The Web enables access to the resources of a library for doctors and students from anywhere but the library. As a result, libraries are closing their doors. [1] The weakening connection between librarians and users is currently the great challenge of our profession. Frequently, libraries try to strengthen the connection by promoting feel-good factors such as providing food & beverage, nice furniture, architecture & facilities, and a good atmosphere. Sound and positive relationships with users are not only build by harmonious environments in which students feel comfortable, but also by emotional competent librarians, who accompany students from enrolment to exam. The connection can be maintained and improved by various means such as joint task forces, focus groups, library instruction via working lunches (or coffee & cakes), walking around, be open-minded for conversations, be present in social networks, and not only supporting users at study related problems, but also in a holistic way. As a result, students will feel themselves valued – not just as a user or customer, but as human beings.

Humour
Humour is both, a catalyst and an indicator for healthy, lively, and enjoyable relationships. In the following I would like to show, that by integrating humour into the library, the connection between librarians and users could become not only light-hearted but also highly rewarding.
There are many articles about the benefits of being humourous in library instruction courses, and even one which made it into PubMed [2]. In 2006, Walker gave an good overview of the topic, [3] and Trefts & Blakeslee delighted the reader by their increasing efforts to become funnier. Here is their motivation for using comedy in the classroom:

Most instruction librarians know that library instruction can often be boring to teach, and boring for students, but we also know the value of library instruction and its importance to our students. So what innovative approaches can we take to spice up our instruction and make the topic more appealing? The authors decided that using humor was the best approach. [4]

They learned about comedy, they became funnier, and incorporated it sucessfully into their library instruction. Many teachers will agree, that fun is as important for learning success as content: “If your students not having fun getting better, they’re not keeping it doing.” [5]

Clowns
One excellent way of bringing humour to the library is the clown. In hospitals, “clinic clowns” or “doctor clowns” are well known for delivering “clown care”. As successors of Patch Adams they bring joy and laughter to small patients (but also to the elderly). Dr. Jerko (aka Bowen F. White) provides an insight on his work:

The Clown creates an environment for people that it is save to laugh and have fun and [as a results] they drop their defences. We don’t educate students in ways that are playful. We tend to not honour as a value for adults. When we’re valuing playing more, then […] we paying attention in new ways with beginners’ minds, and see options and possibilities. To be playful, to game is a way to connect to people more fully, in a holistic approach. That’s make you feeling more fully alive, and a dull frontal presentation becomes a lively performance. [5]

The clown is capable of giving important impulses and acting as an icebreaker. Playing games is an important method for knowledge transfer in the educational process and can be used by anyone. Especially interesting is the absence of a hierarchy between the players:

The mother is doing stuff the kids can’t quite do by themselves, but the mother isn’t thinking ‘Oh, the kid can’t do it.’ Instead, they’re playing a game together. And out of that game the kid gets exposed to stuff from which it can learn. [6]

The playful manner of the clown and his inborn neglect of any hierarchy makes him perfectly suitable for any educational purpose. In the library, he has the great advantage: he is definitely not a librarian. He stands outside the hierarchy of knowledge and saying “Ssshhhh…” He has a red nose, and with a magical smile he conjures the anxiety away, which prevents many students from connecting with librarians. [7] Overall, the clown brings a new quality into the relationship between the user and the library.

Library
Recently, at the medical library in Münster, Germany, a librarian dressed up as a clown interacted with students. He walked around, sat with the students and asked them which beautiful books they were reading and for what purpose. And what actually were they doing. Studying? He suggested that it looked more as if they were lazing around…

The library clown also handed the students sweets and roses, and some even returned his kindness with their own sweets. Within 1½ hours, the clown had had some 40 interactions, through which he obtained a detailed overview what exactly the students were doing, if they were satisfied with the library, and last but not least about their sense of humour.

