January 30, 2007

Need Pics for Powerpoint? Check out Flickr -- History, Art, Pathology, Implants, and Much More

There are a lot of sources for images that you could use in your teaching, presentations, and research. You have probably already tried Google Images, which is one of the very finest image search engines. So, if Google Images is so cool, why do I want to talk about Flickr?

In Google Images, you do a search just like for web pages, by typing in keywords that describe what you want. Google finds images that have that word near the image. Sometimes the image is right on target, sometimes it is really strange. In Google Image searches there is also the question of licensing, how to find out who owns the image, is it copyrighted, and can you get permission to use it. Answering those questions can take a lot of work.

In Flickr, you can search, just like in Google, but that isn't the best feature. What makes Flickr so powerful are three main factors.

First, currency. People tend to be loading new images every day of events right around them. This has made Flickr a popular source of images for low end or local news media.

Second, groups. People with similar interests will add their images to a shared collection. Find the collection or group that matches, and you have a much better chance of finding an image that meets your need. This also puts you in touch with people who are creating the type of images you want and find useful, and you can follow that person's new work, if you wish. Flickr will even let you search for pictures just in a group.

For example, the Dentistry Library and Sindecuse Museum are both adding images to a Flickr group for images on the history and art of dentistry. You can go to that group and search for "GV Black" or "Jonathan Taft" or Michigan or bitemark or ... well, you get the idea. If you search in "dentalhistory" for "Michigan", what you find will be more connected with dentistry in Michigan than if you searched "Michigan" in either all of Flickr or Google.

Flickr: History & Art of Dentistry: http://www.flickr.com/groups/dentalhistory/

Third, licensing. In Flickr, the authors are allowed to define the level of access and licensing they wish attached to their images. As soon as you find an image, you can check to see what is expected and what you can or cannot do with the image. Now, this has its good parts and less good parts. Some people choose to block their images from showing to anyone who does not have a Flickr account. Just remember, that if you want to see everything, you might want to consider joining Flickr -- it's free! If you have a Flickr account, you can send messages to someone to ask permission to use one of their images, even if you don't know their e-mail address, so that is another advantage.

Here are some other dental-themed Flickr groups.

Dental Photography: http://flickr.com/groups/12745983@N00/

Street Dentistry: http://flickr.com/groups/streetdentistry/

Dentistry: http://flickr.com/groups/88473280@N00/

The Dentistry Library is planning to have a class on Flickr in the Bootcamp series, so please stay tuned!

Posted by pfa at 03:02 PM | Comments (0)

January 16, 2007

Recipes for Dental and Other Patients

There are many different ways in which food and cooking is important to dentists and their patients. A patient might have TMJ, problems either chewing or swallowing, sensitive teeth, be wearing braces, avoiding sugar, or have other concerns. There are even recipes for how to make your own toothpaste or mouthwash! Often recipes of interest to patients in one of these groups might be helpful for other patients as well.

The Dentistry Library has a number of cookbooks available for patients in the Consumer Health section of our Reference collection. You can find these books listed in MIRLYN by searching "Cookery" as a subject heading, or the textwords "Recipes" or "Cookbook", and then refine the search to just the Dentistry Library.

In addition to our books, here are a few websites of interest on this topic.


Cathy's EC Cafe (Esophageal Cancer): http://www.eccafe.org/cnt/index.html

Dr. William Trepp, Orthodontic Specialist: Soothing Recipes: http://www.orthodontics.org/recipe.htm

Eating to Win: http://website.lineone.net/~brittan/Food/

TMJ Friends Message Board: Life: Nutrition, Recipes, Eating Concerns: Random Soft or No Chew Recipes: http://www.tmjfriends.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-860.html

Zajaczkowa, Jadwiga. A selection of dental hygiene and mouthwash products from a variety of Medieval and Renaissance sources.
http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/herbs/teeth.html


WANT MORE?

You can explore, look for more, or find books to buy in the following Google search.

Google Search: ("no chew" OR swallowing OR dysphagia OR tmj OR esophageal OR oesophageal) recipes

Posted by pfa at 03:57 PM | Comments (0)

December 24, 2006

Avian Influenza Resources

The Health Sciences Libraries (Dentistry, Taubman Medical, and Public Health) have partnered to provide the following collection of online resources about avian flu and pandemic response / preparedness.

