More SLA: SharePoint and Social Networking

I attended a session on SharePoint which featured speakers who were working at o with Microsoft to develop the product. The session had a "what's next" and "how does this all fit together" feel to it.

"With enhanced awareness, you get enhanced productivity, increased agility, and increased innovation." ~ Lawrence Liu's theory

The vision for SharePoint, according to Lawrence Liu, is to create the best place to use applications to support information management and use. The three main uses for SharePoint he cited include information sharing, content management, and business productivity. Through SharePoint, applications, back end services, use and delivery can happen through one system. So what's the big deal? The most important things that should be addressed in configuring a business information sharing system are:

1. Awareness (not a surprise!). Not just what, but who. Awareness can also be noise, though.


2. The best awareness is contextual, reducing noise and giving the rightest, strongest signal.

1. The system needs to be integrated.


2. The system needs to work seamlessly, slowing the creation of silos as much as possible.

So where does social computing come in? According to Liu, there are three waves of social computing, each with a different focus and purpose.

1st wave: Communicate (email, calendar, discussion forum)
Focus: Client centric/activity focused Purpose: Build awareness

2nd wave: Share (online workspace, web conferencing, personal sites, portals, IM)
Focus: Server centric, content focused Purpose: Enhance awareness

3rd wave: Content (blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging, personal profiles, people and expertise search
Focus: Service Centric, user focused Purpose: Provides context

What's coming? Liu showed off TownSquare, a feed that brings together actions and changes by "friends." This is a cross between FriendFeed and Facebook. Microsoft SharePoint currently lacks some of the social features that Facebook is known for. TownSquare may meet the social computing needs of some enterprise portals.

TownSquare, a prototype enterprise news feed developed by Microsoft Office Labs,
allows users to receive news about managers, friends and colleagues all in one place.

* * * * *

Pam Green from the Microsoft Library shared her experience of working with the SP development team and librarians to use the technology to meet the information needs of customers. The MS Library is using the SharePoint now to push out RSS feeds for favorite searches to customers and to let customers subscribe to existing prefab library feeds.

A collaborative co-branded project, the library portal pushes out news from the library to the Intranet, library pages, and other non-specific RSS feeds. Library content editors modify content and publish once to many sites. The library just launched a rating feature for library books and resources. (Very cool.) The library site provides value by narrowing down the mountain of choices that users have when they, virtually, to the library. Users want to know what they don't know, says Green. "Help me know what I should do next." is the word from researchers.

What might come next for the library could be in the form of more contextual resources, more feedback and collaboration, mobile features, and more expertise sharing. At the beginning of the presentation, Pam showed portal views from ten, eight, and just a couple of years ago. What a difference compared to the MS Library presence now! I'm excite to see what's next. Kudos to librarians for brining information to the people.

Pam also cited Social Software in Libraries, a book by Meredith Farkus.

* * * * *

Brian Kellner showed off Newsgator, an enterprise server add-on for SharePoint to supplement SharePoint mySites. Newsgator encourages users to connect by providing recommendations and nearness views via a personal social network tool. Content becomes more discoverable and ultimately people can enjoy better content experiences. For an enterprise (particularly for a large one), the connections between colleague can help individuals mine knowledge and ascertain relationships between others and involvement in projects.

SLA Conference in Seattle

I attended my first SLA conference this past spring and found it to be overwhelming, exciting, and invigorating. My main goals were four:

1. Meet more special librarians in the Seattle area. Check.
2. Find "my people": the special librarians in biomedical and life sciences. Check.
3. Join some committees so that I could branch out across the profession. Check.
4. Dig in and learn some strategies for dealing with knowledge and information in corporations. Check.

I had my laptop on hand for a couple of sessions and took some notes for two sessions. My non-session time was spent at roundtables and staffing the SLA Pacific Northwesrt chapter Hospitality Booth with several other awesome chapter volunteers. I also had lunch with the Biomedical and Life Sciences Division group, where Dr. Jim Brinkley from the University of Washington spoke about journals of the near future -- journals 3.0-- and shifts toward greater integration, expoloration, and visualization of data.

* * * * *

Here are some session notes from Cyberinfrastructure: Informatics Across the Biological Sciences. Scientists across a wide range of fields need to manage large quantities of data. This program explored some of the projects and issues involved in informatics/bioinformatics researchand what librarians can offer. It also offered some ideas for new career paths for "traditional librarians" who are transitioning to biosciences research environments.

