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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…

Firefox for iOS is here! But it’s not (yet) what we need it to be.

The iPad and iPhone are now ubiquitous in medical environments – for access to Clinical Decision Tools such as Uptodate, for quick-and-dirty Medline searches, but also as a convenient reader for journal articles that researchers have found from their Mac or PC, organised in a reference management tool, and forwarded to the iPad for reading and annotating in an app such as GoodReader.

One of the most versatile reference management tools, and an Open Source one, is Zotero which comes as a Firefox add-on, or a standalone package with browser plug-in. My hope was that Firefox for iOS would be fully compatible with all the Firefox plug-ins, so Zotero would come to iOS with the browser. Well, it’s not, sadly. And there doesn’t seem to be any information available at this stage if, and when, the wealth of add-ons that third-party developers have written for Firefox, will be ported onto the iOS version later.

The academic community would benefit considerably from a version of Zotero that runs on iOS phones and tablets. Imagine you could save the papers you happened to find while on a bus or at the dentist, to your bibliographic database! Let’s hope the integration of add-ons to iOS will become a reality soon…

New kid on the block: Paperpile

‘Paperpile‘ is the reference management system for the ‘gmail’ generation, the young researchers who have grown up sharing information and collaborating via the web. They access, add and edit data from whatever device is at hand, as long as it connects to the net. Google docs is for them what MS Word was for their parents. And Paperpile aims to be what Endnote was to the ‘Word’ generation.
Paperpile is a plug-in to the Chrome browser and seems to work seamlessly, from importing data, to organising them, to handling bibliographic annotations in a paper. Unfortunately, there is no tablet version yet, neither for iOS, nor for Android.
My own main concern is security: certainly, in a biomedical research context, I would not recommend cloud-based services that could be subject to US espionage. Instead, I’d go for a solution where your institution has full control over the servers. Other reference management tools, e.g.the Open Source ‘Zotero‘, allow you to save data either on a local disk, or on a server you trust. And once you have installed LibreOffice or OpenOffice, you will hardly look back to MS Office!

Aggressive Preispolitik nun auch bei E-Books

Preissteigerungen von bis zu 150% bei der nutzergesteuerten Erwerbung (PDA, DDA) für Short Term Loans von E-Books (Zugriff während 7 Tagen), haben zwei grosse Deutsche Bibliotheken bewogen 4 Verlage von diesem Angebot zu kippen. Für den einmaligen Zugriff auf diese Inhalte werden nun 40% des Kaufpreises verrechnet. Taylor&Francis, deGruyter, Cambridge University Press und Oxford University Press schlagen damit bei den E-Books eine Preispolitik ein, wie sie sonst nur bei Zeitschriften bekannt ist.

Die Strategie auf das Modell PDA zu setzen, birgt also die Gefahr einer weiteren Preisspirale.

Mehr dazu unter: http://biomedbibbern.org/2014/06/23/aggressive-preispolitik-nun-auch-bei-e-books/

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!

Reinventing the ZB Med as ‘Leibniz Information Centre for Life Sciences’

Dr. Ulrich Korwitz, Librarian of the ZB Med, reported about the new strategy of the ZB Med in the wake of the evaluation two years ago. An extensive user consultation was undertaken, and the input from professors and research fellows used as a starting point for the new strategy.

Some highlights amongst the many adjustments to the ZB operations:

  • shift towards an advisory rôle to academic medical libraries, especially in the field of license negotiation (they will even hire a business lawyer)
  • focus on research and clinical practice
  • services to the pharmaceutical industry have been dropped
  • constant innovation which will include regular evaluation of assisting products and services
  • strong commitment to staff development, including a decrease of junior and increase of senior positions

This is a bold move by the ZB Med, or rather: the ‘Leibniz Information Centre for  Life Sciences’. Especially the advisory services in the field of license negotiation were met with great approval by the audience.

Creating the European Library Quality Standards for Health (ELiQSR)

In the context of EBM libraries have become more important to medical education and research and to the delivery of healthcare services than ever. Surprisingly, there hasn’t been an adequate set of quality standards for the evaluation of medical libraries so far.

Janet Harrison, Clare Creaser and Marta de la Mano prepared a paper for the EAHIL 2014 conference about their development of an evaluation tool for medical libraries. Standards currently used by medical libraries are MLA and LQAF. The new standard will review these and other existing standards, but will take feedback from a survey of medical librarians across Europe into account.

Elsevier out of sync with Elsevier?

Francesca Gualteri reported about her library in a pharmaceutical company’s use of Elsevier’s ‘Mendeley’ to manage the internal literature repository. Interestingly, she mentioned problems with the importing, especially of Elsevier publications. Others in the audience confirmed these issues. I suppose quite a few of the participants at the conference are going to ask the Elsevier reps at their stall about this issue…

Library blogging: what’s it actually good for?

Tuulevi Ovaska is a subject librarian from the University of Eastern Finland, with additional commitments at a hospital. In her talk at the 2014 EAHIL conference she reported on her experience in running a library blog that aimed to assist users with everyday search queries which tended to be about PICO, the ‘deep web’, and database searching. From the start Tuulevi added a list of answers to her users most frequently asked questions, but even so her (Finnish language!) blog attracted over 3’000 views within its trial period of around a year – part of which came from Sweden and the US.

What’s the meaning of library blogging? Tuulevi is certain her blog complements the library’s website, especially with news and marketing (in conjunction with social media), but also responding to real-life user enquiries.