Background

The Internet is the world's largest network of information, communication and services. Although the Internet is widely used in medicine and has made significant impact in research, training and patient care, few studies had explored the extent to which Nigerian physicians use Internet resources for patient care. The objective of this study was to assess physicians' use of the Internet for health information for patient care.

Method

172 physicians at the University College hospital (UCH) Ibadan, Nigeria; completed a 31-item, anonymous, standardized questionnaire. The Epi-Info software was used for data analysis.

Results

The mean age of the respondents was 31.95 years (SD 4.94). Virtually all (98%) the respondents had used the Internet; 76% accessed it from cyber cafes. E-mail was the most commonly used Internet service (64%). Ninety percent of the respondents reported they had obtained information from the Internet for patient care; of this number, 76.2% had searched a database. The database most recently searched was MEDLINE/PubMed in 99% of cases. Only 7% of the respondents had ever searched the Cochrane Library. More than half (58.1%) perceived they had no confidence to download full-text articles from online sources such as the Health Internetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI). Multiple barriers to increased use of the Internet were identified including poor availability of broadband (fast connection speed) Internet access, lack of information searching skills, cost of access and information overload.

Conclusion

Physicians' use of the Internet for health information for patient care was widespread but use of evidenced-based medicine resources such as Cochrane Library, Up-to-date and Clinical Evidence was minimal. Awareness and training in the use of EBM resources for patient care is needed. Introduction of EBM in the teaching curriculum will enhance the use of EBM resources by physicians for patient care.

Background

This paper examines how the adoption of a subject-specific library service has changed the way in which its users interact with a digital library. The LitMiner text-analysis application was developed to enable biologists to explore gene relationships in the published literature. The application features a suite of interfaces that enable users to search PubMed as well as local databases, to view document abstracts, to filter terms, to select gene name aliases, and to visualize the co-occurrences of genes in the literature. At each of these stages, LitMiner offers the functionality of a digital library. Documents that are accessible online are identified by an icon. Users can also order documents from their institution's library collection from within the application. In so doing, LitMiner aims to integrate digital library services into the research process of its users.

Methods

Case study

Results

This integration of digital library services into the research process of biologists results in increased access to the published literature.

Conclusion

In order to make better use of their collections, digital libraries should customize their services to suit the research needs of their patrons.

The Arizona Health Sciences Library has collaborated with clinical faculty to develop a federated search engine that is useful for meeting real-time clinical information needs. This article proposes a technology mediation role for the reference librarian that was inspired by the project, and describes the collaborative model used for developing technology-mediated services for targeted users.

Background

The North Carolina (NC) Area Health Education Center's (AHEC) Digital Library (ADL) is a web portal designed to meet the information needs of health professionals across the state by pulling together a set of resources from numerous different sources and linking a pool of users to only the resources for which they have eligibility. Although the ADL was designed with the primary purpose of linking health care professionals to a set of licensed resources, the ADL also contains a significant number of links to free resources. These resources are available to any ADL member logging into their ADL account and to guest visitors to the ADL. While there are regular assessments of the subscription resources in the ADL as to utility and frequency of use, up until this point there has been no systematic analysis of the use of the overall set of free resources. It was decided to undertake an examination of the usage of ADL free resources over a 6-month period to analyze the utility of these resources to both ADL members and guests.

Methods

Each time a resource is accessed through the ADL, it is logged in a table. This study used a SQL query to pull every free resource accessed between November 1, 2005 and April 30, 2006. An additional query also pulled the user information for each free resource accessed. Once the queries of the database were complete, the results were imported into an Excel spreadsheet and analyzed using basic descriptive statistics.

Results

The vast majority of resource use through the ADL is to licensed resources. There are 2056 free resource URLs in the ADL, to which 1351 were linked out, meaning there was at least one link out to 65% of the free resources. The single most popular free resource was PubMed with 4803 link outs or nearly 20% of the total link outs to free resources. The breakdown of free resource use by different use groups indicates that the highest percentage of use of free resources was by guests followed by institutional affiliates and AHEC Faculty/Staff. The next 3 highest user groups accessing free resources are: paid members, preceptors, and residents.

Conclusion

The only free resource capturing a significant number of link outs is the free link to PubMed. This reflects the importance placed on traditional medical literature searching by the ADL clinical user base. Institutional affiliates access free resources through the ADL with the second highest frequency of all the user groups. Finally, in analyzing use of free resources, it is important to note the overall limitations of this survey. While link outs are excellent indicators of frequency of use they do not provide any information about the ultimate usefulness of the resource being accessed. Further studies would need to examine not only the quantitative use of resources, but also their qualitative importance to the user.