Usually clowns perform as duos, in which one acts as the “Auguste” or “Redface”, while the other is the “Joey” or “Whiteface” character. Redface has good intentions and is good-natured, but foolish (but he thinks he is highly knowledgable). He is naïve, like a child and as curious as one. On the contrary, Whiteface is quite normal; he acts as the watchdog, and tries to prevent Redface from making mistakes (if he is not too angry with him) – similiar to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, who acted that scenario to perfection. The library clown, acting as Redface, had a nice play with the students, which behaved quite normal. This character is perfectly suited for the study of information needs and satisfaction rates, because Redface is not only interested in everything but he is also very much welcomed by anybody to be curious and ask ‘stupid’ questions. [8]

The clown not only examine needs or delivers a course, but he tells a story. His costume and his makeup is already a story in itself and tells much about him. People love that, they pay attention and memorize better, what he is telling – a perfect premise for successful connecting with customers.

People love to be told stories. They don’t necessarily have to be nice stories, but they must be memorable. Whether you’re babysitting kids or closing a big deal [or explaining PubMed limits!], telling a story that’ll stick with your audience is the key: a story is a soft shell that seals in the facts and livens up hard data. [9]

Conclusion
Humour makes things easier in the workplace, as has been proven several times in libraries. Some may act as a clown even if they do not want to admit it [10]. And yet the obvious idea of a clown, who acts as a catalyst for customer relationships, is quite new in the field of librarianship. Nevertheless, as shown above, the library clown can improve many areas such as marketing, needs assessment, contacts and customer relationships, and avoiding clichés. Because the clown is not afraid to fail, he helps us to be brave and overcome our anxiety. Like Mevlana Rumi said: “Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah… it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.” To be a clown once in a while, prepares us to take risks, to be experimental and creative, and as such to live more fully, and eventually make work more rewarding. Remember: “Everybody is a clown, but only a few have the courage to show it.” (Charlie Rivel)

Literature

1. Kelley, Michael (2011): Major Medical Library Closing Its Doors to Patrons and Moving to Digital Model. In: The Digital Shift 27.10.2011.
2. Maggio, LA et al (2009): A case study: using social tagging to engage students in learning Medical Subject Headings. J Med Libr Assoc. 97(2) 77-83
3. Walker, Billie E. (2006): Using humor in library instruction. Reference Services Review 34(1) 117-128
4. Trefts, Kristin; Blakeslee, Sarah (2000): Did you hear the one about the Boolean operators? Incorporating comedy into library instruction. Reference Services Review 28(4) 369-378
5. a) Bowen F. White (2000): Why Normal Isn’t Healthy: How to Find Heart, Meaning, Passion, and Humor on the Road Most Traveled. Center City: Hazelden
   b) Bowen F. White (2000): Bowen White in El Salvador
6. Brooks, Rodney (2002): Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us. New York: Patheon
7. Mellon, C.A. (1986): Library anxiety: a grounded theory and its development. College and Research Libraries, 47(2) 160-5
8. Obst, Oliver: Was macht ein Clown in der Bibliothek? Aktuelles 4.3.2011
9. Torley: Life Lessons You Can Learn From The Joker. In: Stepcase Lifehack 31.7.2008
10. Schott, Michael J. (2008): A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Library: 20 Years of (Mostly) Humor in Medical Libraries. Journal of Hospital Librarianship 8(2) 230-236

This article was published in the December issue 2011 of the JEAHIL.

I have to confess. Seriously. I have to confess you about my working habits. My working habits are a great challenge for me (and my boss) because I am not working, instead “I am actually distracting myself from work. I notice these days that I can spend hours at my computer, in a cloud. A swampy blur of digital activity, smeared across various activities and media and software. Emailing, writing, tweeting, designing, browsing, taking calls, Skyping, Facebooking, RSS Feeding – all blurred into a single technological trance. I seem to switch randomly from one to the other.” [1]

The Swiss physicist and philosopher Eduard Kaeser explains this habit with an example by himself: “Multitasking. We are hardly in the Web; the temptation is stirring to do just not what you have to do. We are browsing, blogging, chatting, googling, texting, twittering as the persecuted. I saw it the other day, ironically, by writing this text. I did what tens of millions of desktop-workers do today. I googled for a small article about multitasking, thereby discovered three other relevant articles that interested me. While printing them, I checked my e-mails en passant, glanced at the website of the “New York Book Review” and stucked on an essay by Amartya Sen on an entirely different issue. The running jazz program on the radio presented simultaneously an interesting Italian pianist, whom I liked so much, that I looked him up at iTunes, found various pieces of him, bought them immediately, downloaded them and burned them onto a CD. Rather than continue working on the article, I began to hear the music, not without telling me at the same time on the website of the pianist about his biography and discography. Before I knew it myself, my main attention was scattered on two or three adjacent lanes. I was not able to gain back my concentration on the original work. I call this ‘Cogitus interruptus’.” [2]

McCandless hits the nail on the head: This habit is fancy, addicted, devastating. I could not describe it better.