Catherine Norton, Director of Marine Biological Laboratory Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution spoke to us about taxonomic structures, data mining across sources, and brining taconomic references together under one Web-based umbrella called the Encyclopedia of Life. Informaticians, information specialists, scientists, and librarians come together to create content and organize existing content about all of the species in the world. There are links to full text, common names, and tons and tons of human-mediated content. Woods Hole brings publications to users by mining what's been published in the Woods Hole zip code. The Biodiversity Heritage Library uses a mashup search and browse via Google maps. Catherine game thanks to the whole world who has contributed content and knowledge over centuries. Here's one example of what you can find in the EOL.

YELLOWBACK SEABREAM
Dentex tumifrons

* * * * *

Dr. William Michener from University of New Mexico delivered a talk called . His groups is working on system to allow ecologists to generate complex analytical soluitions and reuse solutions on different sets of data. Metacat, one system he discussed, really took off on in about 2005 for LTER.

Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network is a collaborative effort involving scientists and students investigating ecological processes over long temporal and broad spatial scales. LTER uses data to put value added databases back into the community through some databanks like Vegbank, sponsored by the Ecological Society of America. He also shows some really eye-catching school-age friendly (and accessible) resources online. Ecological research isn't just about ecology, ut is about population science, earth science, sociology, and culture. Three points he made concerning the future of information in this field:
1. Facilitate the long-term access to preserved biological, socio-ecological, and earth observation data.
2. Agile, evolutionary CI development..focus on CI that enables the science. Develop end-to-end solutions, easily integrate those data despite heterogeneity, support vosualization and sharing. Look across sources, systems, observations, and results to facilitate visualization.
3. Develop sustainable cyberinstfrastructure enterprises to support continued, complex research. Support the data life cycle.

Project BudBurst is an interactive site that permits people
around the world -- nonscientists-- to track observation sites and
plants throughout the year and contribute to climate variattion.

Related resources for more reading:
Gold, Anna "Cyberinfrastructure, Data, and Libraries, Part 1: A Cyberinfrastructure Primer for Librarians." D-Lib Magazine 13(9) September/October 2007 <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september07/gold/09gold-pt1.html>

* * * * *

Dr. Quentin Wheeler, Vice President and Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Director International Institute for Species Exploration Primary spoke about biodiversity exploration. The reason that we need to explore biodiversity rapidly, Wheeler says, is to establish baseline information. The world is changing rapidly. We can't set or attain goals if don't know the benchmarks. Datasets are distributed over hundreds of millions of years for any species. It is time consuming to find fragments, add up data, make assessments. "We need to focus on the 90% of species that we have zero representation of."

Taxonomy has its own questions, some of the biggest question in biology. Wheeler asks, What is a species? What is the history that explains the origin and diversity of species? Why has the funding and research focused on undermine taxonomy? Wheeler asserts that there are problems with the way we're doing things, particularly in two areas. For one, he says, the information we're generating through short molecular phylogeny is simply branching diagrams by which other scientist can place their research. The other effort that is flawed is supporting databases of bad data rater than robust good data. I agree with Wheeler's statement that the scale of taxonomy puts people off. Taxonomy involves a world of items and participants over a significant period of time.

Dr. Wheeler is credited with naming a new species of beetles after Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. In an interesting twist of PR for science, news reporter wanted to know who named the species, how taxonomy worked, and ...surprisingly were not interested in politics. Wheeler also named a beetle after Roy Orbison. One awesome taxonomy outreach effort can be seen on YouTube in a production called Planet Bob.

* * * * *

Neil Rambo, ARL Visiting Program Officer at the University of Washington Libraries spoke on the library supporting role in bioscience research. What do scientists do and how do they use information? What can librarians do to support research? Librarians need to continue to evolve in order to provide support to their clients. Libraries, too, need to anticipate and plan for changes in research culture and client perception of libraries. University of Washington Libraries and ARL have undertaken several studies to chart the future of library services in biosciences. Here are some snapshots of research opinions and expectations, as shared by Mr. Rambo:

• Researchers want more and older stuff online
• There are too many libraries and getting stuff from them is confusing.
• Web search engines are the preferred starting point.
• There is no general identification that the library might have a role other than providing a link to e-journals.

Some of the biggest challenges for researchers are

• Keeping current and integrating resources
• Knowing about appropriate digital collections
  
• Learning new collaborative tools and integrating tools into their current work.
  

This may not be a direct quote, but the idea was prominent in Mr. Rambo's talk: researchers think that libraries are places to go when you know what you want, not when you are interested in discovering new stuff. What does it mean? Based on the recent research...print has been declared dead. Really dead. Books and journals are just part of the bio research informationscape. Virtual space ownership sentiments are shifting.

What, then, can be the new roles of libraries?

