A recent Manhattan Research report, Taking the Pulse v 9.0,  found that for the past 8 years, number of U.S. physicians who use smartphones has doubled from 30% in 2001, to a recent 64%.

A total of 1,900 practicing physicians participated in the survey. According to the result,  89% of them acknowledged that Internet has become an essential part of their practice and about 75% use Internet daily for professional purposes. iPhone ownership doubled in the past year and mobile medical applications has become popular. More than 45% have used Wikipedia when researching online clinical content. Participation in online professional communities also doubled last year and 25% of the physicians reported contributing to a medical blog or other online medical content.

You can revisit our February SCR CONNECTions webinar on Medical Applications on Mobile Devices for more information.

The NN/LM SCR is now accepting applications for Year 4 technology funding opportunities:

Information Access Improvement Project Award:

The purpose of the Information Access Improvement Project (IAIP) award is to provide an opportunity to the NN/LM SCR Network members interested in improving access to Internet-based health information including National Library of Medicine products and services. At least five (5) projects of up to $5,000 each will be awarded.

Application deadline for IAIP: August 3, 2009, 5:00 CST and February 1, 2010, 5:00 pm CST

Library Technology Award:

The purpose of the Library Technology Award is to assist full Network member libraries in the NN/LM SCR that are interested in implementing large-scale technology applications to further encourage library improvement and expansion of library services.  Three (3) projects up to $20,000 each will be awarded.

Application deadline for LTA: August 3, 2009, 5:00pm, CST

For more information, please see http://nnlm.gov/scr/funding/

The National Library of Medicine launched a new feature on MedlinePlus today. On both MedlinePlus and MedlinePlus en español, search clouds will be displayed that show the most frequently searched terms for both sites:

MedlinePlus Search Cloud: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/cloud.html
MedlinePlus en español Search Cloud: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/spanish/cloud.html

The MedlinePlus search cloud displays the top 100 English searches, and the MedlinePlus en español search cloud displays the top 100 Spanish searches. The search clouds are linked from the MedlinePlus and MedlinePlus en español homepages.

The search clouds are usually updated every week day. The search terms appear in alphabetical order, and their size represents their relative frequency. The bigger the term, the more often it is searched by people who visit MedlinePlus. A term’s exact ranking is found by placing your cursor over the term, and you can click on any term in the search cloud to conduct a search for that term in MedlinePlus.

As the most popular searches change over time and with the seasons, visitors can see the dynamic and diverse interests of MedlinePlus users. For instance, the term “tick bites” might appear in the cloud during the summer, and the term “frostbite” might appear in the winter.

MedlinePlus has an exciting new interactive tutorial that teaches people about medical terms. It shows how medical words are put together, and includes quizzes, lists of words parts, and lists of medical abbreviations. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/medicalwords.html

If you’ve been listening to the news recently, it seems that everyone is Twittering.  So, what exactly is Twitter?

Twitter is a micro-blogging and social networking service that has been around since August 2006. It allows users to send short messages with no more than 140 characters (a.k.a. “tweets”) from a computer or a mobile device to their followers.  A recent Pew Internet survey found that nearly 11% of online American adults use Twitter or a similar service to share updates with others.

Free applications such as Tweeterific, Twhirl, Twitterfeed and Facebook app help you send or read tweets from your computer, your smart phone  including Blackberry or iPhone, or your cell phone. Instant Messaging applications such as Skype also allow you to send tweets without logging in to the Web page. See more applications at http://twitter.com/downloads.

Libraries and librarians have been using Twitter to post announcements, class updates, new services, interesting articles, and resource sharing. Some examples are:

• Library of Congress Twitter, 2,473 followers
• Santa Fe Public Library in New Mexico, 114 followers
• Boerne Library in Texas, 271 followers
• MD Anderson Library in Texas, 53 followers
• Medical Librarians Twitter, 252 followers

Here are some useful resources and interesting articles:

• Twitter in Plain English
• NYTimes - Twitter? It’s What You Make It
• Library Success - Libraries Using Twitter
• Twitter for Health

Thanks to Julie Gaines at UTHSC-San Antonio for additional examples of twittering libraries and medical librarians.