Is there a remedy for us hypersurf lunatics? Kaeser recommends two agents, unfortunately both not much appropriate in library settings: sex and jogging. But there is a third agent, even better: The iPad. And it’s perfect for the office! I actually managed to read Kaeser’s pretty long text in one piece without interruption and distractions on the iPad! That speaks well for the author but even more for the device. Due to the singularity of the applications and open windows, the iPad/iPhone (much like the printed book) creates an almost distraction-free interface, a space with a single focus. [3]

In order not to get “lost in distraction”, I need a lot of motivation. The best motivation for me are deadlines. I would never finish this column without strong deadlines. As a friend of mine used to say: “You have to create constraints for yourself” …

[1] David McCandless “The hierarchy of digital distractions” Information is beautiful 8.9.2009
[2] Eduard Kaeser “Cogitus interruptus: Googeln, Bloggen und Twittern“ NZZ am Sonntag, 31.5.2009
[3] Adam Hodgkin: “Why the iPhone is a better Reading Environment I” Exact Editions 8.5.2009

This article was published in the September issue 2011 of the JEAHIL.

Oliver Obst asked me to write a guest post for his column of the June issue of the JEAHIL. At first I hesitated because writing – to be honest- is not really my preferred cup of tea.

It takes me too much time and concentration, I tend to write too much on too many topics at once, and I always demand a original quality contribution from myself. During the writing process I keep coming up with new stuff, constantly hesitating between extra information and the levels of detail to include. But then again, how could I refuse Oliver who has put such a determination, originality and efforts into this colums for many years now, on topics that always interest me and many -if not all- other Eahil members.

iPads on Loan : shaking things up

In many things Oliver’s Library is a great example for using new technologies in medical libraries. With his combination of intelligence, logic, his sensitive antenna for user needs and a pragmatic approach in applying new technology, he created over the years a wonderful medical library with a large scale of tools and services for the ZB Med Münster. http://www.uni-muenster.de/ZBMed

Last year he launched their iPad on Loan project and when we (at the Central Medical Library (CMB) of the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) http://www.rug.nl/umcg/bibliotheek heard how it was introduced and how well it was received, we wanted to do this too. Oliver agreed immediately without hesitation in sharing his “blueprint” & all the ins- and outs about the project. Here’s another reason NOT to refuse his request. He also wrote about it in this Journal, http://jeahil.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/ipad-lending-project-first-results.

The Background Info-page on the iPad on Loan-project wiki, http://ipadscmb.pbworks.com tells the story from the beginning, – from buying 6 iPads and collecting Apps via iTunes – to the present day (having 8 iPads available and a waiting list of >80 interested staff members).

Our goal with giving these iPads to staff members in our hospital community, was to:

1. learn from their experiences with the iPad as a tool that could possibly change workflow in a clinical, research, patient-care or educational setting
2. learn more about all types of workflow-, communication- & medical Apps
3. learn to know our users needs even better

The personal touch -the iPads are distributed in personal meetings with the head of the library, Annalies Koelstra- has proven to be very effective, and the word of mouth principle works as an oilslick. The iPad-users have to sign a short contract and agree on doing a short evaluation -again in a personal meet- when bringing the iPad back.

While the ZB Med uses their WissensWiki and a php-based home-made program (Oliver has to teach me one day how to do that!) to document the iPads and the project, I decided to make every installed App go into a Delicious Bookmark http://www.delicious.com/digicmb/ipadcmb

The tool Packrati.us (http://packrati.us/) bookmarks all links in my Tweets directly to the Delicious, including the “IPADCMB” tag. Basically I can use the “tweet this” option from inside iTunes AppStore to do this. Unfortunately I still have to maintain that App-list on our beta-wiki manually.

