Opinions of a Wolf

At the meeting, librarians present their papers that were accepted to the conference.  These are organized into groups of four sponsored by one of the MLA’s sections.  The presentations are timed so that you can see the first presentation in one section then go to another section to see the second, etc…  I wasn’t able to take notes at all of the section programming I listened to, because some of the rooms looked like this when I switched into them:

I thus will post what notes I was able to acquire, but bare in mind I actually got more out of these sections that my notes reveal.

International Congress on Medical Librarianship 2: Trustworthy and Authoritative Publicly Available Information Section

“Trustworthiness and Authoritativeness of YouTube Videos on Smokeless Tobacco” by Donghua Tao, Prajakta Adsul, Ricardo Wray, Keri Jupka, Carolyn Semar, and Kathryn Goggins

• Use online media as a tool to educate health care users
• a future study could use a survey of real YouTube users and test their hypothesis
• Methodology of published papers doesn’t discuss how they searched YouTube
• See how videos connect to each other (videos referencing other videos)
• 3,603 unique videos brought up, randomly sampled 433, of which 278 were used based on inclusion criteria

“Twenty Years of the Cochrane Collaboration: A Legacy of Trustworthy and Authoritative Publicly Available Information and Plans for the Future” by Carol Lefebvre, Julie Glanville, Jessie McGowan AHIP, Alison Weightman, and Bernadette Coles

• 2013 is Cochrane’s 20th anniversary, and they have a special anniversary website.
• Cochrane Collaboration crates the Cochrane Library
• plain long summaries, free, multiple languages
• 4 million downloads in 2010
• 6 million downloads in 2012
• New publishing agreement with Wiley
  • February 1, 2013 to the end of 2018
  • gold open access –> author pays a publication fee then article is available immediately
  • green open access –> no author payment but there is a 1 year embargo
• impact of Cochrane Reviews
• We’re not here to decide if we publish clinical data but how
• 20 years ago:
  • only 20,000 RCTs indexed in medline
  • no RCT filter in medline
• Now:
  • new MeSH term for quasi-RCT: Controlled Clinical Trial
  • 1996 Central launched
  • medline’s retagging project supports Central
  • proliferation of search filters
  • Cochrane Handbook has grown
• Future:
  • registration of clinical trials
  • move toward single portals
  • increased access to clinical study reports
  • PubReMiner will increase use
  • text mining increase
  • strengthen relationship with other organizations
  • challenge will still lie in discoverability

Federal Libraries Section: The Role of Librarians in Evidence-Based Medicine: Part One

“Telling the Research Story: A Role for Librarians in Analyzing Research Impact Based on Evidence” by Terrie Wheeler and Cathy C. Sarli AHIP

• Genesis project (Not really sure what this is.  Had trouble seeing the slides and hearing).
• citation analysis
• “It is no longer enough to measure what we can–we need to measure what matters.”
• Found a lot of gray literature using Google
• use clean data –> clear linkage
• explanation of the h-index
• explanation of the g-index
• explanation of the tapered h-index
• all index factors have one limitation or another
• can we produce future science with publication data? Maybe.

That’s all of my notes I managed to get.  I’ll have to figure out how to better juggle notebooks/pens next year.  Or maybe MLA can get us more seating.  Up next, the National Library of Medicine’s Update.