Week 5 assignment: Web office tools

Is this the future of all software products? What do you think?

Oh I certainly hope not. Please, no.

The use of Google Docs or related online document services is one of the two areas in the course I haven't had prior experience with. I was poking around minding my own business on it this evening (I doubt Sunday evening/early Monday morning is a high usage time, nothing is posted about systems being down for maintenance) and suddenly it froze.

I assumed the problem was my system connection, refreshed, and found a spreadsheet uploaded twice. No big deal, I deleted the extra copy, but then received



That is exactly what I wouldn't want to see if I was working on something urgent without a backup copy of our collective workgroup edits, which I don't believe we can create at Google Docs because otherwise that sort of defeats the sole source purpose. I'm a much bigger proponent of LOCKSS than 'You can trust us to keep this safe, ya sure ya betcha!' Have you ever seen a professional photographer with external dual hard drive failure? It's not a pretty picture, no pun intended, and I value my own professional work just as highly.

For casual writing and presentation projects I can see web office tools working well, but my geek husband balked at the idea of putting any sort of spreadsheet with data that is remotely confidential on Google Docs for security reasons. I'm probably too entrenched in academia assumption that all relevant parties have access to the same shared drive that is well-taken care of with backups to give web office tools a realistic shot, and was am still too OCD to let go of 'my' presentation final edit if I'm a lead for class or other situations. I could see myself becoming completely unhinged at an unexpected 'Your the best!' title that was added 5 minutes before I gave a presentation.

Freak or geek by osmosis? Reflections on librarians' distance education

While I am enjoying the MLA Web 2.0 101 class, I have a confession to make: my sociocultural anthropology side is learning far more by observing my colleagues in the course than my librarian side is with the curriculum. Sorry. Apparently I'm such a Lackluster Veteran (although I don't quite fit the demographics, what are you?) that it's a serious challenge for me to be 'ooh, ahh!' about Web 2.0.

When we arrived at the midpoint of our 8 week class, more than a few colleagues expressed dismay at falling behind due to a variety of reasons that mostly involve time and/or technology & requesting/proposing alternate arrangements. I am certainly sympathetic to the demands of the life/work/education balance yet somewhat puzzled. There appear to be common expectations that our coursework would tidily fit in with our regular routine at our jobs without any extra effort (i.e. homework) required.

I'm fascinated by this and want to understand why as a future online teacher. Were these expectations because the class is free? Online? Massive at over 600? Something in the way it was marketed to MLA members? Having the curriculum administered via a blog? How is this class any different than a college course where professors surely must hear the same things from students at midterms? Do we truly value CEs or see them as something we sit through, grab our certificates for our points then head out without much further reflection on the material?

As I've shared in my profile, I was a full time distance education library school student for 16 months while working at a non-library job 24 hours a week and being some semblance of a wife & mom to a preschooler. If there was a Most Non-Existant Friend award for 2006-2007 I probably would have won it, but I think most of my friends understood & have forgiven me :)

I say this not to boast or suggest taking that life/work/education balance to anyone (I'd discourage it unless you want to question your sanity on a regular basis), but to note that I'm still not certain if I am a freak or a geek by osmosis by being online since the early 1990s and comfortable with learning information in whatever form as rapidly as possible. I have to be careful as I teach in the future to realize that many (most?) of my colleagues are not set on automatic information-seeking overdrive, although I believe that many (most?) of our users are. Of course this depends on our particular library and services, but perhaps this is part of the current disconnect where users are not perceiving libraries as being of value.

Week 4 assignment: Social bookmarking

Can you see the potential of this tool for research assistance? Or just as an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere?

I certainly see the value of creating a personal go-anywhere set of bookmarks that is accessible via any computer. I do want to highlight that just because we use del.icio.us doesn't mean we have to expose our possibly bizarre mix of bookmarks (my colleagues and future users might wonder about my range of Victoriana, goth music & genealogy interests!) for the entire Internet to see: check out how you can set privacy filters. Rebecca Brown from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, MidContinental Region (NN/LM MCR) offered a Social Bookmarking class that is archived and I highly recommend this for some additional insights regarding the cognitive process behind tagging (freedom vs. control) that I hadn't thought about before in addition to a guided tour of importing existing bookmarks and other del.icio.us features.

