(Via LifeHacker, via Joe Morgan)

If the user’s experience sucks, they’ll get their media elsewhere.

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Hey! You’re reading this in an aggregator of some kind! [sarcasm]Haven’t you heard that RSS is dead?[/sarcasm]

I’m sure the good folks at the Cleveland Public Library have seen this by now:

Click for full-size

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A few books I think are essential. What else should I add to this list? What are the books that no medlib geek should be without?

Bell writes:

Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label.

This is very entertaining stuff. Bell links to this article from the Journal of the History of Ideas by Ann Clair:³

This article surveys some of the ways in which early modern scholars responded to what they perceived as an overabundance of books. In addition to owning more books and applying selective judgment as well as renewed diligence to their reading and note-taking, scholars devised shortcuts, sometimes based on medieval antecedents. These shortcuts included the use of the alphabetical index, whether printed or handmade, to read a book in parts, and the use of reference books, amanuenses, abbreviations, or the cutting and pasting from printed or manuscript sources to save time and effort in note-taking.

Other examples include Socrates warnings on the danger of writing and fantasy tales, Malesherbes complaining that newspapers “socially isolated readers,” and an 1883 article which argued that schools “exhaust the children’s brains and nervous systems with complex and multiple studies, and ruin their bodies by protracted imprisonment.”

Go read Bell’s whole article.

Loved this quote from Douglas Adams that Bell mentions:

“Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

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Have you checked out our book yet?

“I wonder if you have found a free add-on for Word 2003 that includes medical terms in the spell check feature and is secure enough for me to recommend to my users at the hospital?”

This is such a great question and something that has come up at my place of work previously. Out of the box, Microsoft Office Word doesn’t recognize a whole lot of the specialized medical vocabulary that people at our hospital use every day. The result of this is that Word frequently fails to recognize clinical terms and underlines them in red, essentially making them false positives for spelling errors.

Only one employee in my department has Stedman’s medical dictionary installed in her copy of Word 2003 because paying a license for each copy used in an entire hospital would add up to an unmanageable sum quite quickly.

Among the books made available to all employees through our hospital’s intranet is a medical dictionary- and that’s okay for the kinds of people who don’t mind stopping what they’re doing to look up a word, but it would be so much faster and easier for Word to be able to spell-check and correct spelling issues with medical terms.

So I promised the friend I’d think it over and come up with some recommendations.

In MS Word, a “dictionary” is just a list of words.

That’s all. Nothing on pronunciation, etymology, or definition.

A quick search reveals that these “dictionaries” (word lists) are stored as .dic files.

Microsoft even tells you how to MAKE a custom dictionary.

So, what we really need is a list of words to turn into a custom dictionary.

OpenMedSpel is pretty awesome.
Free, open source, and released under a GPL license, OpenMedSpel includes nearly 50,000 medical terms. This is all looks great, but while they have a plug-in for OpenOffice, there doesn’t seem to be one for MS Word.

No problem, though. I took apart a .dic file, and it is pretty much a .txt file with a word on each line, renamed with a “.dic” file extension. This means we can just download the .txt version (in the .zip fail available here) and rename it from OpenMedSpel 100.txt to OpenMedSpel 100.dic and save it to our computer.¹

To add this .dic file to Word (2003 or 2007), we just follow these instructions from Microsoft:

1. Start Word.
2. In Microsoft Office Word 2003 and in earlier versions of Word, click Options on the Tools menu.

   In Microsoft Office Word 2007, click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click Word Options.

3. In Word 2003 and in earlier versions of Word, click Custom Dictionaries on the Spelling & Grammar tab.

   In Word 2007, click Proofing, and then click Custom Dictionaries under When correcting spelling in Microsoft Office programs.

4. Click New to create a new custom dictionary.
5. In the File name box, type a name for the
   new custom dictionary, and then click Save.

   The custom dictionary is added to the Dictionary list.

6. In the Custom Dictionaries dialog box, click OK, and then click OK in the Options dialog box.

That’s it. You have medical term spell-checking in Word 2003 or Word 2007.