Background

Medical practice today requires evaluating large amounts of information which should be available at all times. This information is found most easily in a digital form. Some information has already been evaluated for validity (evidence based medicine sources) and some is in unevaluated form (paper and online journals). In order to improve access to digital information, the School of Clinical Medicine and Research at the University of the West Indies and Queen Elizabeth Hospital decided to enhance the library by offering online full text medical articles and evidence based medicine sources. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the relative value of online journal commercial products available for a small hospital and medical school library.

Methods

Three reference standards were chosen to represent the ideal list of core periodicals for a broad range of medical care: 2 Brandon/Hill selected lists of journals for the small medical library (BH and BH core) and the academic medical library core journal collection chosen for the Florida State University College of Medicine Medical Library. Six commercially available collections were compared to the reference standards and to the current paper journal subscription list as regards to number of journals matched and cost per journal matched. Ease of use and presence of secondary sources were also considered.

Results

The cost per journal matched ranged from US $ 3194 to $ 81. Because of their low subscription prices, the Biomedical Reference Collection and Proquest products were the most cost beneficial. However, they provided low coverage of the ideal lists (12 – 17% and 21–32% respectively) and contained significant embargoes on current editions, were not user friendly and contained no secondary sources. The Ovid Brandon/Hill Plus Collection overcame these difficulties but had a much higher cost-benefit range while providing higher coverage of the ideal lists (14–47%).

Conclusion

After considering costs, benefits, ease of use, embargoes, presence of secondary sources (ACP Journal Club, DARE), the Ovid Brandon/Hill Plus Collection was the best choice for our hospital considering our budget. However, the option to individually select our own journal list from Ovid and pay per journal has a certain appeal as well.

Background

Researchers turn to citation tracking to find the most influential articles for a particular topic and to see how often their own published papers are cited. For years researchers looking for this type of information had only one resource to consult: the Web of Science from Thomson Scientific. In 2004 two competitors emerged – Scopus from Elsevier and Google Scholar from Google. The research reported here uses citation analysis in an observational study examining these three databases; comparing citation counts for articles from two disciplines (oncology and condensed matter physics) and two years (1993 and 2003) to test the hypothesis that the different scholarly publication coverage provided by the three search tools will lead to different citation counts from each.

Methods

Eleven journal titles with varying impact factors were selected from each discipline (oncology and condensed matter physics) using the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). All articles published in the selected titles were retrieved for the years 1993 and 2003, and a stratified random sample of articles was chosen, resulting in four sets of articles. During the week of November 7–12, 2005, the citation counts for each research article were extracted from the three sources. The actual citing references for a subset of the articles published in 2003 were also gathered from each of the three sources.

Results

For oncology 1993 Web of Science returned the highest average number of citations, 45.3. Scopus returned the highest average number of citations (8.9) for oncology 2003. Web of Science returned the highest number of citations for condensed matter physics 1993 and 2003 (22.5 and 3.9 respectively). The data showed a significant difference in the mean citation rates between all pairs of resources except between Google Scholar and Scopus for condensed matter physics 2003. For articles published in 2003 Google Scholar returned the largest amount of unique citing material for oncology and Web of Science returned the most for condensed matter physics.

Conclusion

This study did not identify any one of these three resources as the answer to all citation tracking needs. Scopus showed strength in providing citing literature for current (2003) oncology articles, while Web of Science produced more citing material for 2003 and 1993 condensed matter physics, and 1993 oncology articles. All three tools returned some unique material. Our data indicate that the question of which tool provides the most complete set of citing literature may depend on the subject and publication year of a given article.

The changing landscape of scholarly publication and increasing journal costs have resulted in a need for proactive behavior in libraries. At Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, a group of librarians joined forces to bring these issues to the attention of faculty and to begin a dialog leading to change. This commentary describes a comprehensive program undertaken to raise faculty awareness of scholarly communications issues. In addition to raising faculty interest in the issues at hand, the endeavor also highlights an area where library liaisons can increase their communication with the units they serve.