Meanwhile our activities with the iPads have stirred things up at our hospital a little. It was good to notice that many people from all different departments got into contact to talk about iPad-related topics. From the It-department to the nursing staff, and from policy-makers to researchers, they all came by to discuss the project and some of its consequences. Can we do this really safe without risk of patient-information getting out? Can we organise our IT systems to access critical patient-care tools on the iPads, even from home? Can we use it in teaching, or at the bed-side?

We had teachers come by to do a project on the use of ipads for visually impaired, and a head-nurse to ask for an iPad to “treat” a long-term isolated, very ill patient. With the iPad she could communicate and keep in touch with the outside world, friends and family much better.

We created a manual on how to access the hospitals off-campus solution (using “Citrix”, called Werkplek Op Afstand, WOA).

I can safely say that doing this project the library we got very positive feedback from all over. PR and marketing-wise doing this, even this low-profile project with relatively low costs (just the costs for hardware and the Apps) – has had a high impact. Many people and departments, including IT and Management, is more aware of the possibilities. This week the hospital even lifted the ban on Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com), a very polular file management programm that makes handling files between desktop, laptop, tablets & mobiles dead easy.

In the short future a new emerging challenge will be to compare and explore the river of announced new tablets http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/the-10-hottest-tablets-coming-in-2011/44415

If you have any questions, just contact me, or come by for a visit
To be continued …

MobileCMB.nl

Almost at the same time of the early preparations of the iPad on Loan-project, we started a project with 4th year Hanzehogeschool-students of the Web & Mobile Services program to develop a mobile application for the CMB. Part of this project was doing research into mobile user needs, and the other part was to create a working prototype of a medical library (web)-app.

In the survey (created with Google Docs, Forms) we specifically asked users to leave their email address if they would be interested in an iPad on loan.

That’s how our initial waiting-list got this big. Now -even with 8 iPads- on loan, each for max 2 weeks- the list is still growing due to our library-demo’s on location, in the departments and staff-meeting with the iPad2. The iPad2 is -for library demo’s on Tablets, Workflow, Library & Medical Apps THE best right now, because the complete VGA-out allows us to show the complete screen of the iPad on any beamer with any problems.

Preparation time was too short to present the outcome of the surveys here in detail (we asked both, students ánd staff), maybe a next colums

In January 2011 the prototype was ready and it contains now the most mentioned features of the survey outcomes. Here are the most special ones:

• We are proud to have a fully integrated PubMed search connected with our linkresolver RUGLinks (SFX) to easily get to our fulltexts. The other search tools included are: UpToDate, Catalogue, AccessMedicine, E-Journals and E-Books
• Our new LibGuides on Medicine, Dentistry, Human Movement Sciences and Nursing, http://libguides.rug.nl/profile.php?uid=10227
• Contact section with Olark Chat http://www.olark.com/
• Available Computers in the Library and the MedicalFacility
• All our social media links

If you want to see the complete mobile App, have a look at our CMB Netvibes, http://www.netvibes.com/cmb#Mobile or Scan the qr-code with your mobile and go directly to the (web) app!

Please give it a go, and let us know your experiences preferable via the Response Buttons on the App.

The App was created via JQuery http://jquery.com/ and PHP, http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP and is running on a University server. I can manage it via Filezilla, PHPmyadmin and a MySQL database.

More info at our CMBWIKI: http://cmbwiki.pbworks.com/w/page/36068275/Mobile-CMB

Medical Apps & related

To finish this column off, some short mention of related interesting tools:

• MedicalApps is a public Netvibes page with the most important Medical Apps Search tools in one place. News on New, Free, Pricedrops, reviewed Medical Apps http://www.netvibes.com/medicalapps
• Medical Apps Search (MAPPS) If you are looking for a specific App or topic, try this Google Custom Search MAPPS http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=004308201683882109473%3As7kc4_l-vry
• https://www.facebook.com/Medlibmob?sk=app_4949752878
• Collected medical library mobile sites/apps: http://www.delicious.com/medlibmob/medical+library+mobile
• A medical librarians special group MedLibMob on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_174021102617943&ap=1
• And last but not least, a Daily Magazine created with tweets focussed on Medical Apps
  “The Medical Apps Daily” http://paper.li/medlibmob/1295104201

This article was published in the June issue 2011 of the JEAHIL.