• Data management, preservation and curation of scientific research
• Support new genres of communication and publication
• Support work of virtual organizations.

What do life scientists think core librarian roles will be in five years?

• Custodian of resources
  
• Manage institutional repositories
• Administrator of technical services
• Teach information skislls
• Manage datasets
• Technology specialist

Related resources:
Wilson, Betsy. Bioscience Research and Researchers at the University of Washington: Need and Implications.

Rambo, Neil. Agenda for Developing E-Science in Research Libraries: ARL Joint Task Force on Library Support for E-Science Final Report & Recommendations, Nov. 2007

Report from WMLA Meeting

The WMLA Annual Meeting was held on a snowy day at Bastyr University. I missed two CE courses, but enjoyed the day-long general meeting, held on March 28, 2008. The meeting presentations included the following:

• NN/LM PNR Report
• Will Stuivenga, Washington State Library: A Statewide Catalog for Washington
• Valerie Lawrence, MLS, AHIP: Washington Senate Bill 5930: Heal What? Heal Who?
• Fran Clark: Highline Community College Library Program
• David Masuda, M.D.: Clinical Informatics: The Genie in a Bottle
• Joe Janes, Ph.D: What to Think About When we Think About Reference

NN/LM PNR Report

I learned more about the NN/LM PNR and current outreach projects. The web technologies coordinator, Alison, was there and mentioned her upcoming RML Rendezvous on collaborative technologies, Working Together Apart. Others from the NN/LM PNR shared news of the network and how it was supporting health sciences libraries and health sciences information in the region.

Will Stuivenga, Washington State Library: A Statewide Catalog for Washington

Will Stuivenga presented some really useful information about WebJunction and State Library developments. Web Junction offers free library and computer courses and anyone can join. WayFinder is the new Washington State Library-led portal for bringing together OCLC records from libraries across the state. The Pacific Northwest FirstSearch group is forging ahead with shared WorldCat, bringing the OCLC technologies and resources up from the technical services trenches to web searchers everywhere who might intersect with WA libraries.

While much of Will’s talk didn’t apply to SBRI at this time, I did connect with him during lunch to learn of some substantial offerings for non-profit organizations in WA. He also pointed me toward a consortium representative who offered to help me figure out some best ways to approach journal subscriptions. Will gets two thumbs up for being a great library ambassador!

After talking with Will over lunch and learning more about e-resources that might be available to the Institute, I followed up with several visits to the Washington State library Web site. Aside from the databases, I learned more about some initiatives and revisited Web Junction to sign up for some training.

Valerie Lawrence, MLS, AHIP: Washington Senate Bill 5930: Heal What? Heal Who?

HEAL-WA is a Washington State bill was recently passed that allows University of Washington Librarians to coordinate the provision of selected evidence-based electronic resources to specified licensed healthcare professionals in Washington,. The tagline for the bill itself is"Providing high quality, affordable health care to Washingtonians based on the recommendations of the blue ribbon commission on health care costs and access."

What does this mean for librarians? It could bring some change--like reduce the scramble for interlibrary loan items or delay the urgency in purchasing resources. It will help to support the evidence-based information needs of practitioners. There will potentially be more users using new resources; these users may need guidance. For some, this may be an opportunity to evaluate library holdings. If there are new limitations on access to the resource, these may need to be mitigated by library resources. For example, will access to journal back issues of [Journal name] be available? With more access to high quality information, some people will question of the need for librarians. Yet, as with other grand openings to widely accessible material, one size does not fit all. Finally, the librarians who are coordinating this effort should be encouraged and congratulated for taking on a huge amount of work.

Fran Clark: Highline Community College Library Program

Fran told us about the Library & Information Services Program Information at Highline. There are some neat offerings for continuing ed. Hats off to the group for being practitioners and teachers.

David Masuda, M.D.: Clinical Informatics: The Genie in a Bottle

Dr. Masuda, an inquisitive researcher/clinician, brought us some questions. What is clinical informatics, how is it being used, and what can it do for the state of health care? Clinical informatics is information, computerized, on both the provider and consumer sides of health care.

1. Patient-specific
2. Relied on a medical knowledge base
3. Included in social influences
4. Provided logistical information
5. Showed population information

Dr. Masuda discussed efficiencies, the flow of information, and his need as a clinician to have access to information from multiple data sources. He shared some thoughts about the challenge to make sense of a variety of records from many sources, intended for different uses. Instead of getting bogged down in the clinic, he got active in informatics and helped bring about change in his own institution.

