The interview of Christian Blaschke PhD, scientific director at novoseek was originaly published in Spanish and titled Bioinformatics in the business world in Jose María Fernández González’s blog. José María Fernández González is a bioinformatician at CNIO (Madrid – Spain). He has developed web services for iHOP. With a view to sharing it with the rest of the scientific community and english speaking people, we have translated it and published it here.

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I’ve always wondered how to make a bioinformatics-related development in the business, because the objectives are different. In the scientific world almost always you have to publish prior to your competitors, whereas in the business world, the objectives are more related to the versatility and robustness of the tools and systems developed.

Therefore, when I got the opportunity to conduct a series of questions about someone who is “on the other side”, I grabbed the chance. Christian Blaschke, working at Bioalma answered my questions about the development of novoseek, a text-mining product.

Christian Blaschke is a graduate in Plant Physiology from the University of Salzburg and has a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Autnoma University in Madrid. He began his career developing data-mining systems and information extraction in the Protein Design Group. Today he is the Research & Development Director and Principal Investigator in several European projects in which Bioalma takes part. He was also the coordinator for the first edition of the BioCreAtivE, an assessment for text-mining algorithms. He has been conducting research in text mining for more than 10 years.

1. In general, for ordinary people, what is novoseek?

It is a Web 2.0 search engine for scientific literature and also an alternative to Pubmed to search in Medline, in full-text articles from PubMedCentral and in U.S.
Grants. It is based on a unique text-mining technology that analyzes and processes the nearly 20 millions publications available in PubMed and the 3 million existing concepts in the literature. Our technology analyzes and takes into account the synonyms and homonyms to the search term, which allows to return relevant and complete results in the very first search. In addition, a profile (which appears in the left bar of the browser) is created for each search. This profile displays important concepts related to the search with a view to using them as filters and make the search more specific. Thus, the user finds the publications he needs to read in a more simple, fast and reliable way.

2. What was originally the idea to create this tool?

In the late 90s I was fortunate to work with Alfonso Valencia (then working at the National Center for Biotechnology in Madrid) in subjects dealing with word processing and information extraction. He was among the first to work on these subjects in the field of molecular biology and bioinformatics and I was able to explore many ideas. At that time we were interested in extracting proteins interactions and the analysis of the results on DNA microarrays based on the knowledge published in the scientific literature. Later we realized we could offer the benefits of the technologies we had developed to a wider audience and find a way in which biomedical researchers could benefit from it. So in Bioalma we started working on products that would be based on text analysis in the biomedical field. One could say that novoseek is the third generation of this products development and that we have now brought it online.

3. How many people were necessary for the development of novoseek? Did they / Do they have highly specialized profiles (text mining, databases, etc …)?

We started with a few people and we are currently a dozen that participate actively in the development of novoseek. We are a multidisciplinary team which includes people trained in many areas. From software engineers, experts in the development of databases, bioinformatitians, biochemists, pharmacists to experts in artificial intelligence. In addition we have long been dealing with texts and analyzing natural language. This is an area in which most of our team has experience.

4. Are there critical points with the current tools and web systems such as keeping the information updated and consistent. Did you have / Do you have many issues?

At first it wasn’t easy because the set of documents included in PubMed were much larger than anything we had processed before in our work experience. But I have to say that we have a great team and today we integrate documents published in PubMed (abstracts of publications) and PubMedCentral (full text) every day.

5. How do you get feedback from regular users? I mean, do they propose interesting features, or do they help you detect problems or system failures.

Novoseek is a service based on state-of-the-art technology, people working in the company are quite young, they know the internet well and are concerned with constantly improving the user experience. Therefore, their feedback is very important to us. We have opened discussion platforms that have a particular role. In uservoice, users tend to make us suggestions as to new developments and usability. We study them and we include them into our development “road map”. There are things that are easy to implement and take little time (like export to CiteULike) and others that we need to assess and may take longer (such as search in figures and images). Twitter (@novoseek) is a tool we use for real time communication with our users and to share information such as: interesting publications, news and interesting links for our community, surveys or a more direct feedback. For example, I remember the time someone asked us if novoseek was down and in 5 minutes, 5 people (including us) told her that it was not.