In January, we had to elect new EAHIL councilors for Germany. We examined the possibility to vote by email, but what a hassle of to- and for-ing and counting emails this would have been! By chance I had used Doodle [1] a lot in the last months for scheduling meetings and found this web tool very helpful. It is straight forward, easy to use, and registration-free. I was surprised to learn that Doodle offers also voting, named “Make a choice”. After some trial and error we set up an election site with hidden and one-time-only voting. It made the election process an easy and playful experience. It’s not an exaggeration: in social networking, everything is like that. No matter what your task or demand is: on the Internet is a (free) service can be found for it! In the following I will point out some of them, which may be useful for your library. I will omit the most obvious ones such as free blogs, bookmarks, or wikis, because I had described them already in detail in former columns.

Documents
Make PDFs from your documents and publish them on Scribd [2] “so others can read them online or download them. It’s also a great place to find articles and papers written by others.” [3] Upload your PDF on Issuu [4], they will convert it to a high quality output with animated pages. Let them do the usage statistics for you as well.

Are you looking for a place to publish your PowerPoint slides? The default is SlideShare [5], where there are literally tons of presentations. It offers not only storage capacity, but you can share, comment and follow the presentations of hundreds of people as well. You may even add a recording of your speech and customize it, so that the slides change in accordance with your speech.

At Google documents, you can store, edit and share almost anything, from PDF and text files to spreadsheets to drawings or presentations. But Google is a big brother and you never know what they do with your data. Google documents may not be evil on their own, but in combination with Google Mail, Google search, and their other services, they can know you better than yourself. So maybe it is wise to use others services such as DivShare or myDrive [6].

When it comes to paper, presentations and citations, you need bibliographic software too. The former killer appliances such as Endnote or Reference Manager have gotten very strong (and free) web competitors such as Citavi, CiteULike, LibraryThing, Mendeley, or Zotero. [7] These offer almost all features of commercial bibliographic managers, and may even exceed them with services such as metadata extraction from PDF (Mendeley).

Web Conferencing
You are working with someone on a shared document? Put it on Google documents and discuss it side by side with a Skype “group conversation”. Or use Elluminate (ex-Wimba) [8] and start in 50 seconds your own online classroom (free for up to three people). WebEx from Cisco is a wide spread commercial web conferencing tool offering free trials. [9]

Cloud Computing
Google documents, SlideShare, Flickr and a lot of the other mentioned services make use of cloud computing to offer file sharing, but in the following I would like to address some specialized tools which act as your remote hard disk. The most used is obviously Dropbox [10]. It comes for free and offers a data plan of 2 Gigabytes (50 GB for $ 99 a year), which you can upload on there servers and share with anybody (including your iPhone or iPad of course). SugarSync offers 5 GB for free (30 GB for $ 50 a year) and offers more privacy [11], a least in the “terms of service”, than Dropbox. [12] Frequently, smartphone apps are accustomed to use Dropbox, SugarSync or Boxnet [13] as file folders.

Alerting
What you do, if your Professor of Sports Medicine requests an RSS feed from you, which should alerts him on scientific papers as well current news items for “Sports and COPD”, “Exercise and Elderly” and so on? Just go to Yahoo Pipes [14], where you can embed, filter, merge, and manipulate feeds from PubMed, SportDiscus or Reuters Health in a variety of ways. If you want only to merge some feeds or put them on the Web, Google reader [15] or Feed Informer [16] may do the job quite well too.

Medicine
There are many, many web tools targeted to doctors or patients. AIRO is a system for clinics / hospitals / medical centers to record incidents, problems, and changes [17]. For patients, there comes Mentaline, a booking system for online therapy or coaching sessions with +275 coaches, psychologists, psychotherapists and other therapists – you can choose between audio/video through Skype and phone sessions [18]. Or ReliefInsite, a secure online pain management system, for helping patients “take a more active role in their health” and better communicate with their doctors. [19] Slogan: “Tracking your pain is one of the best things you can do to treat it.” Patient record management systems (much needed and much offered) are usually subscription based.