Joe Janes, Ph.D.: What to think about when we Think about Reference

Joe Janes, librarian, blogger, educator, thinker, and comic, shared some tips for being an effective librarian. His talk was more of a performance with its timing and humor. Dr. Janes is the kind of speaker who starts us down a road, diverges, hits a few hard points, then brings us back around to see the big picture. I experienced several “Oh, of course!” moments throughout his talk. Some quotes:

"Take all the stuff people have created and share it back with people."
"What is a library? A library is “stuff, help, place, values, and interaction."
"What does it take to stay in business? You (well, the library) must be effective, interesting, compelling, and attractive."
"We need to offer very good service in person and excellent service online."
"We are now in charge of the human record."

So HOW can librarians do an be all these things? Blog in our communities. Find a blogger, see what they want, and help them find out more. Follow the interests and topics of concern in your neighborhoods. Participate in what your user community participates in.

Make things easier—especially the things that are important to people. The average web search takes 11 minutes. People are repeatedly failing at something that is very important to them. The key is to focus on the “something that is important to them.” Janes stressed that this is often the tipping point when it comes to medical librarians and/or reliable resources: when people absolutely want an authoritative source, they are seeking an answer to something that is really important. The facts and the sources are crucial.

Searching for information in times of need can become teachable moments. When people find junk information online via Google or its avatars, libraries may not be able to do much about it, explained Janes. However, if librarians and libraries can become part of people’s thinking such that people can think of interactions, You Tube videos, and other media, separating good from bad, then librarians are doing the best they can.

Raising information literacy is something that resonates with me, whether we consider the health, geopolitical, lifestyle, or community-developed news. Discerning quality information from low-quality information will continue to be a focus of education, learning, and socialization in our increasingly information-overloaded society,

Dr. Janes also shared a wonderful story about overdue monkey teeth. If he ever speaks for your group, ask him to tell it.

MLA Chicago '08

The highlights from my trip to Chicago for MLA:

I met with three other librarians at the Chapter Council Sharing Roundtables (I was a recorded at table 27," Strategies for Threatened Librarians"). We discussed ways to make yourself (librarians) visible and valued in organizations and what the profession is doing to support that venture. Our facilitator, a NNLM librarian, was passionate about teaching librarians the skills they needed to be their own advocates and keep the profession moving forward.

Many sessions seemed to have themes of Web 2.0, which was appropriate given the them of Only Connect! and the increasingly connectifying pre-conference blogs, wikis, and Twitter posts. I was happy to meet a colleague from New York who was very interested in Second Life. She helped prep me for a Second Life-oriented talk where the University of Michigan showed off some of their offerings on Wolverine Island. I never knew that SL had such a strong following in the education realm. I was also excited to hear of one video available that shows off science learning opportunities in Second Life.


In The Role of Health Sciences Librarians in Applying Web 2.0 Technologies and Their Uses in Clinical and Public Health Practice and Instruction, speakers shared successes implementing social bookmarks, wikis, podcasts, blogs, folksonomies, social search engines, mashups, and instant messaging in their organizations. One hospital used a SharePoint-based wiki for collecting information from many contributors across an organization in a secure environment.

While at MLA I participated in the mentoring program and was paired up with a very gracious and insightful Julie Esparza, a librarian at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Medical Library. She helped get me oriented to the conference and provided some tips about where I might meet with kinds of people I wanted to talk with, and which sessions might really tickle my brain. Our breakfast meeting was in a big group setting, so we didn't get to talk much. We did get to visit more later on at dinner later that night (along with a colleague of hers) and on the way to the Bearded Pigs show.

I sat in on the National Library of Medicine update (given by Dr. Donald A.B. Lindberg, Sheldon Kotzin and Diane Boehr). There I heard about the new Disaster Information Management Research Center, created to to help prepare, respond to, recover from, and mitigate the adverse health effects of disasters in conjunction with Federal, State, and local governments, private organizations, and local communities. This new center will meet many needs. Why is a new center needed? Beyond Homeland Security and local health organizations, there is little coordinated effort to consistently and effectively answer questions what will come up during a disaster. For example, what is the appropriate treatment for exposure to radiation? Many physicians have a "beginner" level of knowledge about handling radiation exposure because it so rarely comes up in their practice. Everything from weapons to treatments, pandemics and hazards will be addressed via the center.

In addition to the above, I participated “Connecting the Dots,” a two-part, hands-on session sponsored by the Leadership and Management Section. In part one, attendees participated in roundtables on professional development and job-searching skills and techniques. Part two was a speed mentoring session, in which mentees spent ten minute meetings with three library administrators (directors, in my case) to review resumes and discuss professional development opportunities. I found both parts of the session to be extremely useful. I was grateful to have had the opportunity to ask candid questions of experts who were game to share a information of a designated scope and within a predetermined block of time. My table had some rapid exchanges!

