Thesis (Ph. D.)--Portland State University, 1996. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [157]-163).

Purpose: Explore the current state of generalist search education in library schools and consider that foundation in respect to the Medical Library Associationâ s statement on expert searching. Setting / Subjects: Syllabi from courses with significant searching components. Ten of the top library schools, as determined by the U.S. News and World Report rankings. Methodology: Mixed methods, but primarily quantitative bibliometric methods. Results: The educational focus in these searching components was on understanding the generalist searching resources and typical users, and performing a reflective search through application of search strategies, controlled vocabulary, and logic appropriate to the search tool. There is also a growing emphasis on Web-based search tools and a movement away from traditional set-based searching and toward free-text search strategies. While there is a core set of authors used in these courses, there is no core set of readings. Discussion/conclusion: While library schools provide a strong foundation, there is still need for future medical librarians to take courses that introduce them to the resources, settings, and users associated with medical libraries. In addition, as more emphasis is placed on Web-based search tools and free-text searching, instructors of the specialist medical informatics courses will need to focus on teaching traditional search methods appropriate for common tools in the medical domain.

The nature of work for librarians/information professionals is undergoing a profound transformation, due to the arrival of deadly diseases like AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) and the change in information needs of the local community. This change necessitates much more professional expertise, updated knowledge, critical thinking and involvement in developing effective AIDS literacy programs. Information professionals serving in different libraries or potential information dissemination centers can provide dedicated services to society by helping to access AIDS information not only in urban settings but also in rural environments. This paper outlines strategies for effective collaboration in the context of AIDS literacy promotion efforts. It identifies a number of obstacles in the process of empowering the community and suitable measures essential for success.

Edited and abridged version of a paper presented at International Conference on Digital Library, New Delhi, 24-27 February, 2004, entitled â Architecture and building of Medical Digital Library at National Informatics Centre: What exists and what is required for MeDLib@NIC?â / ICMR-NIC Centre for Biomedical Information has developed various products that are available over Internet. These includes: i. UNcat (http://uncat.nic.in) - union catalogue of journal holdings of medical libraries of India; ii. IndMED (http://indmed.nic.in) - A bibliographic database of Indian biomedical journals and iii. medIND (http://medind.nic.in) - full texts of Indian biomedical journals being indexed in IndMED. Now, having these services, tools, databases and content in operation, the focus of future activities would be to integrate these â ingredientsâ both internally and externally to provide â single window digital access persistentlyâ . Here we propose an architecture under which each service, tool, database and content collection is an independent layer. These layers are the building blocks of Digital Library (DL) and can interoperate with each other due to either build-in or plug-in(ed) interoperability. They are accessible by their own interfaces as well as through Digital Library interface. In context of the proposed architecture, this article also takes stoke of what is available and what is required to build the digital library.

European Association for Health Information & Libraries Workshop 2007, Kraków, Poland, 12-15 September 2007 / Since 2006, the Campus Library of Biomedical Sciences of K.U.Leuven University is reconsidering its role in education and research. Giving access to scientific information is still our libraryâ s most important mission. However, teaching our students and academic staff the skills for efficient retrieval and use of scientific information is increasingly becoming an important task too. In the past, instruction was limited to guided tours and short library instruction sessions, organized on an individual and unsystematic basis. This changed in 2006, when we were asked by the Faculty of Medicine to reconsider part of the medical curriculum in the light of integrating information literacy in it. The following considerations were made: 1. information literacy should be integrated in a systematic way in the curriculum 2. minimal skills of information literacy should be determined for each level 3. instruction in information literacy should be a continuous line starting in the first and ending in the last year (vertical line) 4. information literacy should be acquired in an active way in as many courses as possible (horizontal line) 5. instruction in information literacy is a shared responsibility of library and academic staff As a result, the biomedical library was given the responsibility of information literacy in the beginning of the curriculum of medical students, while academic staff took the responsibility of the rest. At the same time, the library was investing a lot in providing our academic staff with tools, formats and learning objects for integrating information literacy in their lessons. We also started planning systematic trainings for keeping our academic staff up to date with major changes in scientific information. The new curriculum of the Faculty of Medicine was put into practice in October 2006. It was soon followed by similar projects in all other biomedical faculties of our university.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / To access the content of digital texts efficiently, it is necessary to provide more sophisticated access than keyword based searching. Genescene provides biomedical researchers with research findings and background relations automatically extracted from text and experimental data. These provide a more detailed overview of the information available. The extracted relations were evaluated by qualified researchers and are precise. A qualitative ongoing evaluation of the current online interface indicates that this method to search the literature is more useful and efficient than keyword based searching.

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Faithful aggregated accounts of the advancement of science are invaluable for those setting scientific policy as well as scholars of the history of science. As science develops the scholarly communityiÌ s determination of the accepted knowledge undergoes shifts. Within medicine these shifts include our understanding of what can cause disease and what defines specific disease entities. Shifts in accepted medical knowledge are captured in the medical literature. The Index Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon GeneraliÌ s Office, United States Army, published from 1880 -1961, is an extremely large index to medical literature. The newly digitized form of this index, referred to as the IndexCat, allows us a way to generate faithful accounts of the development of medical science during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. My data looks at shifts within the IndexCat surrounding three disease entities: syphilis, Huntington's chorea, and beriberi, and their interactions with two disease causation theories: germ and hereditary, from 1880-1930. Temporal changes in the prominent subject heading words and title words within the literature of these diseases and disease theories corroborate qualitative accounts of this same literature, which reports the complex and sometimes oblique process of knowledge accretion. Although preliminary, my results indicate that the IndexCat is a valuable tool for studying the development of medical knowledge.

In this article open access is defined, and the resources and issues of greatest relevance to the medical librarian are discussed. The economics of open access publishing is examined from the point of view of the university library. Open access resources, both journals and articles in repositories, are already significant and growing rapidly. There are close to 2300 fully open-access peer review journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (320 health sciences titles are included). DOAJ is adding titles at a rate of 1.5 per day. An OAIster search of resources in repositories includes more than 7.6 million items (a rough estimate of the number of articles in repositories, although not all items are full text), and this number will exceed one billion items before the end of 2007. Medical research funders, including the US National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, the UK Medical Research Council, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, either have implemented or are considering open access policies. This will drive greater growth in open access resources, particularly in the area of medicine. There are implications and leadership opportunities for librarians in the open access environment.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1995. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 194-205).