davidrothman.net

Fun Videos from PPLD

David Rothman — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 09:43:11 +0000

Jill Jarrell hipped me to the fun videos her library posts on Vimeo. Here’s one on workplace etiquette (Jill stars in the fridge, grazing, at about 3m:19s).

NCBI ROFL

David Rothman — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 23:32:02 +0000

Martha Hardy (friend, medical librarian, incredibly cool person) hipped me to NCBI ROFL, a wonderful blog that highlights the best chuckles from PubMed citations.

Edit: D’oh! Nikki posted about this yesterday and Berci before that!

I have become a truly lame blogger.

CHLA-ABSC 2009

David Rothman — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:10:09 +0000

Thanks so much to Laurie Blanchard and everybody at CHLA for inviting me to speak! I enjoyed Winnipeg and it was a treat to finally meet people like Francesca Frati (who is awesome) and Mark Rabnett.

The slides for my talk (which look awful in Slideshare) are embedded below.

To clarify for Krista Clement:

I think anything that removes obstacles between users and the information they want is good. If more fully automating some functions of the library makes those functions less visible, I think that’s great. I don’t think that doing a better job for users will result in decreased funding, but I do think that better automation will cut costs.

☣Sneeze: Flash Flu Fun

David Rothman — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:45:52 +0000

How timely that a friend sent me the link to this game just when I needed a fun break from Swine Flu panic.

In Sneeze, you are an influenza virus in one human and have the opportunity the spread yourself in various environments by having your human sneeze just once on each level.

Q&A With Melissa Rethlefsen

David Rothman — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:45:11 +0000

MIDLINE, the Newsletter of the Midwest Chapter of the Medical Library Association has a Q&A with my friend and kick-butt medical librarian Melissa Rethlefsen.

EBSCOhost and ScienceDirect Blocking RSS re-syndication?

David Rothman — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 02:44:49 +0000

A friend who is a medical librarian emailed me. She writes:

“I’ve been setting up local RSS pages with Feedburner [for email distribution] and Feed2JS [for dislaying the content of feeds on Web pages] for our most popular journals, to allow for TOCs.

…

It seems the publishers have gotten wise to this and are not allowing their feeds to be resyndicated. It started with EbscoHost — I noticed their feeds never seemed to refresh themselves (which totally defeats the purpose of having a feed). Now it seems ScienceDirect is also blocking re-syndication. FeedBurner can’t pick up the feeds; Feed2JS gives an error, yet the feed validator says it’s a valid feed. SD is providing it’s own source-code to paste into local web pages, but it takes so long to load the page that it invariably times out = useless.

Just wondering if you’ve heard of this from anyone else…”

I don’t use either one of these, so I haven’t seen this problem. Has anyone else? Please let us know in the comments?

Watching Swine Flu on the Web

David Rothman — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 05:34:21 +0000

~~Holy cow!~~ Holy pig!

Watching misinformation spread is sort of entertaining. Check out all the people who talk about not eating pork on Twitter. (The flu is not spread by eating pork.)

Hah! As I was writing this post, the latest xkcd appeared!

The CDC’s Emergency Preparedness and Response Twitter feed seems to be a frequently-updated source of sanity:

RSS Feed for CDC’s Swine Flu site

Maps
Google Map 1 (H1N1 Swine Flu)
Google Map 2 (”Swine Flu 2009″)
Google Map 3 (”HPAI H5N1 30-Day Outbreak Map”)

HealthMap (previously mentioned here) might be the most complete map visualization. HealthMap’s twitter feed is also interesting, but gives a more panicked impression than that of the CDC (see above)

Really Stupid Social Health Site

David Rothman — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 01:32:31 +0000

The idea behind rateadrug.com is for users to rate drugs.

Our goal is to provide unique user-generated data on side effects and subtle side effects of medications. We want to know how these prescription drugs make you feel.

I’ve seen stupid applications of social media in healthcare, but this may take the cake as the dumbest I’ve seen in a good while.

Screencast: Introduction to new PubMed Advanced Search

David Rothman — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 01:00:19 +0000

Way behind on sharing this, but better late than never.

The Mayo Clinic Libraries’ Liblog has a screencast by Melissa Rethlefsen on PubMed’s new Advanced Search features that you can embed on your own page:

In case I have not mentioned it recently: Melissa is awesome.

Venting About a Vendor

David Rothman — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:45:09 +0000

I spent too much of today on the phone with a vendor from whom I’d requested an advertised, free, 30-day trial of an information resource on behalf of a clinical department at MPOW. (For now, I won’t name the product or company, but I welcome your guesses in the comments.)

After 30 minutes of my patiently letting her finish pitching me with sales information I did not want (We’re already interested in the product! Why would I ask for a trial and quote otherwise?!), I asked for the third time if we could get a quote.

Vendor: Well, I’d really like for you to have the trial for a week before I tell you that.

[Uncomfortable pause]

Me: I can understand why, from a sales perspective, you’d want that. However, if my internal client evaluates the trial for a week, likes it, and THEN finds out it is impossibly beyond her budget, she will have wasted a week of her valuable time…so I need to have that information up front.

Vendor: Well, how much money do you have budgeted for this type of resource?

[Uncomfortable pause as I wrestle with my disbelief that the question was asked]

Me: (Slowly and calmly) Lets assume for a moment that I have that information. The quote you give me should be based on what you feel the product’s market demand merits. If I have that kind of information, let us assume that there is no way on earth I’d share it with you. The quote you give us will not be based on how much money is available.

Vendor: Well, we don’t want to devalue our data either.

Me: That’s why you set prices based on market demand, not on how much money the prospective client has, especially in this economy. Right now, you’re devaluing a prospective client- and I suspect that’s even worse for your bottom line than devaluing your data.

___________

Fortunately, my internal client finds this behavior as despicable as I do.

How often have you had conversations like this with vendors and how do you handle them?

Seriously- tell me your vendor horror stories?

(Again, I’d love to hear your guesses about who the vendor/product is. If you guess correctly in the comments, I’ll email you and tell you so.)