Entries from September 2009 ↓

Research -medical, biomedical, scientific- is one tricky task medical librarians are here to help you with. It requires training, a strong medical knowledge and advanced computer skills. This is why university, hospitals, private and public companies have libraries with qualified medical librarians who help make one’s daily work easier. Indeed, a medical librarian is trained and keep updated continuously on state of the art research. With the internet, the Medical Librarians have understood how web2.0 technologies would help search, organize and work more efficiently. This is one of the reasons why they are online and are used to posting on their blogs. In fact, medical librarians often have a blog and post about the news and share information about new or existing tools.

This is why we have decided to list 10 top medical librarians blogs you should read to get started.

1. A medical librarians exploration of the web 2.0 world and beyond



Who?
Jacqueline is a married librarian with 2 daughters. She studied Medical Biology and worked as a scientist after graduating a PhD back in 1990. She studied a post-doc course documentary information science (1994-1995) and worked as an information specialist in a pharmaceutical company. She now has been a medical information specialist at the Academical Medical Center (AMC) in Amsterdam for 3 years. Also, she enjoys riding her bike everyday.

What?
She is a clinical librarian so she is involved in developing courses, teaching & searching. She first started the blog as a way to publish the class exercises. However she quickly moved to broader interests and caught the “blogging” virus. According to her About page, she tries to blog about medical librarianship, medical information, EBM and Cochrane Collaboration (where she works as a Trial Search Coordinator).
Jaqueline blogs about her feelings about the web2.0 tools, its evolution and gives well-detailed opinions. Reading a blog post takes some time as they are most of the time quite long but they are worth it. They are well structured and often come with web links that help understand better why she came to that conclusion.

We like:
The Blog Carnival that she helped populate and which is held every other month. The principle is that a medical blogger hosts a round and writes a blogpost based on the posts that were submitted before. We invite you to read the latest round now and see what it is like.

Resources: http://laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com/

Twitter: @laikas

2. Emerging Technologies Librarian



Who?
Patricia F. Anderson is a librarian from the University of Michigan Health Sciences Libraries. She used to work as a Head Librarian for the UM Dentistry Lab which helped her enter the wonderful world of social media tools. She is a mother and has a fulfilling life as her Flickr Gallery lets us guess.

What?
Patricia writes pretty much about everything around social media activities, services and stories. Her latest post when writing this review was about Augmented Reality and More ETech Trends where she recalls with a great sense of humor that 2 years ago, augmented reality was only for labs and SciFi! She is also very active on Second Life. She mentions and share information about it a lot in the Second life matching section.

We like:
She created a whole set of iGoogle widgets in a single tab that will make your bioresearch easier. Visit Research tools iGoogle tabs to install it now.

Resources: http://etechlib.wordpress.com/

Twitter: @pfanderson

3. Alisha764’s Blog: A solo medical librarian’s ramblings

Who?
Alisha Miles graduated from FSU in 2008 with a Masters in Library Science and Information Studies. She is a solo medical librarian in non-profit hospital in Georgia. She created this blog to post ramblings about the medical library field.

What?
This new-yet-growing-famous blog (February 2009) is a nice place to read the fresh opinions and “ramblings of a young librarian. Among other things, you’ll be able to read quite a lot about Pubmed like this enthusiast post about its upcoming changes.

We like:
The extensive and well-argued post reviews she writes around new services she has been testing. One which is impressive and interesting to read is Google Health information: surprising facts.

Resources: http://alisha764.wordpress.com/

Twitter: @Alisha764

4. Eagle Dawg Blog: Perspectives in health informatics and medical librarianship



Who?
Eagle Dawg or Nicole S. Dettmar is a medical librarian at the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM). Oh, and she is “not an acronym…(she is) a free woman.”

What?
Nicole is an extensive blogger woman who tries to cover what is hot in Medical & Libraries’ news and who takes part actively in discussions with her peers. She also dares to raise her voice to help through her community, like when she posted about the flood in the Louisville Free Public Library.

We like:
The Friday Foolery posts where she allows to talk about almost everything in a more simple way. She already goes by #52!

Resources: http://eagledawg.blogspot.com/

Twitter: @eagledawg

5. Krafty Librarian: Things of interest to a medical librarian.

Who?
Michelle Kraft is a medical librarian since 1998 and currently a medical librarian for a hospital system in Ohio. She is interested in technology and its outcomes in libraries.

What?
A lot of informative and technology oriented posts. For instance, she blogged recently about the Medical Apps and Phones. We lack some effort in design (or some personalization) however it helps reinforce the content over the rest. She is worried about explaining the trends in medical applications and how systems improve and change.