I admit that there is a subtle balance between what people want in the web-based service and what we think is good for efficient searches and a nice user experience. In general, user feedback helps us a lot.

6. If today you had to start from scratch the design of a tool with the same target as novoseek, having the background that you now have, what would you not do?

Our professional education is very technical and this was reflected in our previous products. They were very powerful but sometimes too complex for our target audience. We thought that more (functionality) was better than less and we did not consider enough the point of view of our users. For us this has been quite a journey in which we learned a lot. In the last months we have conducted many usability tests, and we realized that there are elements that are not clear enough. So we are currently working on a redesign of novoseek. This should help understand better how it differs from PubMed and what it actually bring to users.

7. In the current scientific landscape of web 2.0, web services, bibliographic social networks (such as CiteULike, Zotero 2.0, …), etc … that is beginning to be beyond PubMed or Google Scholar “Are you facing many challenges to link (or provide links) to these resources?

Given our work and activity online, we know well the other web 2.0 tools that today are part of the life of a novoseek user. They are tools we are also using ourselves and that we consider important because they are completing the service offered by novoseek. It is a requirement that we must meet so that people keep using novoseek. So far, we have done it for CiteULike and it is pending for Zotero 2.0 and Mendeley. As these web 2.0 services grow in number and their use is increasing among scientists, novoseek has to be more compatible with them.

8. Nearly all bioinformatics services today (either academic or commercial) offer programmatic APIs. What can you tell about yours?

For novoseek’s API we have used REST based on the XML standard because it is relatively simple to use and there are libraries for most programming languages available today.
As for the functionality it offers, we tried to bring most things that can be done in novoseek to the API. One can do searches based on words and biological concepts (like e.g. genes, diseases, drugs or chemicals) to retrieve documents. The documents offer all the entries included in novoseek and these can be used as a basis for new text mining services. It also offers the key concepts that are calculated for a search related to the documents returned and that characterize this set of documents.
Our main goal is to offer the possibility to integrate the functionality of novoseek on other platforms. For example to enrich the content of web pages or blogs. Furthermore, it is now very common to do ” mash-ups” between different systems to create something totally new. We wanted people to be able to use novoseek in new ways beyond what might occur to us. People interested can request an API Key in http://api.novoseek.com

9. What are the future plans for a tool like novoseek?

In the future we want to extract more and more information from the documents which are indexed in novoseek to allow ever more powerful searches. One problem is that e.g. in PubMed you can not search for a person. If you search for “John Smith” the system will return documents where the name refers to different people. Or in documents where “J Smith” appears as an author, you do not know if it belongs to “John Smith” or “Jeff Smith”. Another problem that requires a lot of work is to find specific information such as, e.g., what drugs treat a disease or what are the genetic causes of a disease. We want to solve these problems for our users to save them time spent searching and so that they could devote to actually reading the documents that are relevant to them.

10. Can you tell more about the infrastructure needed to provide this service?

At first we set up novoseek on a small cluster of Linux machines installed in our offices in Madrid. But we realized that keeping a 24 hour service with minimum disruption was not easy. We were depending on a single Internet line that failed several times in the first months. The air conditioning system was not secure enough and we could not withstand power outages of over 15 minutes. After evaluating many options such as hosting of machines in a data center or collocation of our own hardware in one of them, we chose the web services offered by Amazon (which is known as AWS – Amazon Web Services consisting of EC2 and S3). Amazon offers what is known today as “the cloud”, a system of virtual machines that are configured in a flexible way. It is easy to create more nodes to meet our growing needs and also pay only what is actually used. The decision to migrate novoseek to the Amazon platform solved the problems I mentioned before because it is a very stable environment that has not failed us so far.