Some more tools

• Mindmeister.com is a free mind mapping tool on the web;
• Prezi.com is for animated, breathtaking presentations;
• Netvibes.com is for creating comprehensive worlds of information, updated automatically;
• Sitemeter.com offers little html snippets, which will tell you how much your web site is used (Google analytics is better, but in some countries it is illegal to collect personal information. And see above: “Google is not evil”);
• Host discussion groups on Homepagemodules.de;
• Publish surveys and analyze answers with Surveymonkey.com (coming with basic services for free and subscription plans for bigger surveys with more options);
• BasecampHQ.com for online project management and collaboration. I tried it not by myself, but there is certainly a big need for that;
• Lobbying for your library? Use Epetitions.net for collecting votes against the closure of your library.

If this short but not comprehensive list did not suit your demands and you are still seeking something, I can recommend two especially valuable directories:

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2010 List
Compiled since 2007, the recent list derives from the contributions of 545 learning professionals worldwide [20]. Among the top 10 you will find pretty much every tool that I described in past issues. Moodle, a prominent course management system, comes in at rank 10.

Webtools Directory of the UK National Health System
The NHS Web Tools [21] “is showing you, what’s out there. As the Web changes fast these days, it’s hard for busy NHS managers and clinicians to keep track of what’s out there. NHS Web Tools is for helping this special clientele by selecting and annotating useful web tools.”

References

1. http://doodle.com
2. http://www.scribd.com
3. Carol Skyring in [2]
4. http://issuu.com
5. http://slideshare.net
6. http://www.divshare.com/, http://www.mydrive.ch/
7. http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/reference-manager-overview/
8. http://www.elluminate.com/
9. http://www.webex.com/
10. http://www.dropbox.com
11. http://www.sugarsync.com
12. http://www.dropbox.com/terms#privacy
13. http://www.boxnet.com
14. http://pipes.yahoo.com
15. http://reader.google.com
16. http://feed.informer.com
17. http://airohq.com
18. http://mentaline.com/
19. http://www.reliefinsite.com
20. http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/top100-2010.html
21. http://www.nhswebtools.com/

In the last issue I mentioned the plans of my library to lend out iPads “preloaded with a pleopthera of learning tools”. Now I would like to share our first experiences with you (because I know that many of you are curious about the project and its outcome). [See Footnote 10 for other libraries lending out iPads]

Back to the future
We may laugh at the hype about the iPad [1], but tomorrow’s world is just not imaginable without ubiquitous and comfortable access to the Internet and sophisticated applications, which not only facilitate our life but have become a part of it. The iPad is not the absolutely perfect device, but it is a significant step towards one. A successor or competitor with half the size and double the power may come close to the magical capabilities of the all-knowing personal librarian “Mister D.”, which Morgan had described in a visionary essay [2].

When I first heard the rumour about this new gadget from Apple, I was not only fascinated but electrified by the news of a tablet PC with that extraordinary features. Such a gadget could completely change the way we handle information, the methodology of reading books, and how we consume other media! The iPad may well foster the transition from a printed to a digital learning environment and if so will have a great impact on libraries.

Back to practice
With my naïve enthusiasm, I applied for 24 iPads from tuition fees, but was turned down – fortunately (obviously we could not handle that much at that time). After some phone calls, three iPads were sponsored to start with. In August, we began lending them out for a period of one week to researchers and physicians.

With the iPad, it’s pretty much the same as lending out Personal Digital Assistants (PDA). [3] The devices are lent out and withdrawn by a single, appointed staff member, and the lender has to sign a loan contract in advance. [4] In the beginning, only faculty members, not students, were allowed to put their hand on an iPad.

Lending is a great way to whet the appetite for a new way of using library resources. Our underlying strategy works like this: “the library will bring the user to the iPad and the iPad will bring the user to the library.” Let me explain this in a little bit more detail:

The core of building sustainable customer relationships is to tie the clients in some way to the library. Usually this will be achieved be a good book collection, kind and supportive staff, expertise in searching, etc. In the web 2.0 age this is backed up by promoting services via interactive social media such as Twitter. Another way to attract users is by lending out cool gadgets such as Personal Digital Assistants. But essential for the success of such a service is that the library not only lend out these things, but also provides users with applications and build an expertise around this devices with the result, that the users will always turn to the library for support, new apps, etc. Our PDA project from 2004 to 2008 proved this: the lending part was not our greatest success but in fact the support part of the project was, where we distributed an impressive number of 1,013 apps to 382 clients. I think the iPad project will evolve in similar ways.

