Finding patient education materials in diverse languages and staying up to date with cultural competency tools and training are important goals for health care providers. Help the providers you serve by sharing these resources with them!

• How to Order National Institutes of Health Publications In Non-English Language http://nnlm.gov/mcr/resources/community/multilingualNIH.html
• Consumer Health Information in Many Languages http://nnlm.gov/outreach/consumer/multi.html
• Cultural Competency Resources http://nnlm.gov/mcr/resources/community/competency.html

Last week, I attended the National Rural Health Association Quality and Clinical Conference. The NRHA has made the handouts from the conference available at http://tinyurl.com/l48pgb. Topics include electronic health records, telemedicine, and models for rural health care. [SD]

Last week, I attended the National Rural Health Association (NRHA) Quality and Clinical Conference in Park City, UT. At the conference, Doug Romer, Executive Director-Patient Care Services at Grande Ronde Hospital in LaGrande, OR, gave a fascinating talk and demonstration of the “remote presence” telemedicine services provided by the hospital in conjunction with various partners.

The hospital uses an inTouch RP7 robot that can be controlled remotely by physicians not located at the hospital. The robot has a monitor, camera and audio system so that the patients and remote physician can see and hear each other.

At the conference, Mr. Romer conducted a live demo of the system using the hotel’s wireless Internet access — participants were able to communicate with a patient undergoing an ultrasound and see the results of the ultrasound live. We were instructed that the patient did not want to know the sex of the baby, so to please not reveal that information when we saw the ultrasound!

To see the system in action, view the video the hospital has made available on this page: http://www.grh.org/srvTelmed.html. [SD]

TwitCam (http://www.twitcam.com) is a new free service that allows you to stream live video to your Twitter followers. You must have a Twitter account to use TwitCam.

TwitCam posts a video description and link for your Twitter followers to find your video. When you are broadcasting from your camera, you can chat with your Twitter followers directly from the broadcast page. You can also record an archive of the broadcast.

Although this is intended for live broadcast to an audience, it could also be used to create a promotional or informational video that you want others to view asynchronously.

At the moment the service has a lot of test videos as examples. It will be interesting to see the videos that are created as the service grows! [SD]

Two MCR liaisons, Sharon Dennis and Siobhan Champ-Blackwell, attended the Woods Hole Bioinformatics course recently. We would like to form an alumni group of librarians who have attended Woods Hole in the last few years. The purpose of the group is to help us determine the best way to disseminate the information we learned at Woods Hole to other librarians in the region, as well as looking at ways the knowledge we gained has been or could be integrated into the librarian’s role.

If you have attended the Woods Hole course and would like to participate in the group, please contact Sharon Dennis at sdennis@lib.med.utah.edu. [SD]

Are you a hospital librarian whose access to information resources and Web 2.0 services is blocked by institutional firewalls and filters? If so, funding is available to help you! MCR will provide a one year subsidy to pay for mobile broadband service, offered by the major cell phone networks, to hospital librarians that are blocked from information access, distance education, and committee activites due to their institution’s firewalls and filters.

For more information, download and complete the application (MS Word format). Deadline for applications is August 14, 2009. For questions, please contact Sharon Dennis, MCR Technology Coordinator, at sdennis@lib.med.utah.edu. [SD]

I was recently asked how to set Word 2007 to single spacing. Click here to view the 1 minute 27 second video instructions from Microsoft.

The Technology Liaisons presented at this July’s Breezing Along with the RML. Rebecca Brown, MCR’s Kansas and Technology Liaison, demonstrated several tips to make working with Word and PowerPoint 2007, plus Gmail more efficient (and exciting). Sharon Dennis, MCR’s Technology Coordinator, discussed three new search engines: Wolfram/Alpha, Bing, and Google Squared. She also gave a heads-up about a new Google tool coming out later this year, Google Wave. You can view the archived recording of this session at: https://webmeeting.nih.gov/p33896738/

Click here for the step-by-step instructions for Rebecca’s presentation.

Click here to view Rebecca’s PowerPoint presentation.

New selections and a new brochure are now available on our NetLibrary collection of e-books focused on library administration and technical topics. The collection is available at: http://nnlm.gov/mcr/education/netlibrary.html. Click on “access NetLibrary directly,” or download the list of more than 90 books by clicking on “view a list of books available for download” or print out the latest trifold brochure highlighting our new selections by clicking on “NetLibrary brochure.” You’re sure to find something relevant to your job today!

The Disrupted Library Technology Jester blog has published an excellent comparison of three new search services: Wolfram|Alpha, Microsoft’s Bing, and Google Squared; see http://dltj.org/article/alpha-bing-squared/. Wolfram|Alpha and Google Squared are “fact retrieval” search engines whereas Bing is more like existing search engines that retrieve web links about a topic.

The post features an 8-minute long screencast that contrasts results from the three search engines. I recommend taking the time to watch the screencast; you will come away with a good understanding of the differences between the three services. Note the new service described at the end of the post that provides a way to conduct a search across all three engines. [SD]