Health Sciences Libraries: Guides: Avian Influenza Resources: http://www.lib.umich.edu/hsl/guides/avianflu.html

The links on the page above take you to sections within a collection of resources in del.icio.us -- a free bookmarking and productivity tool. The main sections we are highlighting for you are these:

- Major Avian Flu Portals
- Overviews of Avian Flu
- Disaster Planning
- Personal and Family Planning
- Local Michigan Information
- News and Travel Information
- Research

You can either go directly to one of those sections and browse the links available there, or you can browse the entire collection of over 40 recommended links. Each link includes a brief note describing why the resource is useful as well as terms (called "tags" in Del.icio.us) that you might think of as subject headings. The tags or subject headings describe the resource in a little more detail, and help you decide if you want to visit that site.

There is additional information on how to use Del.icio.us at their help page.

Del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/

Del.icio.us: Help: http://del.icio.us/help/

Posted by pfa at 12:14 PM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2006

NIH Electronic Grant Submission Workshop Series

The Health Sciences Libraries are offering a symposium series to assist grant applicants with the electronic submission of NIH grants. The workshops will be at the Biomedical Science Research Building (BSRB) Auditorium, 109 Zina Pitcher Place on the Medical School Campus.

NIH Electronic Submission and Deep Blue
- January 11, 2007 from 9 – 11 am
- Merle Rosenzweig Health Sciences Libraries and Department of Human Genetics
- Jim Ottaviani, Coordinator, Deep Blue

Deep Blue and Intellectual Property (Copyright)
- January 18, 2007 from 9 – 11 am
- Paul Newman, University Library Intellectual Property Office

NIH Electronic Submission Process
- January 25, 2007 from 9 – 11 am
- Bob Beattie, Managing Senior Project Representative, Division of Research Development & Administration (DRDA)

More information, registration, directions, and updates will be posted at the following link.

NIH Electronic Grant Submission and How Deep Blue Can Help You: http://www.lib.umich.edu/taubman/grants0612/GrantWorkshopSeries.html

Posted by pfa at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2006

Dentists Seeking Information via Google

Here is a very interesting study about dentists and how they use Google (and other information resources), right on the heels of the recent BMJ study of doctors using Google for diagnosing difficult cases.

Landry, Carol Fay. Work roles, tasks, and the information behavior of dentists. JASIST December 2006 57(14):1896-1908.
Link for UM patrons

"Developing an information framework is one technique dentists have applied to their seeking strategies. ... Google was favored by study participants as the means to develop this type of framework."

"Textbooks were the preferred source for the patient management/service provider task, professional associations were favored for CDE/student and patient education/educator tasks, vendors and sales representatives were first for the practice management/administrator task, and colleagues and journals were chosen for the research task."

"Although dentists continue to rely on traditional sources for their authority and accessibility, the Internet has emerged as an important adjunct in the information process because of its convenience and accessibility and the belief in the currency of found information. ... However, despite its ability to provide information quickly and conveniently, the Internet is not considered by dentists to be without flaws. Irrelevant, promotional, and questionable information flourish online. Recognizing these limitations allows one to consider the Internet a tool to augment rather than replace traditional information sources. Cross-referencing and framework building illustrate these findings. Still, the Internet is not embraced by all. An underlying current suggests that maintaining a personal connection with people remains important to a segment of this population and should not be ignored."

Posted by pfa at 08:02 PM | Comments (0)

Today's Students & Critical Thinking Skills

As a follow-up to Sharon Grayden's excellent presentation last week in the School's Bootcamp series ("Preparing for a New Generation of Learners"), here are some new reports and data from the Educational Testing Services (ETS) about the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary students.

ETS: College Students Fall Short in Demonstrating the ICT Literacy Skills Necessary for Success in College and the Workplace
PDF [60KB]: http://www.ets.org/Media/Products/ICT_Literacy/pdf/2006_Preliminary_Findings.pdf

"Despite the assumption that today's college students are tech savvy and ICT literate, preliminary research released by ETS today shows that many students lack the critical thinking skills to perform the kinds of information management and research tasks necessary for academic success."