Thank you to José María Fernández González and Christian Blaschke for their time and dedication for this interview.

We are glad to announce the launch of the biomedical gadgets working thanks to the novoseek’s API. The use of the biomedical gadgets is open to everyone and free. You can get your API Key today and start using the gadgets to extract relevant biomedical information from novoseek and to create biomedical gadgets. In order to create biomedical gadgets, you just have to follow a few steps to publish it on your website or blog.

Gadgets will allow you to publish biomedical information where you want. Gadgets can be published on your blog, website…(where scripts are accepted) and will alllow you to easily extract information from the literature according to your query. With the gadgets you will:

• Enrich your content
• Integrate valuable data
• Display more information
• And no need to know about programming.

There are at this time 2 types of gadgets:

• The Key Concept Gadget allowing you to display the information related to any biomedical concept.
• The Document Gadget allowing you to display the most recent documents related to your search.

Through an intuitive interface, you will create handy gadgets in a few seconds and will be able to publish a gadget where you need it and modifying it as many time as you want. You are also able to create multiple different gadgets.

Let’s have a look at the possibilities brought by the gadgets with a few examples:

• Insert a Document gadget on your Diabetes blog sidebar to keep readers updated on the most recent scientific publications.

Example: 10 latest publications for Diabetes.

• Insert a gadget to show the most relevant disease, pharmacological substances, genes & proteins, chemical substances, organisms, organs & body parts, tissues, biological functions, procedures-techniques, journals, authors -a combination of them or all of them- related to your query.

Example: Tissues, Biological functions and Procedures/techniques related to “chronic granulomatous disease”

• Match the gadget design to your blog’s.

The examples shown previously have a style by default but you can easily change the design colors, width and height during the creation of biomedical gadgets.

Last but not least, we recommend you to watch the tutorial video about the gadgets to see how easy it works.

We’d love to hear from you and know how you are using the gadgets, so feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.

Welcome to the MedLib’s Round 1.9. This month, the MedLib’s Round did not specify a special theme. This may have encouraged medical librarians and you to submit articles as 13 16 people took part in this round. It is always interesting to read medical librarians’ concerns as they are using state-of-the-art tools and techniques to work better and face the new challenges of communication, information retrieval and are always keen on sharing their impression on new services and debates. You will notice that this month, the MedLib’s Round leaves room for discussions on Social Media, web 2.0 services and Tips for health.

Thoughts

• David Eddy Delivers Controversial Reinertsen Lecture About Future of Evidence-based Medicine posted at ICSI Health Care Blog by Kent Bottles, MD.

Dr. David Eddy is a controversial doctor that questions the reliability of evidence-based medicine. He was invited at the Institute for Clinical System Improvements by Kent Bottles, Chief Knowledge Officer at this institute in early november. His conference was remarkable for two reasons. First one is that more than 300 people gathered to attend it. Second is that no one would have guessed Dr. David Eddy would challenge people to think about the future of ICSI and of evidence-based medicine. An extensive post you should read to keep updated on the future of evidence based medicine. (Follow Kent Bottles on twitter)

• Technology & Medicine: new screens on Alisha764’s blog

Alisha Miles shares with us her interest for new technologies and their interest for medicine and health information. In that case, she focuses on the new screens available or on the market or to be released soon and wonders about their possible uses. (Follow Alisha764 on twitter)

Social Media in health

• How Can We Help? Roles for Librarians in Public Health on PH/HA News by Alison Aldrich

Alison exposes her feelings after she attended the American Public Health Association conferences. Her post is a nice sum up of the conference and the people that were there as lecturers. The amount of conferences about social media for health matters lets us guess its importance in discussions. She raises a great question about the importance of advocating open access to public health research too. Indeed, she spent a time in the National Library of Medicine’s booth in the exhibit hall where she could talk about one common question: “how can I get all of your journal articles for free?“.

• What is Google Wave and why should I care? on Krafty Library.