PLEASE NOTE: I would not hesitate to recommend this solution to my hospital’s CIO and could demonstrate to him why there is absolutely no security risk in adding this .dic file- but I wouldn’t go around setting it up on other employees’ computers without his go-ahead.

Want to go with a bigger word list?

The MTHerald blog has built on the OpenMedSpel list to one that contains almost 100,000 terms. I downloaded and checked it out and will recommend it as a harmless, malware-free .dic file- but as with any file I don’t host myself, I can’t promise that’ll be true tomorrow.

There are a number of other sources for lists of medical terms or abbreviations you can find online and add to your .dic file as suits you.

Know of any other especially good sources? Please advise in the comments.

A similarly interesting discussion of this post is taking place on FriendFeed.

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Have you checked out our book yet?

(Is anyone else completely done with the “There’s an app for that” meme?)

Novartis, for example, signed a $24 million (£15.3 million) deal last month with US-based Proteus Biomedical to create “smart pills” that can transmit data from inside the body to monitor patients’ vital signs and check they have taken medicines as prescribed.

Bayer is connecting its glucometer for diabetic children to Nintendo’s video-gaming consoles to promote consistent blood sugar testing.

And Johnson & Johnson’s Lifescan unit has an iPhone application that lets users upload readings from their connected blood glucose monitors to their Apple phone.

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[This space for rent] Want to reach about 3,500 RSS subscribers to this feed? Please get in touch.

I did NOT mean to post the same video with the same post title a day after Nikki did.

[/EDIT]

Ever have a hard time explaining the placebo effect? Let Dr. Ben Goldacre do it for you in this video from the NHS:

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I still think it is a huge waste of resources for a library to invest any time or money in a Second Life presence.

http://eai.nlm.nih.gov/

The Emergency Access Initiative (EAI) is a partnership of the National Library of Medicine, the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, and the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers. EAI provides free access to full text articles from major biomedicine titles to healthcare professionals, librarians, and the public in the United States affected by disasters.

Of course, I won’t be using this because I’m not doing anything related to the disaster in Haiti- but the NLM deserves all kinds of attention and praise for doing this, as do contributing publishers:

American Academy of Pediatrics, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American College of Physicians, American Society of Health-Systems Pharmacists, ASM Press, B.C. Decker, BMJ, Elsevier, FA Davis, Mary Ann Liebert, Massachusetts Medical Society, McGraw-Hill, Merck Publishing, Oxford University Press, People’s Medical Publishing House, Springer, University of Chicago Press, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer.

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Twitter and similar tools have no innate value. The value is in the network you use the tool to connect with.

Are there other government agencies (related to health and/or healthcare) with social media projects I haven’t noticed yet? Please let me know in the comments?

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Know of something I should blog about? Please let me know!

If you prefer, you can leave me a voicemail here: (315) 876-9574

Centers for Disease Control
CDC Social Media Tools Guidelines & Best Practices

Front page for social media at the CDC:
http://www.cdc.gov/socialmedia/

Health and Human Services
The HHS Center for New Media, Standards and Policies

Front page for HHS Center for New Media:
http://www.newmedia.hhs.gov/

Brief “interview” from AdAge with Andrew P. Wilson, web manager for HHS:
http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=134332

Excerpt:

Pblackshaw: So Andrew, does the Health and Human Services Department really have a social-media team?

AndrewPWilson: Yes. See http://tinyurl.com/accz97. The social-media outreach effort is being directed by the department’s new Social Media Center.

Pblackshaw: What does that mean — Social Media Center? Just you? A full team? A body of activity?

AndrewPWilson: People in the department have been working with social media for some time, e.g., http://tinyurl.com/bsrtt8 (and others). Now we’re starting broader initiatives.

Pblackshaw: But just you? What’s your role?

AndrewPWilson: It’s still evolving but much more than just me. To start, developing resources and expertise in the dept to help HHS understand and use new tools.

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You can follow me on Friendfeed or Twitter if you want to- but be aware there’s lots of stuff there that may not be related to libraries or health information.