Also of potential interest, the ETS Education Issues 2007 publication.

ETS: Education Issues 2007
PDF [1.3 MB]: http://www.ets.org/Media/Education_Topics/pdf/candbrief2007.pdf

Posted by pfa at 09:43 AM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2006

SlideShare.net: Ready, Set, Present!

Dr. X. Pertise agreed to speak to a university group at a meeting that is coming up in two days, on a broad topic peripherally related to his own research, but for which he doesn't have appropriate slides. Dr. P. thought there would be plenty of time to just put together something quick, but something unexpected has gone haywire in the lab at the last minute. He doesn't have time to make presentation slides, so he logs onto SlideShare and looks to see if there is a presentation by anyone he knows on this topic, that he could repurpose for this talk, with appropriate attribution to the original author. A few quick keyword searches, and he has found one presentation that has some good images, another presentation with a good conceptual outline, and some recommended resources that he can easily enrich. He knows the authors, so he contacts them to request a copy of their slides. In the meantime, he sends the links to his assistant, and asks them to start assembling new presentation slides that incorporate these bits. Later, he will quickly reorganize the information the way he wants it for the presentation.

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Does this sound too good to be true? Pie-in-the-sky futuring? Well, tah-dah! The future has arrived. SlideShare.net allows people to share their slide presentations. It does not allow people to download the slides, only view them online, but that still can be very useful when assembling ideas in a time-dependent situation. SlideShare is a new service, so the content is still very much growing. Some of the best content is from organizations and government institutions that provide free information as advocates for a specific topic.

Still, you might be surprised what you can find. Examples include presentations on HIPAA and e-mail, four-handed dentistry, medical ethics, professionalism and education, bioinformatics, genomics, the semantic web, craniofacial anomalies, tissue engineering, drug development, and more.

The search interface is particularly sloppy, so you have to do a fair amount of digging once you get to the results. The more specific language is more useful in this circumstance. Like any of the Web 2.0 tools, the quality of what is findable will depend on people who are willing to share their content. If this would be a useful resource to have in the future, consider if it is worth sharing something of yours to make it more useful now.

Posted by pfa at 03:06 PM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2006

Googling for a Diagnosis?

This new article from BMJ has some possibly surprising findings. Previous understanding of web search engines were that simply entering a list of symptoms was as likely to come back with the wrong diagnosis as anything else. Evidently the knowledgebase and results rankings have improved to the point where this is not necessarily the case for a searcher with a strong medical background.

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Hangwi Tang & Jennifer Hwee Kwoon Ng
Googling for a diagnosis--use of Google as a diagnostic aid: internet based study.
BMJ, doi:10.1136/bmj.39003.640567.AE (published 10 November 2006)
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/bmj.39003.640567.AEv1

Objective: To determine how often searching with Google (the most popular search engine on the world wide web) leads doctors to the correct diagnosis.

Results: Google searches revealed the correct diagnosis in 15 (58%, 95% confidence interval 38% to 77%) cases.

Posted by pfa at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2006

High Tech Toothbrushing

Today at WordSpy, they highlighted a new phrase for the techno-weary -- "feature fatigue". This means, in short, that customers and patients are burned out by too many options, choices, and gizmos.

Word Spy: Feature Fatigue: http://www.wordspy.com/words/featurefatigue.asp

What captured my attention was that the primary example given is that of a toothbrush that is so complicated it is sold with a DVD to give instructions on how to use it. Was it really true? It must be, or they wouldn't say so, would they? So I looked, and I found it.

Goodman, Ellen. The complexification of the toothbrush: Technologies for making life more difficult. Washington Post Writers Group, 05.26.06: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=20870

This entertaining article ends with a great couple lines: "Now I am sure that somewhere there is an engineer creating a toothbrush with an LCD, an MP3 player and the capacity to instant message from my mouth to yours. Beware, the feature creep is coming to a molar near you."

