National Network of Libraries of Medicine

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Dragonfly

Summer 1999 -- Volume 30, Number 3

The newsletter of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Pacific Northwest Region.

In the current issue:

EthnoMed Community Outreach Project Funded

NN/LM PNR is pleased to announce that a proposal entitled "EthnoMed Community Outreach Project" will be funded as the Resource Library outreach subcontract for 1999-2000. The target populations for this project are six refugee/immigrant groups in the Seattle area: Amharic, Cambodian, Oromo, Somali, Tigrean, and Vietnamese and the health care providers who serve these communities. The Principal Investigator is Ellen Howard, Head, KK Sherwood Library at Harborview Medical Center, which is one of the University of Washington Medical Centers.

The Project staff will work with the six groups to improve their knowledge of and access to the Web and get them involved in the process of writing health related documents for the Web. The staff will also work with care providers for these populations to improve their access to information related to these populations and cultural diversity in general.

This is the fourth year that the RML has provided outreach funding for Resource Libraries:

1996 - Health Sciences Information Service, University of Alaska Anchorage

1997 - Biomedical Information Communication Center, Oregon Health Sciences University

1998 - Idaho Health Sciences Library, Idaho State University

1998 - Renne Library, Montana State University

1999 - KK Sherwood Branch, University of Washington Health Sciences Library and Information Center

A copy of this proposal and previous ones is on the NN/LM PNR Web site at http://www.nnlm.nlm.nih.gov/pnr/specproj/resourcelib/.

Dragonfly, Summer 1999 -- Vol. 30, Number 3 (posted on PNRNews July 30, 1999)

NLM and Health Information for the Public

Editor's note: Starting this year, the National Library of Medicine has added a new area of outreach to the Regional Medical Library contracts: health information for the public. As we start our foray into this program area, we are looking at NLM's scope statement, approved by the NLM Board of Regents in May 1999. Later articles will outline some of our ideas for outreach to the public, based on this scope statement. We will also be turning to community members, including you, to get advice.

NLM's goal is to improve the national infrastructure that supports the public's access to electronic health information. This infrastructure includes the intellectual organization, information technology, inter-institutional arrangements, and training that will be needed to ensure that all people in the U.S. have a known, accessible, understandable, and affordable source of current, authoritative health information.

Audience

NLM's efforts are targeted toward members of the public, health professionals seeking information for individual patients or whole communities, librarians and other health information providers, and health educators. NLM works with a variety of intermediaries, including family members, health care providers, public health professionals, librarians, educators and community -based organizations to reach those who lack direct access to electronic health information.

Priorities

Organize selected authoritative electronic information that is available at low or no-cost, with an emphasis on science-based, nationally applicable resources.
Develop easy-to-use access and delivery mechanisms that promote the public's understanding of health information, drawing on research in lay terminology, graphical and multimedia presentation, etc.
Publicize reputable electronic health information services, including those available from NLM and other sources.
Assist those providing health information to the public to make effective use of electronic services through Internet connections, training, and other means, with an emphasis on those serving minority groups, low income populations, seniors. Promote integration of NLM services with other electronic services covering regional, state, or local health information.
Refer members of the public to regional, state, and local sources of reference assistance and document delivery and continue to serve as the national backup.
Conduct and support research, development, and evaluation on the public's health information needs, information seeking behaviors and learning styles, information systems that meet the public's needs, and the impact of access to information.

Exclusions

will not provide personal medical or health advice to individuals
will not lead disease prevention or health promotion campaigns
will not write new information content, but will bring gaps to the attention of NIH
will not expand its acquisition and cataloging of print materials written for the general public, but will continue to acquire selected high quality print items

Dragonfly, Summer 1999 -- Vol. 30, Number 3 (posted on PNRNews September 15, 1999)

Have you become J.A.D.E.d?

The National Center for Emergency Medicine Informatics (NCEMI) now offers a current awareness service called J.A.D.E. (Journal Abstracts Delivered Electronically.) It searches PubMed every Monday morning and sends you the citations for every new article on the topic you specify. Like everything else, it has advantages and disadvantages, including the kind of bugs that grace every new product or service.

First and foremost among the advantages is the fact that you can set up a search in 6 steps and modify it and store it in just a few more. These quick and relatively painless steps are:

Go to http://www.ncemi.org/jade/.
Type in your name and email address.
Click on the purple word MEDLINE. It appears in two places on the page. They are equally effective at linking you to and back from Pub Med.
Assemble your search terms in PubMed through either the Basic Search or the Advanced Search. Type in author names as last-name-no-comma-initials-if-known (Smith JB, for example) and journal titles in full form, or as a valid MEDLINE abbreviation or ISSN#.
Highlight the terms when you've got them the way you want them, then go up to the button bar to Edit, drag down to Copy, click back to J.A.D.E.'s home page, put your cursor in the MEDLINE Search Terms box and hit Edit--Paste. Your PubMed search terms should appear in the MEDLINE Search Terms box on J.A.D.E.
Click on the appropriate circle to answer the question under the search box about your email's ability to display web pages. NO is the default. Then click on Send and see what you get the next Monday.
The first time you run the search, you may get everything on that topic in PubMed. In that case, pick yourself off the floor, stopper the smelling salts and remind yourself that similar avalanches won't lurk at your desktop every Monday morning. If this happens, you can scroll down the list to estimate the rate at which citations on your search terms have been entering PubMed and adjust your search by broadening or narrowing your terms until you estimate you'll have a volume of email you can live with.