As for research assistance, I can see value in social bookmarking with the important caveat of first determining if the user or specialized user group perceives this as a valuable service after a brief explanation. We can annotate in notes to help users determine the importance of or otherwise rank resources within a category, but I'm a bit concerned that there's not an efficient way to list them as #1,2,3 etc without renaming the link as such and that can be distracting plus high maintenance for the future. At this point I believe RSS feeds for PubMed searches rank a bit higher for research/currency in our field, but I also haven't checked out Connotea yet which seems more on target for health sciences.

Your call is being forwarded: POPLINE search engine reconnected

Finally, an official response from Johns Hopkins regarding POPLINE via ResourceShelf.

I was informed this morning that the word “abortion” was blocked as a search term in the POPLINE family planning database administered by the Bloomberg School’s Center for Communication Programs. POPLINE provides evidence-based information on reproductive health and family planning and is the world’s largest database on these issues.

USAID, which funds POPLINE, found two items in the database related to abortion that did not fit POPLINE criteria. The agency then made an inquiry to POPLINE administrators. Following this inquiry, the POPLINE administrators at the Center for Communication Programs made the decision to restrict abortion as a search term.

I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have ordered that the POPLINE administrators restore “abortion” as a search term immediately. I will also launch an inquiry to determine why this change occurred.

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction.

Sincerely,

Michael J. Klag, MD, MPH
Dean, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

I will be quite interested in the results of this inquiry.

As of noon Pacific Daylight Time, 1320 records are now available via basic search.

Please hold: Reconnection at POPLINE?

After yesterday's discussion of POPLINE apparently listing 'abortion' as a stopword for their search engine, I have just now rerun a POPLINE basic search on abortion 3 times in the span of several minutes.

14, 48, then 67 records were available via this search. Interesting.

There is still no mention that I can find on POPLINE regarding this alleged action, nor has there been an update at ResourceShelf which was told they would receive an update today.

Now at 11 am Pacific time, the results are up to 105.

The question still remains: What, if any other relevant search terms, may have also been coded as stop words... and why?

The number you have dialed is no longer in service: Intentional disconnection at POPLINE?

I'll admit I joined a major listserv in my field solely because of the fallout from last week's ruckus regarding the PhD student from Harvard, and was dismayed by some of the comments made there by my colleagues regarding the situation. I initially wanted to write further about the matter, but David Rothman & The Krafty Librarian have covered additional perspectives well. I'm still mulling over how to identify relevant national, regional and community medical blogs and the roles medical librarians can serve in both participation and outreach on them.

However, I've watched the listserv traffic with alarm today at what appears to be search term censorship at POPLINE, a federally-funded search engine operated at Johns Hopkins that bills itself as "the world's largest database on reproductive health."

There's just one (known, what else might there be?) small problem: a librarian conducting a query earlier this week found fewer records than previous searches. For a comprehensive database, that means something about the way the database is organized/indexed has changed when nothing else with the query has or there's some type of problem.

You can see the problematic indexing in action yourself: enter abortion in the subject box, click search and voila... nothing. Now try entering abortion in the subject box, then clicking browse index, which brings a popup box (Inmagic, blech! I'm having library school dbase programming flashbacks!) Enter abortion again there, then click the Go to button, and you'll pull up the term with almost 25,000 records. Next, click paste and you'll notice the formatting in the main search box changes to ="Abortion" Click the search button again, and all of the records display.

The reason from Johns Hopkins for this convoluted search nonsense at the world's largest database on reproductive health appears so incredulous that I'm still suspicious that there is a horrible April Fool's Day joke being played here:

Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion
terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was
best for now., according to an email forward supposedly originating from Debbie Dickson on April 1st.

Stepping outside our library jargon, stop words are terms like a, and, the: most search engines don't look for these terms unless a search is specifically constructed to include them because they aren't relevant to the information being sought.

No one can find a way to explain to me how the term abortion, which includes not just the major subject but areas like spontaneous abortion = miscarriage, is not relevant to a search of a reproductive health database, and I will not stand for it as a newly minted librarian and former Project Censored student reviewer. If it starts and succeeds with POPLINE, who is to say MedlinePlus isn't next as a federally funded agency?

This is currently on the front page of Wired with a link to their listing in the Privacy, Security, Politics & Crime section.

I am expressing my dismay to Johns Hopkins regarding this decision and hope that you will as well.

AH ha ha ha stayin' aLIIIIIIIVE!

From the Wall Street Journal health blog, very smart move to go straight to YouTube with this but unfortunate that I'll probably have John Travolta's hips come to mind if I ever need to do CPR now:



The contrast between this and how long it took to get public service announcements (PSAs) and decide on their airtime rotation at my old college radio station in the mid-90s is mind boggling.