For the curious, the toothbrush in question is the Intelliclean System, www.intellicleansystem.com/

Now while I was searching for a toothbrush with its own DVD, I found a lot more about toothbrushes and DVDs, mostly old classic movie snips with some newer films. I had no idea there were so many films with toothbrushes as prominent aspects of the plot or title. Here are a few for your entertainment, and you can find more at IMDB (over 4,000 pages were listed).

The Toothbrush (1918)
The Old Family Toothbrush (1925)
The Toothbrush Family (1999)
Don't Forget Your Toothbrush (1994, 1995 and 2000)

The Brothers Grunt (1994) has a toothbrush-obsessed criminal; Mr. Robinson Crusoe (1932) has a young man stranded on a deserted island with a toothbrush and a young woman; Boogeyman II has death by toothbrush; Goldie Hawn cleans the bathroom with an electric toothbrush in Private Benjamin (1980); and who can forget the great toothbrushing scene in Home Alone (1990)? There is even a movie called toothbrush in Slovenian -- Scetka (1999). Who'd have thought ...

Posted by pfa at 07:09 PM | Comments (0)

May 30, 2006

Online Community Tools: Streamline and Turbocharge Your Information Retrieval

A great deal of the power of science has come from collaborations. These days collaborations increasingly begin online or convert to online when one or the other participants move to another part of the country. Technology is making these connections easier in many ways. here are just a few.

The UM Research site facilitates connections among on campus researchers.

UM Research: http://www.research.umich.edu/

UM Research recommends the Community of Science, saying, "Community of Science publishes databases useful to the research community funding opportunities, in expertise, funded research, patents, and others. UM faculty and staff may search many of these databases free-of-charge." In the Community of Science, you can enter a personal profile describing your research interests, and then subscribe to a notification service for funding announcements in those areas or browse to locate other researchers working in those topics. Very useful.

UM Research: Funding: Community of Science: http://www.research.umich.edu/funding/cos.html

Community of Science: http://www.cos.com/

There are free online comunity resources also. One specifically in dentistry is the Dental Informatics Online Community, which provides "a networking platform for people interested in DI promoting the development of dental information resources, disseminate research results and encourage the formation of research and education partnerships."

Dental Informatics Online Community: http://www.dentalinformatics.com/

Not specifically dental, there are what are becoming known as folksonomy tools -- tools for 'folk' to share information, discover what other 'folk' think is worthwhile, and who the other 'folk' are interested in the same areas as you. Folksonomy tools initially were created for the general public, and over the past few years some have become available specifically for the scientific community. Here is an article about how these are being used in the scientific and research communities.

Social Bookmarking For Scientists - The Best Of Both Worlds, by Ben Lund, Nature Publishing Group, b.lund@nature.com (XTech 2006: "Building Web 2.0" — 16-19 May 2006, Amsterdam, The Netherlands):
http://xtech06.usefulinc.com/schedule/paper/75

So let's take a closer look at how this works in practice, and what you can expect to find. Here is an example of a general purpose folksonomy tool, del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a "social bookmarking" tool. You can put your bookmarks online, keep them private or share them, and access them from any computer with a network connection. Since del.icio.us is for the general public, its greatest strengths are in finding things of interest to lots of people. Let's see what they have for dentistry or dental.

Del.icio.us: Dental: http://del.icio.us/search/?all=dental

Now, knowing that this is not the likely place to look, let's see what they have for matrix metalloproteinases or MMPs.

Del.icio.us: Metalloproteinases: http://del.icio.us/search/?all=metalloproteinases

Now, let's compare this to what we can find in Connotea for the same topic, knowing that Connotea is for scientists and clinicians, and that it collects citations for articles, not web sites.

Connotea: Metalloproteinases: http://www.connotea.org/search?q=metalloproteinases

Connotea: MMP: http://www.connotea.org/tag/mmp

There are other scientifically focused folksonomy tools, most notably CiteULike. Let's look for MMP articles in CiteULike.

CiteULike: Metalloproteinases: http://www.citeulike.org/search/all?f=title&q=metalloproteinases

Do you like anything you saw? Just checking this topic, it looks like the MMP folk are hanging out at CiteULike, so if I was doing research in that topic, that might be a resource I'd want to start considering.

