes, we want to use this in the library mainly for quick tutorial and tips, but also potentially for the Bullitt Club lectures and other lectures that are sponsored by the library. It's a good idea to archive those anyway - and this allows us not only to save them for the future but also to share them in the present.

This is my favorite YouTube video ever: The UAB ER Nurses Rap

Week 6: Online Photo Sharing

2008-04-18T08:16:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am catching up on being lazy for two weeks. What of it?

This week the class was about online photo sharing, particularly using Flickr. I became a heavy user of Flickr when I got into Ravelry - as that is the platform they use for photo sharing of projects, yarn, patterns, etc. It's very convenient!

Here's a photo of me doing my online office hours from home:

I'm so cute, right? Actually, looking at this picture I realize I should really get a haircut...

The photo was originally taken for a poster that we presented at MAC and are presenting at MLA on office hours in the Schools of Pharmacy (me) and Public Health (Mellanye).

I love that the Library of Congress is putting up historical materials in digital format for people to see and tag at will. I think this is a nice use of online photo sharing - though I'm not sure how useful it would be for us as we don't have that much in the way of visual materials. (I could be wrong about that!).

Update: Just talked to one of our GAs, who said that the UNC Documenting the American South project had tried to use Flickr in a similar way to the LofC. Apparently Flickr got spooked over copyright problems (which didn't actually exist, but proving so would be hard) with some of the images and took them down. The upshot was that Flickr doesn't want to be used for academic purposes. It appears that we need some open source platform that the university could sponsor to do this (isn't Penn doing something with open tagging of their library catalog? Hey: could we have a class session on tagging? that would be kewl).

Week 5: Shared Office Tools

2008-04-18T08:08:00.000-07:00

Week 5 of the MLA Web 2.0 class focused on web-enabled office products such as Google Documents. As with the previous weeks, I've been using Google Docs for a long time. I find them a very convenient way of creating and managing documents with people who are geographically diverse and/or are working on things over time. Also - for docs and spreadsheets that I may want to access from multiple locations it spares me the need to either email or otherwise port files from computer to computer or to haul around my laptop so that I can connect to the VPN.

I have two main problems with Google Docs right now. First, it is difficult to get PPT slides back out of GD when you need them. You can present from within GD, but if you're in a location without internet access (Aino, rt?), that's clearly not going to work. Second, they currently don't accept PDFs - only working (editable) documents. Thus, it's not great for general file transfer and storage. I suppose something like Scribd might help for that, though. Something to think about.

At the moment I'm trying to get various groups to do group editing of documents (both word and excel). It's like pulling teeth to get them to use either GD or a wiki. I like that GD at least handles some formatting better than a wiki - and of course spreadsheets are much easier to manage there - but am not sold on either technology as the end all be all.

So, this week's question is, "Is this the future of all software products? What do you think?" I am not going to state that the current iteration of these software packages is "the future." However, I think that as the technologies are adopted by more and more people that it will support cross-border communication and, eventually, become a norm for how documents are created, edited, and shared.

Week 4: Social Bookmarking

2008-04-01T08:13:00.000-07:00

I've been trolling other people's del.icio.us bookmarks for a while now, but since I pretty much always use the same computer (my work laptop), haven't felt the need to sign up for my own account. Shock! This is the first week that we're talking about something I haven't been using for a long time! I signed up for one - I'm librariankt - and have populated it mostly with knitting magazine submissions sites and other knitting-related stuff. This is largely because I don't have bookmarks for work-related pages. Pretty much everything I ever have to use is available from the library's homepage.

Oh, except for Drugs at FDA. I should go add that. And I added the PharmLib wiki. I should probably also put in things like the AACP L/ER section, etc. Suffice to say, I love social bookmarks. It's fun to see what your friends/colleagues/competitors have put in for their tags. It's also really interesting to see how people have tagged my own sites - like the PharmLib wiki, the HSL homepage, etc.

Here are some amusing things: 9 people have saved the HSL; 9 people have save the PharmLib wiki. Only 2 people have saved the main page of the AACP homepage (the other one than me is also a librarian); 338 have saved ASIS&T; 157 have saved MLAnet; 3 have saved MAC-MLA. Do you see why I love ASIS&T?

I think now that I have the TAG button in my browser's toolbar I'll be much more likely to add things. I'm a bit feed-happy already with blogs; this will be a nice way to grab websites. I agree that it's easier than bookmarks, as well as being more portable.

Week 3: Social Networking

2008-03-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

And again with the technologies that I've been using for ages...

This week we had to create profiles in Facebook and LinkedIn. I've had a Facebook profile for about six months now - and acknowledge that I should've had one before that - and a LinkedIn profile for over a year. Honestly, I find Facebook more helpful - you can see your friends' friends more easily, plus you can remember how you know them! I have an app in my profile that creates a "friend wheel" - it maps out where the connections are among my friends. This is a very nice way of seeing my networks, not just the official ones (UNC, Raleigh-Durham, Harvard), but the inherent ones created b/c of MLA, ASIST, etc. Apparently I'm the only link among some of my high school friends. :)

The UNC HSL is creating a Facebook page. I hope it will be up by the end of next week, but we'll see. snide comment redacted. Given that 98% of UNC undergraduates create a Facebook page while they're here (per Fred Stutzman's research), it's a no-brainer for us to have a presence available there. We should be where our students are - not expect them to come to where we are!