Michelle sums up what is google Wave about and how you can use it. This article will be perfect for you to discover, understand and start using Wave in a proper way. She describes how medecial librarians have already created dedicated waves but still doubts about usefulness of the tool. (Follow her on Krafty)

• Manhunt: Google Wave for Community (Emergency?) Communication posted at Eagle Dawg Blog by Nicole S. Dettmar.

Nicole took part in the google wave about the manhunt in Seattle that happened in early december. She shows how powerful was the very google wave as to information exchange and how users helped enriching previous content. At the same time, she raises the problem of false information in waves (new email tool from google encouraging real time exchange) and spam that may get into these new communication channels. (Follow EagleDawg on twitter)

• FDASM Highlights for UM Stakeholders, pt. 1: Early Presenters as SWOT-Plus posted at Emerging Technologies Librarian by Patricia F Anderson

Patricia wrote a great post (the second) on the highlights of the FDASM. The FDASM is an initiative from the FDA about the use of internet and social media for health related communications for FDA-regulated products. This public hearing held in early november was a beginning to knowing and discovering how to use social media channels to communicate about products. In that field, she recalls how the FDA has already been providing essential resources online. There is more to learn and I encourage you to read it. (Follow Patricia F. Anderson on twitter)

Web 2.0 services for health

• Biomedical search on Biomedsearch by Dr. Shock on Shock M.D.

In this article, we learn with Dr Shock about a new tool that wants to provide free access to documents relating to the biomedical field. He explains the functions of this search engine and wonders about whether it can be an alternative to the redesigned pubmed.

• How to switch from one to the other antidepressant by Dr Shock.

There’s one common problem with antidepressant which is either that the antidepressant does not work or provokes side effects. When that happens, you have to switch from one to another. This can be a tricky task and Dr. Shock presents us some great resources websites to manage it. (Follow Dr. Shock on twitter)

• Medpedia Now Includes News & Analysis, Alerts, Q&A by Walter Jessen on HighlightHealth

Walter Jessen focuses here on new functionalities brought recently to Medpedia and create a richer experience for users. Mepdedia is a medical wiki and has useful functionalities. You will now be able to use in Medpedia the following features: News & Analysis from over 150 professionals, Alerts from real time web platforms and Answers (a kind of medical Yahoo Answers). He then wonders about the possibility for Medpedia to become a medical wikipedia thanks to the amount of reliable information it has. (Follow HighlightHealth on twitter)

Tips

• Adding Methodological Filters to MyNCBI posted at Laika’s MedLibLog by Jacqueline

Jacqueline has created a great tutorial to learn how to add methodological filters to MyNCBI. MyNCBI is one’s account on Pubmed. Obviously, creating filters is a must-use option when you are keen on research and need to automate search processes. In that case, she shows how Pubmed allows to create and run advanced filters to save time. It is always nice to read well detailed techniques that will turn the reader in a better prepared person for searches. Jacqueline writes a lot about Pubmed and she has a great experience with it. Enjoy learning with her. (Follow Laikas on twitter)

• How to follow Twitter users in Google Reader on Clinical Cases and Images Blog by Dr. Ves Dimov.

In this post, Dr. Ves Dimov (who has a great blog in medicine) makes us discover a way to easily read Twitter updates without even following the people via Google Reader. Dr. Ves Dimov explains how this approach makes it easier for him to manage multiple information streams. Plus, Google Reader is web-based and can be accessed from any devide with an interent connection. (Follow Dr. Ves Dimov on twitter)

• How to make and maintain a Library Twitter account on DigiCMB by Guus Van Den Brekel

Guus shows in this example of a new twitter account how to fine tune parameters to receive all the possible interesting updates and twitts right into your twitter account. This tutorial will definitely take you to the best practices in terms of interconnection and follow up! (Follow DigiCMB on twitter)

• Allergy Notes: If you think blogs don’t matter, think again: this blog is the number one search result for “allergic rhinitis guidelines” on Allergy News Updated Daily Blog Dr. Ves Dimov.