We like:
Her commitment when she went to the MLA conference and extensively blogged about it to keep her medical readers community updated on the news.

Resources: http://kraftylibrarian.com

Twitter: @krafty

6. The Search Principle blog: Dean Giustini on health libraries + web media



Who?
Dean Giustini is a reference librarian at the University of British Columbia at UBC’s Biomedical Branch Library located at the Vancouver General Hospital (VGH).

What?
Dean is a state-of-the-art social medias specialist and blogs a lot about it. The blog is a nice place to stay updated on the new tools medical librarians can use and on their applications in Canada.

We like:
Dean is a endless worker and shares tons of nice information on slideshare that will be very valuable to other medical librarians but not only.

Resources: http://blogs.ubc.ca/dean/

Twitter: @giustini

7. Women’s Health News: Women’s health news, politics, information, and resources from a medical librarian



Who?
Rachel Walden is a medical librarian with a degree in library and information science (MLIS) from the University of Pittsburgh, where she focused on medical librarianship and currently works in a prominent academic medical center library. She also works as an Editorial Assistant for the Journal of the Medical Library Association and handles clinical questions for medical center, including the diabetes clinic, impatient internal medicine, and the order set teams.

What?
She focuses on Women’s health News and is willing to provide information regarding current women’s health topics, including policy, legislation, news, and events, as well as to point readers to additional useful resources online. For instance you can read this post:How do you not know when you’re pregnant.

We like:
The blog posts by this medical librarian are more notes. They are most of the time short with a view to making it informative and straightforward. This is when the conversation begins with her community through the comments where she takes good care to answer them. Aditionnally, she proposes a list of useful health information you should be interested in if you’re into Women’s health.

Resources: http://womenshealthnews.wordpress.com/

Twitter: @rachel_w

8. Blog: Library of the Institute of Public Health



Who?
Ewa Dobrogowska is medical librarian from Cracow interested in Web & Medicine 2.0.

What?
She blogs in Polish but you will easily translates it to English (or other) through the Translate tool in teh sidebar. Plus you can follow her on twitter where she twitts almost exclusively in English which allows better interactions.

We like:
Her struggle to make Health information accessible on the internet and understandable by everyone.

Resources: http://www.bibliotekaizp.blogspot.com/

Twitter: @pudliszek

Edit: The two following librarians mentionned in this list (#9 & #10) are not medical librarians, nevertheless their work and blog posts appeared interesting enough to be listed here. We apologize for the lack of accuracy in the title and description.

9. The shifted librarians: Shifting libraries at the speed of byte

Who?
As she says:”My name is Jenny, and I’ll be your information maven today“. Jenny Levine is an internet Development Specialist & Strategy Guide at American Library Association. She is a highly skilled person in all emerging technologies and new tools and has already traveled across the US and Europe to give presentations.
By the way, what’s a shifted librarian? A “shifted librarian” is someone who is working to make libraries more portable.

What?
Her blog homepage is interesting as it consists of a daily stream displaying what she has been doing, reading, commenting and liking the past few days. You’ll have to click on the blog section to access the medical articles.

We like:
Jenny brings nice and educative resources as well as more distressed sections such as the gamin in libraries’ where you’ll find a set of posts about games (and mini golf) in a library!

Resources: http://theshiftedlibrarian.com

Twitter: @shifted

10. Musings about librarianship

Who?
Aaron Tay is a librarian at the social science departments of the National University of Singapore. Aaron is a librarian really into web2.0 who wants to keep track of interesting and cool ideas that might be used by libraries for benefit of users.

What?
The blog is really oriented to making the students’, professors’ and readers’ lives easier through the use of web2.0 tools. The posts aim to explaining in depth how to make the most out of them. For instance, the latest posts explain 8 ways to share links with users.

We like:
We like the top ranked post Subject guides on web 2.0 startup pages – 12 widgets! A must read.

Resources: http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/

Twitter: @aarontay

And now our bonus medical librarian we highly recommend for the Spanish speaking people.

11. Biblioteca Médica Virtual

Who?
María García-Puente is responsible for the library of the Torrevieja Hospital (Spain)

What?
The blog’s objective is -according ot her saying- to make health science easy. She blogs regularly about the new services on the internet that make the medical librarian’s life easier. She also collaborates in congresses and recently made a bright presentation of how to get the most out of RSS feeds in the medical field.

We like:
The regular work she brings to her blog which has helped her become the reference for medical librarians. The fact that she is form Spain makes us like her even more.

Resources: http://bibliovirtual.wordpress.com/

Twitter: @bibliovirtual