Librarianship in the Age of the Ebook

An interesting presentation.  40 min.

The New Librarianship in the Age of the Ebook from R. David Lankes on Vimeo.

Plain Language Medical Dictionary

A few of my colleagues at the Taubman Health Sciences Library won an Innovation Award at this year's Midwest MLA conference for the embeddable medical jargon translator below:

Read more about it in the Cornflower.

Grab the code here.

NLM Digital Collections

On September 27, 2010, the National Library of Medicine® (NLM) launched a new free digital repository, Digital Collections, which is complementary to the PubMed Central® digital archive of electronic journal articles. The repository currently provides rich search, browse and retrieval of monographs and films from the NLM History of Medicine Division. Additional content and other format types will be added over time. Users can perform full text and keyword searching within each collection or across the entire repository.

Nice collection.  Nice transcripts.  Too bad the videos aren't embeddable. 

DDT; United States. Navy Dept. Bureau of Aeronautics.; 1944.

[01:01] Because in some areas more men were being incapacitated from action by insect-born diseases than by battle casualties,

[01:09] a search for a more powerful insecticide than had previously been known was imperative.

[01:14] The answer to the quest for a poison to eradicate the insects

[01:18] which threatened the morale, health, and military efficiency of our troops was found in DDT.

ACRL Report on the Value of Academic Libraries

Here is the list of recommendations from the report on how to effectively demonstrate your library's value:

• Define outcomes
• Create or adopt systems for assessment management
• Determine what libraries enable students, faculty, student affairs professionals, administrators, and staff to do
• Develop systems to collect data on individual library user behavior, while maintaining privacy
• Record and increase library impact on student enrollment
• Link libraries to improved student retention and graduation rates
• Enhance library contribution to student job success
• Track library influences on increased student achievement
• Demonstrate and develop library impact on student learning
• Review course content, readings, reserves, and assignments
• Document and augment library advancement of student experiences, attitudes, and perceptions of quality
• Track and increase library contributions to faculty research productivity.
• Continue to investigate library impact on faculty grant proposals and funding,
  a means of generating institutional income
• Demonstrate and improve library support of faculty teaching
• Record library contributions to overall institutional reputation and prestige
• Participate in higher education assessment initiatives
• Engage in higher education accreditation processes
• Appoint liaison librarians to support senior institutional leadership and/or offices of assessment or  institutional research
• Create library assessment plans
• Promote and participate in professional development
• Mobilize library administrators
• Leverage library professional associations 

Executive Summary of the Executive Summary: Documentation & Assessment. 

How Does Difficulty Affect a Search?

According to this Google study (pdf), in 5 ways:

1. more question queries,
2. more frequent use of advanced operators,
3. more time spent on the results page,
4. longer queries appearing in the middle and not at the end of search sessions, and
5. a larger proportion of time spent on the results page.

None of these surprise me, but query length isn't something I've given much thought to.

(via RWW on Twitter)