The National Network of Libraries of Medicine, South Central Region will offer the following free workshops for librarians at the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library in March and April, 2009:

Caring for the Mind: Providing Reference Services for Mental Health Information
March 18, 2009, 8:30 am to 11:30 am
This hands-on class will help participants to gain awareness of mental health issues.  Attendees will learn to respond to challenging reference questions for mental health information.  Websites will be presented on collection development and mental health research.  A full description is available at:   http://nnlm.gov/training/consumer/caringforthemind/

Can You Hear Me Now? How to Make a Podcast
April 17, 2009, 9:00 am to 12:00 pm
This hands-on class is designed to provide a fun yet informative introduction to what is podcasting and how you can utilize this technology in your library services, to enable your users to access the information whenever they want, wherever they want and however they want it. Basic steps and suggestions on how to make a podcast will be covered and students will be able to enjoy hands-on practice on popular audio recording and editing software and make their first podcast! A full description of this class is available at: http://nnlm.gov/training/podcast/index.html

Upon successful completion of each class, each participant will receive continuing education credit awarded by the Medical Library Association.

To register for these classes: http://nnlm.gov/scr/training/index.html
If you have any questions about these classes, please contact Karen Vargas, karen.vargas@exch.library.tmc.edu.

The NN/LM SCR is pleased to announce the two recipients of the Year 03 Library Technology Award:

Ochsner Health System Medical Library & Archives
Principal Investigator: Nital Sheridan
Project title: History of Medicine in New Orleans: A Digital Collection
Brief description: The focus of this project is to perform digital preservation of selected materials from archives of the Ochsner Medical Library & Archives. Materials include publications, photographs, institutional records, and personal papers, which chronicle the growth of the medical field in New Orleans. Digitization will prevent deterioration and improve access by enabling easier distribution and access from multiple locations. Materials will be digitized externally, and the Ochsner librarians will create a web interface that brings these materials to the public, documenting over 80 years of medical history in New Orleans.

Texas A&M University and Oklahoma State University Library
Co- Principal Investigators: Esther Carrigan and Heather Moberly
Project title: A Proposal for the Digitization and Preservation of a Key Historical Resource in Human and Animal Medicine: The Index-Catalogue of Medical and Veterinary Zoology
Brief description: This project is a collaborative effort between Texas A&M Medical Sciences Library and Oklahoma State University Library to digitize the Index-Catalogue of Medical and Veterinary Zoology, which will greatly increase accessibility to its contents. By working together on this collaborative project the two institutions will have complete holdings of the publication for digitization.  The finished product will reside in the institutional repositories of both institutions to ensure availability and long-term preservation.

Congratulations to Nital, Esther, and Heather!

The February 18 SCR CONNECTions webinar recording is now available at https://webmeeting.nih.gov/p78795709/

Next session will be held on March 18th.
What: Clever Evaluation: Evaluation Tips for Libraries With Not Enough Time (the session will be presented by the NN/LM’s Outreach Evaluation Resource Center)
Time: March 18, 10:30-11:30 AM Central Time
Link: https://webmeeting.nih.gov/scr/

Hope to see you then!

The 2009 Horizon Report discusses six emerging technologies and practices that are likely to have considerable impact on higher education, and could be widely implemented  for teaching, learning, research, content sharing, social activities, and creative expression in the next one to five years.

The research paper is a collaborative effort between the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). Six areas that have been identified are mobiles, cloud computing, geo-everything, personal Web, semantic-aware applications, and smart objects. Definition and examples of how each technology is being or could be used are presented in the report. It also identifies key trends and critical challenges that facing education and learning organizations over the five-year period.

The report is available free of charge and under Creative Commons license. You can access the full report at http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2009-Horizon-Report.pdf or http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/CSD5612.pdf

You can read how the Project Advisory Board manages the process of selecting topics for the 2009 report on Horizon Wiki, where related resources are also listed.

A January 2009 PEW Internet & American Life Project report, Adult and Social Network Websites, shows that in the past 3 years, more and more adult Internet users have started using social network sites.  The figures rose from 8% usage in February 2005 to 35% in December 2008.

The survey results indicate that younger adults are much more likely to use social networks than their older counterparts, and the majority use the networks for personal instead of professional interests. For those who do use it for both personal and professional purposes, they usually maintain multiple profiles on different sites. MySpace is the most popular social network site among adult users.

With 75% of online adults between 18 and 24 and 57%  between 25 and 34 having a social network profile, there is huge potential for libraries to reach patrons through these sites.

Here are examples of some regional libraries with profiles on social network sites:

• Northeastern State University Libraries, Broken Arrow, OK on MySpace
• Harris County Public Library on LinkedIn
• John P. Ische Library / LSUHSC New Orleans Libraries on Facebook

For more information, see: Hendrix D, Chiarella D, Hasman L, Murphy S, Zafron ML. Use of Facebook in academic health sciences libraries. J Med Libr Assoc. 2009 Jan;97(1):44-7.