tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339063212011-04-21T16:58:59.289-07:00InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.comBlogger241100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1163189543169798402006-11-10T12:05:00.000-08:002006-11-10T12:12:23.340-08:00

One of my goals in blogging about my experiences on the reference desk at Woodward was to use the blog as a way of reflecting on my experiences and revisiting interesting and/or challenging questions to get as much benefit as possible from my experience. Another course I am taking uses the content-performance matrix (pictured below) to distinguish among the five levels of content and two levels

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1163096538062175152006-11-09T10:17:00.000-08:002006-11-09T10:22:18.333-08:00

Some of more interesting questions at Woodward come from students who are writing essays for mandatory English courses. Often these are referrals from Koerner because they are to do with medical topics. The focus is generally non-technical, as they're writing for a general audience, although they need to use articles from refereed journals. Recently, I had a student looking for articles on the

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1162520189629181282006-11-02T18:12:00.000-08:002006-11-02T18:16:29.636-08:00

I had one of those teeth-grinding encounters with the online catalogue today. A patron came and asked if we have the Journal of the Entomological Society of British Columbia. I typed the title in from the abbreviation she gave me, but got no hits (not an uncommon occurrence). I went to Google and found the home page of the Entomological Society of British Columbia, copied the journal title and

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1162430700821941592006-11-01T17:24:00.000-08:002006-11-01T17:26:48.073-08:00

I had a young woman ask for information on the antibacterial resistance of organic substances, specifically against e-coli and staphylococcus. When I asked from which discipline she was approaching the question, she said she was a high school student working on a science project comparing the antibacterial effect of garlic oil, tea tree oil, and olive oil.I didn’t feel I did a particularly good

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1162337330315258042006-10-31T14:53:00.000-08:002006-10-31T15:28:50.516-08:00

I had a patron come by today and suggest that Woodward purchase Primary Care: Balancing Health Needs, Services, and Technology by Barbara Starfield. The patron said she is a heavily published author and seemed disappointed that we had only two copies of her book. I was tempted to quiz her and find out what her academic background was and why she was recommending it, but as I don’t have any say in

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1162066177390336822006-10-28T13:04:00.000-07:002006-10-28T13:12:13.450-07:00

While on the reference desk the other day, I had a phone call from someone who identified himself as a professor in the psychiatry department. He was looking for information on a patient with Cluster B diagnosis, something he had never heard of. He recommended I look in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, also known as, DSM-IV-TR. I took his phone number (he didn’t have an

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1161571377593162482006-10-22T19:41:00.000-07:002006-10-22T19:42:57.603-07:00

I had one of those moments where I say to myself “boy are you ever dumb” (referring to myself, not a patron) today. Saturday I was working on the reference desk and got a phone call from a student who was having trouble accessing the full text on EBM Reviews. He was clicking on the UBC E-link button and not getting anything. I tried it and encountered the same difficulty, but came up with what I

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1161363290885037712006-10-20T09:45:00.000-07:002006-10-20T09:54:50.896-07:00

In LIBR 534 we often consider the information gathering practices of various groups of medical professionals. However, I’d like to reflect on the information gathering practices of librarians. This is a theme I’ve considered before, but it was brought to mind again this week by a posting on a listserve to which I subscribe asking for information on lighting recommendations for a library under

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1161143519192524622006-10-17T20:51:00.000-07:002006-10-17T21:24:36.206-07:00

I had a researcher come to the desk on Saturday asking about the accuracy of the indexes which record the number of articles an author has written. He was thinking about himself, of course. He has 14 publications that show up when you do an author search on PubMed (and apparently this is accurate). However, when we went into Web of Science and did an author search, only 12 of them showed up. He

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1160972460309115232006-10-15T21:18:00.000-07:002006-10-15T21:21:00.316-07:00

This term I’ve had what seems to be a larger than usual number of complaints about the changes to the library OPAC. Perhaps it’s because it’s still near the beginning of the year and people are still figuring it out, or perhaps it’s because I’m working weekends and evenings when the reference desk takes the place of IT support. A new layer has been added to the catalogue that, regardless of what

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1160680832305557532006-10-12T12:16:00.000-07:002006-10-12T14:37:31.176-07:00

On a non-medical theme, it was "Raise a Reader" week a couple of weeks ago. My son who loves reading and gymnastics has managed to combine the two.