If you are thinking about using any of these tools, they are especially good to keep your favorite citations handy and accessible whenever and wherever you are. Here is a helpful tool that will allow you to send your favorite references from PubMed to either Connotea or CiteULike from within the Firefox browser. Recommended only for the truly advanced technophile (a.k.a. "geek"). If there is enough interest, I'll try to do a lunch class on this for faculty.

Pubmed2Connotea / Pumed2CiteULike:
http://www.urbigene.com/pubmed2connotea/

Want to know more about Folksonomy and folksonomy tools?

Wikipedia: Folksonomy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

Posted by pfa at 07:38 PM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2006

Rollyo: Search Like an Expert

I have been playing with a new-to-me folksonomy tool. Rollyo stands for "roll your own search engine." The idea, as I understand it, is that an expert in any area quickly finds that they are going to the same sites over and over again. Rollyo allows you to collect a group of sites that are your favorites for a specific type of task, and then search them all at once. It limits you to 25 sites in a list.

Here are a few examples I've put together. The first one selected reputable consumer health information sources to search for information for dental patients. The second one searches vendors selling historic and out-of-print medical and dental books. The third one searches free fulltext books online for the word, phrase, or concept of your choosing. I use this to find curious quotes to enliven my professional presentations and publications.

Rollyo: pfa: Dental Consumer Health Search Engine: http://rollyo.com/pfa/dental_consumer_health/

Rollyo: pfa: Antiquarian Medical Books: http://rollyo.com/pfa/antiquarian_medical_books/

Rollyo: pfa: Do-It-Yourself Quotations from Original Sources: http://rollyo.com/pfa/diy_quotes_from_sources/

Just imagine what you could do! I promise you, I'll be doing more of these, and will share those relevant to the dental community.

Posted by pfa at 06:21 PM | Comments (0)

May 09, 2006

Consumer Health Information: Kosmix and iBoogie and healthfinder

There are always a variety of Internet search engines, and som specifically on health. There is a new health Internet search engine that has some interesting features.

Kosmix: http://www.kosmix.com/

Kosmix focuses most searches towards health topics, and defaults to the health tab for your search. It does not search the complete Internet, and would not be a good choice for information about movie stars, for example. When you search a health topic in Kosmix, it takes the various results and sorts them into folders in a bar on the left side. The folders include such topics as "Written for Doctors", "Definitions," "Support Groups", "Overview", and much more. This can streamline a search, allowing you to zoom in quickly to the type and level of information you are seeking.

iBoogie: http://www.iboogie.com/

iBoogie is a broader Internet search engine, but has a similar interface, also using the tab-model to focus a search on a given area. Kosmix clusters results into predefined categories, but iBoogie comes up with categories based on the topic. Those topics can be useful suggestions to focus or broaden your search.

Still, when a patient wants health information, my favorite search engine is:

healthfinder: Consumer Health Information Search:
http://www.healthfinder.gov/search/

healthfinder's search focuses results just to government websites, and to 300 highly selected ones, excluding professional level information for results targeted just to consumers. This is a great way to find appropriate information without a lot of digging or sorting through results.

Posted by pfa at 09:11 PM | Comments (2)

May 04, 2006

Free Life Science and Health Books Online

Taken a look at the PubMed Bookshelf lately? Not only are there are several new books (free, fulltext) about public health and global health issues, but you can also search the content of their entire collection of books. For example, a search for matrix metalloproteinases brings back 72 results in 9 books; while a search for ("antibiotic prophylaxis" OR "SBE prophylaxis") gives 90 results in 8 books. Worth checking out. Meanwhile, here are those new books I mentioned.

Posted by pfa at 01:48 PM | Comments (0)

April 14, 2006

How to Write a CV: Online Resources

A number of students have recently been asking for tips and resources about writing curriculum vitae. Many of the best resources for this specifically for students in the health sciences are online. Here is a small selection, including the guidelines for UMMS.

Posted by pfa at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2006

New Dentistry Library Blog

The Dentistry Library is pleased to present a blog format to provide information we hope will be helpful to our patrons. With a blog, you can either browse the content when you wish, or you can subscribe to receive notifications of new additions to the blog. We will be providing more information on these options in the future as we explore this new-to-us mode of communication. We hope you find it useful!

Posted by pfa at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)