Edupage, May 25, 2001
The MedBiquitous Consortium aims to develop standards and software applications for the medical community to use for education and testing, collection of outcomes data, and online journal publishing. Founded by Johns Hopkins University and a number of medical specialty societies, the MedBiquitous Consortium will turn to IBM, Rational Software, and Sun Microsystems for technical expertise. John Hopkins and the other members "want to be leaders in defining how the Internet changes health care," explained Dr. Peter S. Greene, associate dean for emerging technologies at Johns Hopkins' school of medicine. The MedBiquitous Consortium includes the MedBiquitous Laboratory, which will develop the new Internet tools, and MedBiquitous Services, a for-profit unit that will provide the larger group with Web hosting and other services.
(Baltimore Sun, 23 May 2001)
Librarians are going online to pool their collective knowledge
and answer hard-to-crack questions posed by patrons. The Collaborative
Digital Reference Service (CDRS) aims to connect libraries and
universities around the world, allowing librarians to route tough
questions to academics and other librarians with expertise in
a particular field. The system, hosted by the Library of Congress,
is available 24 hours a day to accommodate time zones around the
world. Currently in its third pilot phase, the system has signed
on nearly 600 participant institutions and is working on a better
process to phrase and route queries. The manner in which questions
are asked makes directing them to the right source of expertise
difficult, but Diane Kresh at the Library of Congress said CDRS
members are working on solutions, possibly including a
direct-chat function between participants.
(Government Computer News, 28 May 2001)
A bill now pending before the U.S. House of Representatives
could force the U.S. Department of Energy to end PubScience, its
Web database that allows scientists to search abstracts and citations
from more than a thousand scientific journals. The database, which
operates on an annual budget of approximately $500,000, is the
most popular of the Energy Department's online offerings, with
roughly 1 million searches executed per year. However, a report
associated with the department's appropriations bill for 2002
questions whether the database is appropriate, noting that several
private-sector firms provide similar services. Several firms,
including Cambridge Scientific Abstracts and Reed Elsevier, lobbied
the Software & Information Industry Association to exert its
influence and recommend the elimination of the database in the
report. However, Stephen Miles Sacks, who publishes the journal
"Scipolicy," said that some of the publications that
the department's database makes available are ignored by private-sector
firms. He added that few scientists could afford the fees these
firms would charge if they did create a similar database.
(Chronicle of Higher Education Online, 2 July 2001)
The Library of Congress is launching a system to link reference
libraries across geographical areas in order to let the libraries
refer questions outside their purview to libraries that specialize
in those areas. Although still under development, the reference
system--known as the Collaborative Digital Reference Service (CDRS)--is
already being used in some libraries. CDRS creator Diane Kresh,
director for public service collections at the Library of Congress,
said the system was hatched to allow reference librarians to remain
relevant in an age when the Internet provides instant access to
a smorgasbord of information. Although Web reference sites and
search engines use keyword recognition to pull up Web site reference
points, CDRS can, for example, send baseball-focused questions
to librarians at baseball-focused libraries or military questions
to military librarians. CDRS asks libraries to complete a Web-based
profile before joining the system. So far, 100 institutions have
joined, including libraries in America, Canada, Hong Kong, and
the United Kingdom.
(Federal Computer Week Online, 2 July 2001)
The new iLOR Web site improves searches conducted using Google,
widely considered to be the best mainstream Internet search engine
available. The site is not a separate search engine--in fact,
it has licensed its search technology from Google. Instead, iLOR
provides users with tools to make navigating search results much
easier. After entering a keyword, iLOR users can position the
cursor over the link for each result. Doing so brings up a box
that provides several options. One, "put in my list,"
allows users to save useful links or e-mail them to other users.
The "anchor here" option creates a link to the search
results page. No matter how far into a Web site users then investigate,
they can always return to the search results page simply by selecting
that link, eliminating the frustration of pressing the Web browser's
back button multiple times. College librarians and other critics
of search engines have given iLOR positive reviews. Search Engine
Watch editor Danny Sullivan wondered why Google itself has not
incorporated iLOR's tools.
(New York Times, 17 May 2001)
A new study from the RAND research institution, published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association, reveals that health
information on the Internet is not all that easy to locate and
understand. In the study, 34 physicians looked at 25 English-and
Spanish-language health sites for a six-month period. The physicians
examined how each site presented information on four specific
medical topics: obesity, asthma in children, breast cancer, and
depression. The study found that of the English-language sites,
25 percent gave no mention of these topics, while 53 percent of
the Spanish-language sites did not. For the most part, researchers
said the information presented on the sites was reliable. The
most common source of confusion was information presented two
different ways on the same site, not erroneous information. The
study notes recent research that shows 100 million U.S. residents
use the Internet as a source of health information.
(Washington Post, 23 May 2001)
Librarians know too well the misperception that everything is
available on the Internet--but has that misperception now proved
fatal? Perhaps, say medical librarians, after recent reports in
the BALTIMORE SUN suggested that a Johns Hopkins medical researcher
failed to uncover published research suggesting the potentially
lethal side effects associated with inhalation of the drug Hexamethonium.
According to the SUN, while investigators found that supervising
physician Dr. Alkis Togias made "a good faith effort"
to research the drug's possible adverse effects, his search apparently
focused on online resources, including PubMed, which is searchable
only back to 1960. Previous articles published in the 1950s, however,
with citations in subsequent publications, warned of lung damage
associated with Hexamethonium. Dr. Frederick Wolff, a professor
emeritus at the George Washington School of Medicine, told reporters
Togias was "foolish" and "lazy" for not finding
the articles. Anyone trained in academic medicine knows how to
do this research," Wolff told reporters. "What happened
is not just an indictment of one researcher, but of a system in
which people don't bother to research the literature anymore."
"These people should have been speaking to a medical librarian," says Edward Morman, College Librarian and Director, Francis C. Wood Institute for the History of Medicine at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, noting that the tragedy might have been avoided had an information professional been involved. Morman said "a manual search of pre-1960 medical indexes should have supplemented any database search" on the drug done by physicians. In a case that has garnered worldwide attention, physicians at Johns Hopkins administered hexamethonium to a healthy 24-year-old woman, Ellen Roche, in an attempt to study how the lungs of healthy people protect against asthma attacks. But Roche died weeks later from complications caused by the drug. Medical librarians say the tragedy is a stark reminder that the Internet should not replace either the stacks or the important work of information professionals. In fact, Morman notes, even if the lion's share of medical research does one day make it online, the stacks must be maintained, as reliable search engines and digital preservation remain dicey propositions. "The point is," said Morman, referring to the tragedy, "That older medical research must be maintained."
|
|