Outreach in Action - ASTRO exhibit
Your local NNLM coordinators spent the past week at exhibiting at the ASTRO (American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology) at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Our participation at national exhibits help us to get the word out to health professionals about the high quality resources available through the National Library of Medicine. Most conference attendees were familiar with PubMed. Our objective is to educate about advanced search features. Though, the My NCBI feature came out in 2005. There is still a large majority of health professionals who are unaware of this outstanding feature. My experience is that when care providers learn about the “current awareness” feature (that they can save searches to have them emailed on a regular update)…there is much excitement. This is a time saving and educational tool, which is essential for keeping up to date with new research.
Keep your providers up to date on the “hot topics” most relevant to them. Help them to register for a MyNCBI account, customize searches with them and have them emailed to them. My observation is that most providers are just not using RSS yet. We need to be where are users are at…
Here is our own Lauri Fennell, Outreach and Education Coordinator, demonstrating MyNCBI.