I'm looking forward to MLA 2009.

Welcome to the Lab Librarian blog

Through the award of a Learning Partnership fellowship from The Grace and Harold Sewell Memorial Fund, Inc., I am the new informatics librarian at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute (SBRI). The goal of the fund is to increase librarians’ identification with medical and health care professionals. The Fund was created on the following premise: "Librarians experienced in managing knowledge and teaching informatics can supply quality information by becoming ongoing members of the health care team. Immersion in the health care environment is necessary for librarians to understand how health care professionals solve problems individually and through consensus."

To this end, I have become a part of the IT department at SBRI, where I can begin to support informatics core initiatives and provide tools to harness institutional knowledge and extend collaboration and communication. Some of my projects for the upcoming year include:

• Create an information portal of the most useful scientific reference resources for scientists,
• Support citation management and exchange of publication information,
• Refine digital desktop strategies and records management (advise on strategies to deal with volume and complexity of information, including publications, e-mail, newsletter, conferences and symposia), and
• Recommend best usage practices for collaborative tools to foster scientific interchange.

The challenges at SBRI are common to other science and non-science settings: information is available in multiple formats, in multiple sources, and yet needs to be accessed by the right people at the right time. Reducing complications in the process of managing information will enable scientists to pursue biomedical research and discovery in a more systematic and efficient way.

I am extremely grateful to the Sewell Fund for inviting me to serve as the Fellow in a Learning Partnership with SBRI this year! If you are a post-MLS librarian out there with interest in health sciences, consider applying for a Learning Partnership with the Sewell Fund next year.

Report from PHI '07

A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference in Seattle, the first annual PHI2007: Creating a Global Partnership in Public Health Informatics. Speakers for all sessions contributed to the emerging dialogue between health informaticists, public health professionals, and public health policy improvement advocates, IT professionals, and academics. Of particular interest to me were conversations about knowledge repositories, Web 2.0 collaboration in public health, low bandwidth alternatives for exchanging information between the US and bandwidth-poor areas.

I learned about a collaborative repository of knowledge for information exchange at the Northwest Institute for Bio-Health Informatics, University of Manchester, courtesy of Dr. Iain Buchanan and one of his colleagues (who I met over lunch, but whose name escapes me). A concise blog entry discusses UM's use of readily available software, Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS 2007), to create an lab and field information exchange portal to capture data in multiple formats and from multiple contributors. It allows multiple users to upload data and reduces errors of aggregating data.

The UM Microsoft case study states, "With the new solution, scientists can consolidate data into a research object—an easily accessible, structured block of data—rather than solely paper notes that can be lost or misinterpreted. Furthermore, it is accessible from anywhere in the world with a browser, meaning this valuable data can be easily shared to support ongoing medical research. "

A conference poster from the UW Center for Public health Informatics showed off features of the beta myPublicHealth, an open-source Plone site which provides role-based resources to public health stakeholders and participants. The project description from myPublicHealth DSpace states: "The goal of myPublicHealth is the design and evaluation of an online system that provides rapid access to public health documents, data sets, guidelines, learning objects and tools that are needed for decision-making by public health professionals. The vision for myPublicHealth is an online environment where any level of public health practitioner can pose questions in "plain English" and receive direct answers to their questions, instead of having to click through numerous links and spend a lot of time searching in order to find an answer."

Such a site will be a valuable addition to the researcher and practitioner toolbox. As vertical search engines and custom-focused search widgets gain popularity, it is essential to stake out space for direction and access to quality resources. This portal underscores the fact that not all desirable or reliable public health information can be efficiently "Googled" and also fortifies the unification of cross-disciplinary tools necessary to accelerate public health research and care.

(Update Dec. 2007)
I came away from the conference with a sense that we are all coming together for the same purpose, but there is still a need for strong direction. One librarian from UNC-Chapel Hill spoke up to remind conference participants that all of their work and coordination and research could be advanced if they would enlist the skills of librarians. This point was not lost on Sherrilynne Fuller, conference organizer and a librarian, but there was not a whole lot of comment from the rest of the audience. Ten librarians attended PHI 2007, according to a post-conference list.

Embedded WorldCat

Create a WorldCat link with embedded search terms »
Link people to WorldCat results for one or more subject, author or title keywords. Also: Link to the WorldCat page for an item by standard number

This is the coolest thing ever--instant and free code to plug in to a library site. A customized version of this could run in the lab for access to UW resources. It also integrates with GoogleBooks and GoogleScholar. "Find this book in a library" is now more intuitive than ever.