Attended an open forum at 7.30am discussing health information literacy, results from the MLA/NLM health information literacy (HIL) project. Focus on providing health information to consumers. Interesting project and at the end your HLGW blogger felt brave enough to comment about the UK, bibliotherapy prescriptions and how HLGW will be working with public librarians, this is an international topic.
PubMed update
End of summer 2009-05-20 redesign of the interface to simplify, refresh, better organize the information and promote scientific discovery (?)
We saw a brief mock up of what the pages could look like with a warning that that will probably change but basically simplifies arrangement of result pages with a more ‘Google’ layout – no surprises there.
Coming soon for My NCBI are custom filters and sharing Collections, My Bibliography and Other Citations, rare disease terms will be added to MeSH in 09/10.
Tips for using the Advanced search option, use the clear box before starting a new search [I will probably forget to do this like I forget to remove limits!]
There is a detail link and help link available there now and you have the option to show more or less history.
Going from the PubMed update session to the NLM update I was a little late but NLM update started with a discussion on quality assurance issues. Making health information users aware of common errors in clinical trials – see clinicaltrials.gov
[Critical appraisal issues again I guess, getting users to realise the importance of evaluating and appraising all information before use, ‘cause it’s in print doesn’t mean it’s true!]
There was some information about NLM’s role providing information in case of disaster, DIMRC planning, though something none of us want to contemplate this is an impressive ongoing project in the US you can see info at http://disasterinfo.nlm.nih.gov
The HMD’s database of images for the History of Medicine has had some revamping making images easier to view zoom in on and use for educational purposes [a resource to remind our health professionals and academics about]
More later…