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1160680186605045382006-10-12T12:08:00.000-07:002006-10-12T12:15:59.306-07:00

Continuing on the theme of library organization, I had a person stop by and ask me, “The dentistry section is on the second floor, right?”I had to stop him and ask for more information because I wasn’t sure what floor the dentistry books are on and even if I did know, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t find what he wanted by browsing.He said he was looking for books on “tooth eruption”, specifically

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1160425075248088882006-10-09T13:16:00.000-07:002006-10-12T19:54:40.756-07:00

One part of reference I find interesting is the perception of patrons about how we have (or should have) our library resources organized. I had an elderly man come and start berating me one day because we’d moved a section of books he liked to browse to another part of the library and he couldn’t find them. I tried to discover what books he was looking for and explain how we organized the library

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1160150553797965002006-10-06T08:58:00.000-07:002006-10-06T09:03:19.696-07:00

I had a student come to the ref desk looking for a 1969 article in a journal called Bio Med. Using Jake, we found several journals with what appeared to be the correct name, but couldn’t get the date to match up with the volume and issue numbers on any of them. I searched for it on PubMed and a reference to an article in a journal called Igaku to Seibutsugaku showed up (which interestingly is

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1159839687915235732006-10-02T18:40:00.000-07:002006-10-02T18:41:27.926-07:00

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1159833376031350192006-10-02T16:55:00.000-07:002006-10-02T16:57:30.303-07:00

I had a college anatomy student come to the desk asking for information on breast cancer. I asked her if she could give me some more specific search terms that I could use to limit the search. She struggled a bit, so I asked her if she was interested in review articles that would give her an overview of the research in an area of breast cancer, but no she wanted specific studies.This should be

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1159501482227479702006-09-28T20:43:00.000-07:002006-09-28T20:53:56.756-07:00

I had a call from a researcher who wanted to know the first names of the two doctors after whom Mueller-Weiss Syndrome was named. He had googled the surnames, but couldn’t find any information on their given names. Had this happened after Tuesday’s class, I would have immediately gone to the Dictionary of Medical Eponyms - B.G. Firkin and J.A. Whitworth - W13.F57 1996 and found my answer there.

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1159304938546953612006-09-26T13:58:00.000-07:002006-09-27T06:29:31.586-07:00

The pharmacy student I'd helped a couple of weeks ago was back again with another challenging question. This time he had an elderly patient with atrial fibrillation and was looking for information on stroke prevention. Specifically, he was looking for trials of Clopidogrel where it was not used in conjunction with the anticoagulants aspirin or warfarin (a drug that’s also used as a rat poison –

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1158715599534664662006-09-19T18:23:00.000-07:002006-09-21T14:44:37.926-07:00

Everyone is posting cool pictures on their blogs, so I thought I'd go way back to 1983 and show a photo of a rural health clinic in Zambia. Mothers brought their under-5 children to have them weighed and innoculated. Children who were underweight were given a special high-protein supplement in an attempt to battle kwashiorkor. Traditionally, once mothers become pregnant they wean their children.

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1158682884212416822006-09-19T09:19:00.000-07:002006-09-19T09:52:17.856-07:00

In his UBC Google Scholar Blog, Dean raised the issue of the pedagogy of blogs to which I replied briefly. I’d like to come back to some educational theory that could be used to support the use of blogs. Earlier models of education often saw it as a transfer of information from the teacher/expert to the student/novices. This view still holds in some parts of the world, but in North America it has

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1158346824972808362006-09-15T11:14:00.000-07:002006-09-16T16:09:45.153-07:00

I’m not sure if this falls into the category of medical librarianship, but I had a student asking about any research that has been done on marijuana as a performance-enhancing drug in sports. I couldn’t find any studies like this on SPORT Discus, leaving me to suspect that marijuana is not performance enhancing, and that if it is, most of the research has been privately funded and done behind

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1158091764602354702006-09-12T13:08:00.000-07:002006-09-16T16:10:13.876-07:00

I had a pharmacy student come in and say he was looking for information on hyperparathyroidism (for those who were asking about the spelling of specialized terms, I had a go at spelling it on paper and then showed it to him to confirm that I’d got it right. I like to write down key terms as the patron describes what he/she is looking for. That way I don’t have to keep a lot of unfamiliar terms in

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1157943079399681022006-09-10T19:49:00.000-07:002006-09-16T16:10:36.556-07:00

Reference Question Saturday September 9, 2006I had a forensics student come and ask for information on decapitation (a nice little pick-me-up on a quiet day at the reference desk!).At first it was unclear through what discipline she was approaching the topic. She mentioned initially that she was looking for information on a legal case about decapitation, but when I started to show her the legal

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33906321.post-1157661614346250152006-09-07T13:39:00.000-07:002006-09-16T16:12:21.496-07:00

PubMed Junkie Blog PurposeTo anyone who has stumbled across this blog on the open Web, it is part of the requirements for the class LIBR 534 Health Information Sources and Services. If you are looking for specific information on PubMed, you’ll probably do better looking elsewhere.My aim in writing this blog is to describe some of the more challenging and/or interesting questions I encounter while

InfoLit Librarianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16050914048989469330noreply@blogger.com1