If that doesn't happen, you'll bounce to a page headed "J.A.D.E. Archiving Tools" and get a table entitled "List of Current Terms." Its left-most column reiterates your search terms. If you've missed the adrenaline rush mentioned above (from thousands of returns), click on these. The center column displays the number of citations within the past week that fit those search terms. The right-hand column allows you to delete the terms in that row of the table. The very last row in the table allows you to add a new search.
You can "file" an interesting-looking citation for later reading by highlighting, copying and pasting the MEDLINE UI into J.A.D.E.'s "Archiving Tool" or clicking the "Add Article to Personal Archive" link in your email.

Other advantages of this product are that it appears to be free, that it adjusts its display format according to your email service's capabilities, that it will send automatically-updated tables of content of a limited number of journals, and that it enables busy health professionals to set up their own searches without having to consult a librarian and wait for him/her to set up the search.

At this point the disadvantages seem to outnumber the advantages, but as the creators remind us, the product is new--a mere 7 months old. The problems include:

Instructions for lifting terms out of PubMed and pasting them into the search box in J.A.D.E. are completely missing. It's easy to do, but there's no help screen to walk a user through the steps.
Long strings of search terms from PubMed won't all make it into the J.A.D.E. search term box.
Only tables of contents of a selected emergency medical journal subset can be automatically received (reasonable, since this is sponsored by the Emergency Medicine people, but that limits the appeal of this service.)
When you hit Send to submit your search terms, you get a form to fill out. Most of the questions in the form do not pertain to librarians. It is not obvious that this form is optional.
The instructions for the Personal Archive do not help with its many bugs. Archiving the intended citation will depend on users recognizing equivalent terminologies and highlighting the correct number. PubMed's UI is JADE's MEDLINE UI, though the PMID # precedes the UI# in PubMed. Also, there is no "Archive All" button to capture a flock of citations in one stroke while you're on vacation or when your search topic generates lots of apparently-pertinent citations at one time.
The "About JADE" page lacks any statement of storage limitation in terms of numbers of citations and length of time they will be held in the archive.
The jargon in "Can you View Web Pages with your Email Reader" may be incomprehensible to those who need to be able to answer correctly.
It seems possible for two people with very similar emails to get a combined archive. I tried to set up a second archive on a different account (very similar login names) at the same institution and ended up with a joint archive. Security jitters!

Overall, one admires this direct link between PubMed and current awareness/archiving capability. Its do-it-yourself file-at-your-fingertips seems an excellent solution to the information needs of emergency medical personnel making life-and-death decisions at all hours and far from libraries, journals and professional colleagues. A good help page and a bolstering of the currently unstable archiving service would increase its utility, but a more important flaw to fix is the limited search terms. One appreciates the creators' honesty in acknowledging the problems with the Personal Archive and suggesting that users print periodically. One hopes they are also working to correct the stability and search limitation problems. The fact that its journal table of contents updates are limited to emergency medicine can't be faulted but may motivate others to imitate it for other medical specialties. This site might prove interesting to watch and good to keep in mind as we see and create new information products.

Dragonfly, Summer 1999 -- Vol. 30, Number 3 (posted on PNRNews September 15, 1999)

Free Health Information Classes Offered for Health/Public Library Duos

Do you know the public librarian in your town who handles the health questions? If so, get together! If not, find out! Band together and get free training!

If a Pacific Northwest community's health librarian and public librarian collaborate, the RML will pay for the "Health Information on the Internet" class taught by Margaret Connors, formerly with Oregon Health Sciences University and still a consultant for the Oregon State Library on consumer health. Just show us a partnership and ensure at least 8 library staff participants; we'll pay for Margaret to come to your town and teach.

You can see the outline of the class, developed by Margaret and Dolores Judkins, at: http://www.ohsu.edu/women/judkinsd/lsta.htm The class has been taught around Oregon to rave reviews. You'll want Margaret to teach it in your city, too!

This is a limited time offer! Let us know before the end of October if you will take advantage of it.

We already have several happy collaborations in our region between hospital libraries and public libraries. One example is the partnership between Overlake Hospital in Bellevue, Washington, and the King County Library System. The public is encouraged to use the public library for primary access, but the hospital library is ready and willing to provide documents.

So, grab your partner! And contact Nancy Press at the RML.

Dragonfly, Summer 1999 -- Vol. 30, Number 3 (posted on PNRNews September 30, 1999)

Produced by NN/LM PNR.

Nancy Press, Editor
Michael Boer, Publication Manager

This publication is funded in whole with Federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. NO1-LM-1-3516.

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NN/LM PNR | nnlm@u.washington.edu | Revised: October 19, 1999