Background

The Center for Disability Resources (CDR) Library is the largest collection of its kind in the Southeastern United States, consisting of over 5,200 books, videos/DVDs, brochures, and audiotapes covering a variety of disability-related topics, from autism to transition resources. The purpose of the library is to support the information needs of families, faculty, students, staff, and other professionals in South Carolina working with individuals with disabilities. The CDR Library is funded on a yearly basis; therefore, maintaining high usage is crucial. A variety of promotional efforts have been used to attract new patrons to the library. Anyone in South Carolina can check out materials from the library, and most of the patrons use the library remotely by requesting materials, which are then mailed to them. The goal of this project was to identify areas of low geographic usage as a means of identifying locations for future library marketing efforts.

Methods

Nearly four years worth of library statistics were compiled in a spreadsheet that provided information per county on the number of checkouts, the number of renewals, and the population. Five maps were created using ArcView GIS software to create visual representations of patron checkout and renewal behavior per county.

Results

Out of the 46 counties in South Carolina, eight counties never checked out materials from the library. As expected urban areas and counties near the library's physical location have high usage totals.

Conclusion

The visual representation of the data made identification of low usage regions easier than using a standalone database with no visual-spatial component. The low usage counties will be the focus of future Center for Disability Resources Library marketing efforts. Due to the impressive visual-spatial representations created with Geographic Information Systems, which more efficiently communicate information than stand-alone database information can, librarians may benefit from the software's use as a supplemental tool for tracking library usage and planning promotional efforts.

Background

Recent research has shown a backlash against the enthusiastic promotion of technological solutions as replacements for traditional educational content delivery. Many institutions, including the University of Virginia, have committed staff and resources to supporting state-of-the-art, showpiece educational technology projects. However, the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library has taken the approach of helping Health Sciences faculty be more comfortable using technology in incremental ways for instruction and research presentations. In July 2004, to raise awareness of self-service multimedia resources for instructional and professional development needs, the Library conducted a "Multimedia Bootcamp" for nine Health Sciences faculty and fellows.

Methods

Case study.

Results

Program stewardship by a single Library faculty member contributed to the delivery of an integrated learning experience. The amount of time required to attend the sessions and complete homework was the maximum fellows had to devote to such pursuits. The benefit of introducing technology unfamiliar to most fellows allowed program instructors to start everyone at the same baseline while not appearing to pass judgment on the technology literacy skills of faculty. The combination of wrapping the program in the trappings of a fellowship and selecting fellows who could commit to a majority of scheduled sessions yielded strong commitment from participants as evidenced by high attendance and a 100% rate of assignment completion. Response rates to follow-up evaluation requests, as well as continued use of Media Studio resources and Library expertise for projects begun or conceived during Bootcamp, bode well for the long-term success of this program.

Conclusion

An incremental approach to integrating technology with current practices in instruction and presentation provided a supportive yet energizing environment for Health Sciences faculty. Keys to this program were its faculty focus, traditional hands-on instruction, unrestricted access to technology tools and support, and inclusion of criteria for evaluating when multimedia can augment pedagogical aims.

Innovative biomedical librarians and information specialists who want to expand their roles as expert searchers need to know about profound changes in biology and parallel trends in text mining. In recent years, conceptual biology has emerged as a complement to empirical biology. This is partly in response to the availability of massive digital resources such as the network of databases for molecular biologists at the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Developments in text mining and hypothesis discovery systems based on the early work of Swanson, a mathematician and information scientist, are coincident with the emergence of conceptual biology. Very little has been written to introduce biomedical digital librarians to these new trends. In this paper, background for data and text mining, as well as for knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) and in text (KDT) is presented, then a brief review of Swanson's ideas, followed by a discussion of recent approaches to hypothesis discovery and testing. 'Testing' in the context of text mining involves partially automated methods for finding evidence in the literature to support hypothetical relationships. Concluding remarks follow regarding (a) the limits of current strategies for evaluation of hypothesis discovery systems and (b) the role of literature-based discovery in concert with empirical research. Report of an informatics-driven literature review for biomarkers of systemic lupus erythematosus is mentioned. Swanson's vision of the hidden value in the literature of science and, by extension, in biomedical digital databases, is still remarkably generative for information scientists, biologists, and physicians.

The Scopus database provides access to STM journal articles and the references included in those articles, allowing the searcher to search both forward and backward in time. The database can be used for collection development as well as for research. This review provides information on the key points of the database and compares it to Web of Science. Neither database is inclusive, but complements each other. If a library can only afford one, choice must be based in institutional needs.