LibreOffice for iPad is (almost) here!

Michael Helfer and I today gave a short talk at the LibreOffice conference in Bern on our use of Open Source office software – i.e. LibreOffice – in combination with Open Source reference management software – that’s Zotero – in our Information Skills classes. The two points we meant to press to the audience of LibreOffice developers, were:

Our students need LibreOffice for the iPad! and
Drop the LibreOffice bibliographic tool, and replace it with Zotero.

On our first point, we had a speedy response: Cloudon have just completed development of an iOS app that allows creating and editing text, spreadsheet and presentation files, and is based on LibreOffice. (It’s readily downloadable from the App Store now.) A genuine LibreOffice version for Android is, we are told, in the pipeline for early next year, and an iOS one will follow some time later. For all those who may still be writing their thesis on a Mac or PC, but who wish to edit it on the go, this is good news; but also for LibreOffice itself which needs to catch up with competitors Microsoft Office and iWork.

How committed are our young doctors to EBM?

EBM has, over the last forty years, become the fundamental principle of clinical practice – or, so we thought. Marte Ødegaard reported to the EAHIL 2014 conference about her assessment of final-year students’ knowledge management skills which they have to demonstrate in an assignment. Her analysis showed that a significant proportion of future doctors lack even basic literature searching skills.

Oslo university is addressing the problem, but many in the audience were left feeling uneasy how a similar evaluation would have turned out at our own institutions…

Medical librarians of all nations unite!

Four Scandinavian colleagues proposed that medical librarians across EAHIL collaborate in the field of Information Skills Teaching. They had carried out a survey that clearly demonstrated wide-spread support for sharing teaching materials, but also experiences.

Interestingly, a parallel effort to establish a shared resource for librarians teaching EBM started recently on an MLA forum, and led to the creation of a resource pool (hosted by Northeast Ohio Medical University) and a – still informal – mailing list. Let’s see if these two groups will join forces!