I would love to see MLA create a page, as well. ASIS&T has one - one of my hopes as SIG Cabinet Director this year is to prompt our SIGs to put up information in the page about their events, etc., with the aim of not just linking together current members but also recruiting members from the great unwashed. I am always about keeping in touch with people after they leave the conference - and Facebook allows for a quick and informal means of doing so.

Lately I've been getting emails from the NC Democratic Party via the Facebook group. I find these irritating - largely because the poster is clearly at least 10 years younger than I am and assumes a lot! - but can see how they could be a great way of alerting people to events, etc. It would be nice to not see all of the random crap that comes over the listservs - if it could be pushed to those who say they want email and pulled by people who done (through a notification), that seems ideal.

There are privacy concerns for people putting their names and addresses in the phone book. Of course there are privacy concerns in FB/LI. But we also put up info about ourselves on our official staff pages. Don't put up anything you don't want strangers to know. In FB/LI, though, you can restrict your profile to people who are your friends/connections. I think that's a HUGE improvement over the open web!

The one beef I have with Facebook is all the random apps that people add to their profiles. I'm boring, though. My profile is pretty clean - I'm very selective about what extra stuff I want to have showing in there. Call me dull, I can take it. I wish LinkedIn were easier to use - and more interesting. I have a hard time doing the one-off networks there.

I'm starting to think that what I really need is a course on Web 3.0... I've been thinking/working/researching these technologies for years now. I organized the first panel on wikis and blogs at ASIST, what, five years ago? Four? Can't remember! Ah, it was in 2004 at the Providence, RI AM. I know, quitcherbitchin.

Week 2 of Web 2.0

2008-03-17T12:03:00.000-07:00

And I'm going a bit crazy. As an X-Gen librarian who has been an advocate of technologies such as these for a long time, and an admin for blogs and wikis for at least a year if not longer, I'm finding the first few weeks a bit basic. My boss, I think, is getting tired of hearing me bitch about it. I was tempted to just turn in the PharmLib wiki (on the PBWiki platform) for this week's assignment, but my librarian nature kicked in and I sucked it up and dealt with my hatred of WetPaint.

Why do I hate WetPaint? Simple: Ads. They are inappropriate on an education wiki, and unlike PBWiki, it's really hard to figure out how to set up a WetPain education wiki without the ads. They're all over the wiki page. Also, I dislike their editor - very difficult to see how to edit the sourcecode. So, if you'd like to see the stub I put in on WetPaint (Scholarly Publishing in Pharmacy), feel free. It will be ported over to the main PharmLib wiki once this class is over.

The question for this week is,

What is the difference between a blog and a wiki? What sor [sic] of things might
be better suited for a blog and better suited for a wiki?

I'm similarly irritated at this question - and since it's the sort of thing I have to explain about once a week on the elevator with faculty, I'll give you my elevator speech:

"A blog is like a journal of topics (in "posts") that is arranged chronologically. People can make comments but not change your post, and you can add labels to each post to help find things on a similar topic. A wiki is like a website that lots of people can edit without having to go through the typical uploading procedure - and without needing to know HTML coding. They're both really easy to use, and are good for communication with and among groups." If we're on a LONG elevator ride, I might add, "Blogs are particularly good for things that are of interest for a short time (either because they're time sensitive or of quick interest); wikis are good for normal website use, as well as for group document editing."

Week 1 of Web 2.0 101

2008-03-11T13:23:00.000-07:00

I've created the Pharmacy Librarian blog in the short term to fulfill the requirements of a CE course that I am taking online from MLA (Web 2.0 101: Introduction to Second Generation Web Tools). However, I've been thinking for a while about doing this. Since my primary blog (Knit with KT) is about my hobby, I often feel like the things I'd like to talk about with regards to my research and passions at work - those being things like pharmacy librarianship, recruitment/retention of STEM librarians, biomed informatics, etc. - don't have an outlet online. So, even after I have completed this course I hope to keep this blog running.

But on to short-term needs. This week we have to blog about the following question:

How do you think you could use RSS feeds at your library? How do you think patrons could use RSS feeds?

At the Health Sciences Library we are currently using feeds in several situations:

Our news blog is readable using various feeds.
We have several subject-specific resource pages (see Anesthesiology) that use TOC feeds along the left side.

In addition, we have taught classes for our patrons on setting up PubMed feeds - and even build these for specific departments (I believe, particularly, the surgery and ID groups have requested them). At one point we had a guide to RSS feeds in PubMed available on our website. Of course, now that I need it I can't find it!

I think that the library could include other sources of feeds in its content. It might be helpful to include the feeds from NIH/NLM, the major journals (like JAMA, BMJ, etc.), and the main campus library in our news - we have links there but don't republish the content right now. The biggest advantage I see is in training our users to use feeds and/or to set feeds up for them. For faculty/students who just want to get an analogue of Current Contents, RSS TOCs are a great solution. I like not having things always dumped to my email - this is a nice solution for lab groups, journal clubs, etc. who want to share the updated search results (of PubMed or ISI searches) with several people. The research center of which I am a part laboriously compiles a faculty publications list for the month - this would be much easier using RSS feeds based on searches in PubMed and/or ISI, BIOSIS, etc.

I am also addicted to my Bloglines. I have it open as one of my main tabs in IE - along with my GoogleMail, Yahoo! Mail, and Ravelry (a knitting community). Whenever one of my blogs publishes - and these are in folders for knitting, info/library science, and "other" - I see it as soon as it comes into Bloglines. I have 29 feeds!