Interesting reflexion by Dr. Ves Dimov on the role of blogs when looking for information online through search engines. From the example “allergic rhinitis guidelines” which is the first result on Google, and a blog post -hence listed before NEJM- he shares with us his vision of the future of search results. Blogs and fresh content can play a significant role but better quality source should always be sought for. (Follow Dr. Ves Dimov on twitter)

• A review of the main reference management softwares on Knowledge beyond words by Valentin.

Through a detailed post, we describe the main citation managers available out there and their particularity. You should consult this article if you are to decide what is the citation managers most adapted to your needs and uses. There is also the results of a poll launched on twitter asking people what is their favorite citation manager. (Follow novoseek on twitter)

Thank you for reading this MedLib’s Round on Knowledge beyond words. We’d like to help spread Jacqueline’s message who is looking for ideas for a logo and a new name for the MedLib’s Round which is according to Berci, one of the important things of a blog carnival. So feel free to submit her your ideas, it will be much appreciated.

Feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed of MedLib’s Round Blog Carnival. Next MedLib’s Round will be published next January 5th on Dr. Shock’s blog and you can already submit your materials via this form.

The reference management software -also called citation management software, citation manager or personal bibliographic management software- are programs that allow users –researchers, scholars, authors- to save, work on and use bibliographics citations. The aim of these reference management programs is to save search results and publications with a view to using citations (references) to generate bibliographies. Indeed, publishers or journals often have different citation formats which is time-consuming  activity when writing. These citations management systems help manage bibliographic references and include cited sources easily. In addition, exporting the document to the format needed is also made easier. On top of that, we understand the importance of these software as the scientific literature keeps growing faster.

The picture from PhD Comics should convince you that writing and managing references is one big and hard task!

Why is this kind of systems growing popular and mandatory in the scientist and scholars’ lives today ? There are several reasons to this however two are really important and meet the need to :

• Benefit from effective tools in a world where publications grow rapidly. Indeed, the scientific literature is growing rapidly those last years. For instance, there are 2,000 new publications every day on average.
• Be able to handle all the data attached to a publication : Journal, authors, dates, asbtracts, tags, PMID, etc…

There are already a lot of reference management software available on the market. In fact, there are so many citation managers that one can get lost easily (a look at the comparison of reference management softwares on wikipedia will convince you). Some of them are better known and benefit from good customers’ feedback and reviews. However not all of us know them so we have established this list for you to choose. Interestingly, most of them are free and web-based. Therefore they are accessible from anywhere through private account and remain free.

We will present the main reference management softwares you should know and then show the results of the poll launched on twitter:

• CiteULike
• Connotea
• Endnote / Endnote Web
• Refworks
• Mendeley
• Zotero
• Papers
• [POLL RESULTS] What citation manager do you use?

• CiteULike


Developer: Cite U Like is a free reference management software by Oversity and sponsored by Springer.
Price: Free.
Description: CiteULike is fusion of Web-based social bookmarking services and traditional bibliographic management tools launched in 2004. It is very close to Connotea as you can tag documents too. This way users should try Connotea and CiteULike and decide by themselves. One thing we really like is the possibility to establish priorities for an article you have just bookmarked. (Top Priority ! I really want to read it ! I will read it ! I might read it ! I don’t really want to read it ! I’ve already read it !).
We like: Lately they have come up with a new function that recommends articles to the user based on his preferences and other people’s bookmarks. It’s experiencing a great acceptance among users as they explain on the CiteUlike blog
Twitter: @CiteULike

• Connotea


Developer: Connotea is the free web based service developed by Nature Publishing Group and launched in 2007.
Price: Free.
Description: Connotea works as a combination of both delicious and a reference management system. Registered users are able to tag documents in order to retrieve them later. You can read their blog to keep up to date on their actuality.
We like: Good thing is that you can look for documents tagged by other people as long as their libraries are public which allows you to broaden your searches and knowledge.
Twitter: @Connotea

