A few years ago, I was co-teaching a consumer health class to library school students. In addition to the traditional health websites, my colleague presented a few examples of user-generated content—sites where ordinary people were posting stories about their own health conditions on discussion lists or on their personal blogs for anyone to see. One particular example involved a young woman who had a suspicious mole that turned out to be a type of skin cancer. She posted her story and pictures on her blog, which elicited a flood of responses from people with their own stories. Another example was Ronda’s Migraine page, a support community that offers a journal area where people can post their own stories, a live chat area and discussion forums. This site was started in 1996 and is still going strong! (more…)

This one day symposium, held at the Cerritos Public Library on Friday, March 6, was an overwhelming success, thanks to the efforts of Co-Chairs Cheryl Bartel and Jeff Williams and of all their diligent and hardworking committee members! The Symposium focused on the application of innovative technologies that build a sense of community, connecting users both within the library and the greater organization. (more…)

The NN/LM PSR E-Licensing Program is continuing to grow! Join us for an informal meeting at MLA ‘09 and read about our activities at SCELC’s Vendor Day and at the MLGSCA technology symposium, Technology in Libraries: Providing Access, Linking Communities. (more…)

Have you wondered how you can dynamically publish an RSS news feed on your web page? Grazr is a free web service that lets you do this easily without any programming. After you’ve incorporated the Grazr code into your web page, the news feed will automatically update with any new headlines from that feed. Your web page will be refreshed with new content! (more…)

The Medical Library Group of Southern California and Arizona (MLGSCA), with funding support from the NN/LM Pacific Southwest Region, is planning a one day symposium that will focus on the application of innovative technologies that build a sense of community, connecting users both within the library and the greater organization. “Technology in Libraries: Providing Access, Linking Communities” will be held at the Cerritos Public Library in Cerritos, CA on Friday March 6, 2009. (more…)

The NN/LM PSR E-Licensing Program is now a “go” with two STAT!Ref offers underway. (more…)

We are pleased to announce the NN/LM PSR E-Licensing Program! The following series of questions and answers will help you decide if you would like to participate in this new venture. These questions and answers are also available on the NN/LM PSR web site on the Licensing Electronic Resources page. Please contact Julie Kwan at the RML office if you have any questions. (more…)

The LinkOut Team at NCBI is releasing a new LinkOut Library Submission Utility during the first week of April 2008. (more…)

The Medical Library Association’s educational webcast, “Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices: Discovering the Participatory Web,” was a great success! (more…)

Everyone’s talking about it! Perhaps you’ve explored MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Your library may be using these sites to communicate with your library’s clientele — or thinking about doing so. Maybe you’ve attended workshops on Web 2.0. You may have read the reports of MLA’s Social Networking Software Task Force. Do you want to learn more? (more…)