Guest post submitted by Network member Meg Brunner, MLIS, Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute Library, University of Washington; Chair, Substance Abuse Librarians and Information Specialists (SALIS). If you’re interested in writing a guest post, please contact us at nnlm@uw.edu.

Reading through my RSS feeds yesterday morning, I came across the latest article from Social Media Examiner, a free online magazine that explores new and better ways to use social media tools to increase your visibility and interactivity online.  Though this site is primarily geared toward businesses, I often find its advice applicable to libraries too, as was the case with yesterday’s post, “22 Hot New Social Media Tools Worth Exploring.”

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If you are interested in alternative literature searching strategies, be sure to read the article “PubMed and beyond: A survey of web tools for searching biomedical literature” published last month in the open access journal DATABASE: The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation. This article is a review of 28 search tools that are based on MEDLINE data. The author is a researcher at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, which is the division of the National Library of Medicine that produces PubMed.

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NLM announces MedlinePlus Connect (http://medlineplus.gov/connect), a free service that allows electronic health records (EHR) systems to link users to MedlinePlus (http://medlineplus.gov), an authoritative up-to-date health information resource for patients, families and health care providers. MedlinePlus provides information about conditions and disorders, medications, and health and wellness.

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Those who search PubMed regularly have often wished for a way to import search results into a a program such as Excel. It’s here! A new tool called FLink (Frequency-weighted Links) is now accessible from the NIH National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Structure/flink/docs/flink_about.html. FLink allows PubMed search results to be saved as a CSV, or comma-separated value, file which can be imported into a program like Excel.

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HiveMind by 917 Press

On October 7, 2010, the first organized discussion on Twitter about health literacy using a hashtag of #healthlit was hosted by Dr. Cynthia Baur, the Senior Health Literacy Advisor for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (@CDC_eHealth on Twitter) and healthfinder.gov (@healthfinder on Twitter). The main topic discussed was How can we improve health literacy? along with the recently launched National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy and the CDC blogged about the experience. An online archive of the October 7th #healthlit conversation is available.

The National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Pacific Northwest Region (@nnlmpnr on Twitter) participated in the second #healthlit chat discussion on October 28, 2010, hosted by Health Literacy Missouri (@HealthLitMO on Twitter) featuring Dr. Baur, Dr. Arthur Culbert (CEO of Health Literacy Missouri), and Gary Schwitzer, publisher of HealthNewsReview.org and organized as a Twitter Town Hall. (more…)

The NN/LM PNR will be hosting a group seating for the next Hot Topics in Preparedness webcast on Tuesday, October 26th at noon Pacific.  To join us in person, come to the University of Washington Health Sciences Library, Room T-223.

If you are unable to sit in on the webcast in person, they are archived on the Northwest Center for Public Health Practice site for future viewing.

Session Description

Public health is necessarily concerned with issues that range over long time periods and broad areas/regions. Through several relevant examples (e.g. childhood obesity, low birth weight outcomes), participants will receive an overview of why learning through computer-based learning labs facilitates the development of systemic understanding. Participants will learn how to identify appropriate issues for simulation-based learning, including next steps to build their capacity for developing effective simulations.

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