• EndNote / EndNote Web


Developer: Endnote is a comercial software developed by Thomson Scientific.
Price: It costs approximately $300 for a year’s account.
Description: Endnote is the most known reference management software as it is also a pionneer in its domain since it was first released 20 years ago in 1988. This is the reference management software you would typically find in your university for instance.
We like: With the growing importance of data portability, Endnote released a Web version called Endnote Web. Endnote Web is easier to use and offers slightly less functions than Endnote. For instance you will be able to save up to 10.000 references. Another advantage is that it’s much cheaper. One of the key features of the traditional EndNotes is the possibility to change the reference format in your Word draft, to adjust it to the  journal reference format of the journal.
Twitter: @EndNoteNews

• RefWorks


Developer: Refworks is a commercial web-based service launched in 2001 by Proquest.
Price: You can try it for free for 30 days and then pay approximately $100 a year for one user (sort of expensive).
Description: It is a « an online research management, writing and collaboration tool — designed to help researchers easily gather, manage, store and share all types of information, as well as generate citations and bibliographies » This web based service allows to share references and bibliographies via Refshare (link) . It also support a lot of formats for importing and exporting.
We like: The RefWorks online store where you will find all the items to show your support.
Twitter: @Refworks

• Mendeley


Developer: Mendeley is a research management tool for desktop & web.
Price: Free.
Description: Launched in 2008 by some of the people who have participated to Skype, LastFM and Warner Music, it is told to be the «Last FM of research ». It is growing very popular and they claim to already have more than 100.000 users, as they explain on TechCrunch.
Mendeley works either from the web platform or through the software program. It is totally free and the main difference to a program like Zotero is that it extract information from PDF. The program is powerful and allows to organize documents in a smart way. You can favorite publications, create collection and share them with your community. They also have developed a plugin for word -as endnote does- to generate bibliographies in a simple way.
We like: the « explore research trends and statistics » allow you to discover and aggregate anonymous statistics and trends. Keep up to date reading their blog
Twitter: @Mendeley_com

• Zotero


Developer: Zotero is a free Open Source reference management software Add on for firefox.
Price: Free.
Description: This one differs totally from the previous citation managers (or reference managers software) as it is a plugin for Firefox that is completely free and open source. Since it is a firefox extension, what you download is in Firefox all the time. This may be a problem when you are using several computers. One great feature (maybe the greatest) is that when you are viewing an article that is available for saving, a tiny icon is shown next to the URL. Clicking on it automatically saves it with all the corresponding fields.
We like: Last but not least, Zotero allows you to save into folders, tag documents, search as you type, import endnote collections and is free. Should you need to know more, consult their blog.
Twitter: @Zotero

• Papers


Developer: Papers is a commercial reference management software (available for Iphone) developed only for Macs.
Price: You can try it for free for 30 days and then buy it for 29€. (7,99€ for the Iphone app)
Description: It was launched in 2007 by Alexander Griekspoor and Tom Groothuis while they were studying at the Netherland Cancer Institute. To make this description simple, it is like endnote but exclusively for Mac OS.
We like: On top of that, they have developed an iPhone app so you can manage your citations directly from your preferred mobile. It will cost you only 7,99€. Feel free to read their actuality.
Twitter: @Mekentosj

At this moment novoseek supports a direct export to two of the main reference platforms: CiteUlike and Connotea. You can try it by yourself from this publication on novoseek.

Last but not least, we asked people on twitter which is their favorite citation managers to use and the results are the following (thank you to the almost 100 tweeps who asnwered):

It seems that Zotero is the leader with Endnote while Mendeley is increasing strongly its market share. Other citation managers were also mentionned: BibTex, Wizfolio, Bookends, Bibdesk, Jabref, Citavi. I would be curious to hear what their developers have to say to make us feel like trying them.

This selection of reference management softwares is personal and we will be happy to consider including more of them in the future updates. Just feel free to leave a comment below.

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