Month: December 2015

How To Do a Systematic Review 

This is a question medical librarians are often asked by prospective authors of systematic reviews. Books on the topic are usually weak on the librariany bits – the chapter on literature searching tends to consist of a descriptive list of databases, combined with the advice to ‘ask a medical librarian’… Fortunately, some colleagues have written useful guidance on the whole process. Here is a selection of some really outstanding library websites on literature searching for systematic reviews:

Each of these sites contains a wealth of references to both further reading and training courses. Of course, the range of training materials provided by the Cochrane Collaboration should not be forgotten either.

Librarian in the Cloud

IMG_1467
View of the cloud from mount Weissenstein © Gerhard Bissels 2016

So many of our services these days are ‘cloud based’. Ever wondered what it feels to be cloud-based? Well, I know, because I’m a librarian, and I live in Solothurn, a small town in Switzerland which hides under a thick cloud (locally referred to as ‘Näbu’, i.e. ‘Nebel’) for about two thirds of the year – see picture.

‘Cloud-based computing’ has become a buzzword amongst system vendors, and it seems to make some colleagues shudder with awe. But it really is just a rather nebulous way of trying to stir up a hype for externally hosted LMS and other big systems which end users then often access via their web browser rather than a client. Open Source systems such as Koha have worked in this way for a decade and a half – long before their commercial competitors came up with their foggy idea of ‘The Cloud’ as another marketing gimmick.

Solutions, solutions, solutions

Have you read Proquest’s press release about its merger with Exlibris? What struck me is the language: within that couple of paragraphs they managed to use the word ‘solutions’ eleven (11!) times, and there is no shortage of other buzzwords (‘innovation’, ‘innovative’, ‘integration’). Doesn’t such overuse of phrases make you rather suspicious? The Aleph users amongst us will be wondering how a product that hasn’t changed much in nearly twenty years, can be called ‘innovative’…

Up north

Fränzi and I visited two medical libraries this week, both well respected amongst medical librarian colleagues, but each with its very own preferences and focus.

The library of the AMC (Academisch Medisch Centrum) in Amsterdam has to focus on resources for research, as its director, Dr. Lieuwe Kool, explained: funding does not allow licensing e-textbooks, nor the purchase of multiple print copies. On the plus side, the AMC library’s team of four information specialists offer an extensive programme of training courses and one-on-one support, especially for advanced publications like systematic reviews.

IMG_1447

The Münster Zweigbibliothek Medizin – voted Germany’s best special library by users – supports medical education better than probably any other medical library in Europe, with a substantial collection of multiple copies, e-books, apps, and even hundreds of borrowable iPads with the learning materials preinstalled. With the ‘Easyphysikum‘ project – all resources for the 1. Staatsexamen accessible on an iPad, Dr. Oliver Obst, the librarian, consolidated Münster’s role as innovative leader in medical education resources. Database training and enquiry services are available, too – and the building is comfortable, spacious, modern and well-lit.

It will be a long way until we here in Bern can compete against libraries like these…

iPads in Medical Education – Apple Experts Roundtable, Amsterdam, Dec 14th, 2015

Being librarians, we buy or license e-books. Well, some libraries are getting into publishing – through repositories or OJS journal servers. But producing e-books, and competing with textbook publishers like Elsevier and Thieme? Is that any of our business?

Yes, why not? Programs like iBooks Author – a free-to-download programme from Apple – or, as a platform for a whole university press, Open Monograph Press from the Public Knowledge Project, allow all of us to produce e-books, even with multimedia and interactive content. Jochen Bretschneider from Vrije Universiteit Medical Centre in Amsterdam showed how as part of their ‘Mobile Learning Initiative‘ he and his team turn lecture notes into ibooks and enrich them with videoed surgical procedures, interactive elements etc.

We librarians spend huge and probably unsustainable amounts of money on e-books the vast majority of which make no use of the benefits the on-line platform offers (and quite a few even come in infuriating DRM restricted formats). At the same time quite a lot of teaching materials that our academics have created in-house, are dumped in poor formats in remote corners of Virtual Learning Environments or course websites. Wouldn’t it be worth setting a small proportion of our e-book budget aside, to allow our academics to experiment with the e-book format? Some of the content might turn out more useful than the e-books we have been licensing for so many years…