Tonight I also noticed mention of a blog entry entitled The Pew Internet/Health FAQ by Susannah Fox on epatients.net about how people search for quality health information that contained a shoutout to the Medical Library Association (MLA), a comment from medical librarian Luke Rosenberger with an explanation about how the 'Google as diagnostician' article isn't necessarily accurate, and offered a comment of my own with more quality health information evaluation resources.
Part of the #hcsm discussion?
Bring it on!
While I'm happy about steps that MLA is taking to advocate for the role of hospital librarians, such as the recent Vital pathways for hospital librarians: present and future article and others from the October 2009 Journal of the Medical Library Association, I'd love to see the profession take a more active role for medical librarian advocacy in non-traditional settings as well. There are plenty of us there already at @medlibs on Twitter and elsewhere.
2 comments:
Thanks, Nicole! I have retracted my "kinda boring" tag and further, have come (back) to the realization that there is nothing more exciting than librarians, esp. medical librarians.
Quick aside: I helped launch the website for USNews & World Report back in 1995 and nobody knew where to seat me & my one other colleague. We weren't IT, we weren't reporters, we weren't ad sales, we weren't reader services. So they gave us desks in the only section of the magazine where everyone knew what the internet was (srsly): The library.
What a stroke of luck it was - surrounded by information mavens, curious to the core, helpful by default, and smarter than so many of the senior writers who would breeze in with half-baked story ideas that the librarians would transform into cover story eligibility.
Nikki,
The'Google as diagnostician' comment reminds of something that happened to my husband at the pediatrician's office.
He took our son in for what was determined to be pityriasis rosea. The doctor talked to my husband about it and then said "if you are going to Google it make sure you find reputable sites because there a lot of bad ones out there that have a lot of alarmingly wrong information."
My husband responded, my wife is a medical librarian, she doesn't let me look at those sites.
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