Among the many needs voiced in the PHT Membership Survey was needing to know from an educational perspective – topics like best practices, benchmarking, ROI, marketing and technologies. These ideas are being incorporated in multiple ways – news & updates on the blog, Annual and Spring meeting planning, as well as in setting up learning events during the year.
Starting with the November issue of CapLits, we will also highlight at least one article addressing librarianship that you might not be aware of – articles which can help either strategically or tactically. These are intended to be not only instructive, but conversational – articles will also be posted here on the PHT blog in order to act as a forum for asking questions and sharing thoughts!
All members are encouraged to submit articles for discussion – suggestions should go to the Professional Development Chair, Praveena Raman (Praveena.raman@elan.com).
For this month, here are the articles for discussion:
- Cost-Effectiveness and Cost-Benefit Determinations in Special Libraries – White, HS. Special Libraries 70 (April 1979): 163-69. http://www.sla.org/speciallibraries/ISSN00386723V70N4.PDF#page=23
- The Funding of Corporate Libraries: Old Myths and New Problems – White HS. Special Libraries 78:3 (Summer 1987): 155-61. http://www.sla.org/speciallibraries/ISSN00386723V78N3.PDF#page=29
This came across my desk today from a vendor. It is most directly relevant to those of us in the device world, but it also begs the question more broadly – are we seen internally in our companies as the experts in search?
If so, then at the very least #0-6 below should be recognized as “our domain” – otherwise we risk ceding the expertise to others and losing that credibility. Moreover, if we’re doing these items, not only are we reinforcing value and saving institutional money, but also building opportunities to show additional value in creating knowledge.
Dear Colleague,
March 2010 is rapidly approaching. Every medical device you sell in Europe will need a new or updated Clinical Evaluation Report on file with your Notified Body by that time.
These are not minor documents to write. Together with your writer you’ll need to do the following tasks:
[0] Identify purpose (hypothesis) of evaluation,
[1] Identify keywords,
[2] Identify data filters and cut-offs,
[3] Build Boolean search strings,
[4] Have access to and search Embase, Medline, Cochrane Library, and other databases,
[5] Identify articles to acquire,
[6] Acquire the full-text articles,
[7] Read and weight each article for relevance and data integrity,
[8] Exclude redundant or unusable articles,
[9] Analyze remaining articles,
[10] Write the report.
…
Our team of experts can train you, teach you the depth and breadth that is expected in these reports, or write the reports for you.
The proposed new SLA name: Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals, or ASKPro.
(10/21/09 – SLA has decided not to use the abbreviation; it will not be part of the vote)
What do you think? Please use this post for PHT comments.
Links on the name change (updated 11/17):
- SLA Name Change Information Center
- Reactions on twitter to the new name
- Mary Ellen Bates on the Name Change – post 1 post 2
- iBraryGuy is no on ASKPro
- SLA President-Elect, Cindy Romaine: “No Puny Visions”
- Discussion on the SLA Blog (new with various final thoughts)
- Reaction from a vendor (yes; SydneyPlus)
- An academic view
- Guy St. Clair (SMR International)
- Naming Research Information (how the name was tested)
- ASKPro – Why I like it (Marcy Phelps)
- SLA Name Change: First Impressions
- Point-Counterpoint from the U. of Calgary
- Still Undecided Member’s Considerations
- Thoughts on Name Changes for Associations
- An Open Letter on the Name Change from a German SLA member
- Facebook fan page for Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals
- Index of SLA Member Opinions
On Tuesday October 27, Pubmed transitioned completely to the redesigned interface. The previous version is no longer available. As such, NLM has posted a bulletin with updated training information and changes.
PubMed Now Using the Redesigned Interface
For anyone with links to PubMed, they should not need to be changed.
Executive Board Meeting Minutes have been posted from the October 23 teleconference (SLA membership required):
http://units.sla.org/division/dpht/MembersOnly/bdmeeting-20091016.cfm
Yesterday, CNET reported on a startup which is coming out of stealth and launching publicly, tracked.com. Here is their claim as far as its value:
Tracked.com, of course, provides extensive information on ticker-based companies, including company financials, much like Google and Yahoo Finance do, but it’s not just a stock service. Its strong point is that it also tracks privately held companies, gathering any available information on them. For all of these companies, Tracked shows a wealth of information and news as well as the people associated with the company, complete with fleshed out profiles on them as well.
Having tested the site out a bit this morning, I can’t say that I would use it over for-fee services; the private companies I tested it against didn’t show much valuable information. Still, it is a free alternative, and since it’s still in start-up, there is likely a lot more development to come, so it’s worth keeping an eye on.
For those in the medical device industry, those looking at devices, and/or others just curious, Cambridge University Press recently published a new book, Biodesign – The Process of Innovating Medical Technologies.
Designed as a text for engineering students in a capstone course, it gives an detailed look at the process of innovating medical devices from beginning to end, along with a glossary of industry terms and a list of resources. As one who has held various roles throughout the medical device industry (R&D, business development, S&M and now information professional), it’s a very good primer / reference text. (742 pages)
My only quibble is that, as an information professional / librarian, we play vital roles in everything from needs identification through funding, business strategy & integration, and that’s not called out as clearly as I think it could be. Nevertheless, I would still recommend it for anyone interested in the industry and/or its information needs, or wanting to know more about the innovation process.
One of the current holes in the major search engines is that there is no “real time” search – that is, items which change rapidly are not indexed on the fly, but spidered as the server has time to reach out to the page. (lag is variable)
Items which won’t get captured include Tweets and Facebook status updates. (There are other engines right now which do “real time” search, but to date it hasn’t been integrated with the major search engines)
The news of the day is that Microsoft has reached an agreement to index Twitter updates - and word is that they have an agreement in place with Facebook as well.
Google followed with their own announcement including Twitter.
STM recently published The STM Report: An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing, providing an overview of trends in scholarly STM publication, including information on open access journal adoption and different access models. This is a followup to an earlier 2006 paper.