What will be our next steps?

1. Lending iPads to students too, but in a slightly different approach, only for one day, like they use a reference book of the non-lending collection. (Librarians do not like to take risks and one never knows how students will handle “iPads to go”). Our slogan will be: “if this printed book is not available at the moment, you can use it on this iPad.” Once they use an iPad, they will notice these wonderful interactice multimedia apps for anatomy or pharmacology or whatever. As a great media device, the iPad is a perfect companion for the great content libraries have to offer. This combination is supposed to do an excellent job helping students to pass their exams. For this purpose 15 additional iPads will be provided.
2. We shall build a strong base of support for the growing iPad community in our faculty, including newsfeeds of new iPad apps [5], classification of apps according to the NLM [6], promotion of apps at our library blog, writing wiki entries on how to make the most out of your iPad, etc.
3. A group of iPad faculty members has been founded, which work professionally with iPads, and which lend iPads to students, patients, physicians. There are 35 iPads in use for endodontic learning classes, 18 in the library, 15 in the study hospital, and some more for patients to fill out questionnaires. This iPad group is especially useful for getting first hand information, support, and knowledge. It enhanced significantly the library’s embedding and networking within the faculty.

Preliminary results
We had a wonderful start in the first 2 months with people virtually jumping on iPads as bears to honey and the feedback has been remarkably positive [7]. All users were clinicians; departments ranging from cardiology, ethics, gynecology, neurosurgery, to pediatrics. Among them were the usual “early adopters” but also newbies. All in all there were quite technophile as more than 80% had smartphones or PDAs already. The service was propagated by word of mouth very well: anybody using this gadget was asked: “Where did you get that from?”

For about 60% of the lenders, iPads proved to be very useful, but for 40% not at all. The reasons why the iPad did not stand the test for almost half of the lenders has to be examined in detail. The lenders used the iPad and its apps for a great variety of purposes: most often E-Books were used, followed by literature search, literature management, lectures, lecture videos, and games. Patient education, diagnostics, or music were not used so often and podcasts or movies rarely.

Magazines and journals, such as Macworld, MedPage, Nature News, NEJM, and PLoS were used more often than communication tools such as newsreader, social networks, and chat apps. Half of the lenders used E-book-reader such as GoodReader or iBooks quite frequently, while the other half did not use them at all. Lecture videos from iTunes University, which we had synced with the iPads, were used only a few times.

From the 75 medical apps preinstalled on the iPads, the well-known literature management app Papers was the most used one, followed by UpToDate (as a app-icon on the home screen), German pharmacopeiae, The Elements, DDx Differentials, PediSafe, and ColorTest.

Overall, more than 80% were satisfied or very satisfied with the opportunity of lending an iPad at the library.

Conclusion
Providing mobile access to library resources is a top trend in academic libraries [8]. Mobile phones are the communications technology of the future [9]. Digital natives expect every information (and person) to be immediately available, e.g. mobile. The iPad is an important step in the direction of an all-mobile world. By lending out iPads, the library can increase their reputation and networking among faculties and clinics. This is an invaluable and easy to achieve opportunity. Building a solid base of expertise around this cool gadget will put a “coolness factor” on the library itself and make it a light house. Hi-tech users accept librarians as peers on the same level and our participation in pioneering projects, such as e-lecturing with iPads or accessing electronic patient records on iPads, has been highly appreciated.

This article was published in the November issue 2010.

Foot Notes
1. Facebook VP Christopher Cox: “We laughed at every new technology because we are grounded in the perspective of the media we use today.” in Ryan Singel: Silicon Valley Lacks Vision? Facebook Begs to Differ. Wired 8.10.2010 http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/10/facebook-matters/
2. Eric Lease Morgan: “A Day in the Life of Mr. D” In: Thinking Robots, an Aware Internet, and Cyberpunk Librarians, The 1992 LITA President’s Program Presentations by Hans Moravec, Bruce Sterling, and David Brin. Chicago 1992. http://www.cni.org/pub/LITA/Think/Morgan.html
3. O.Obst: “Evaluation of the PDA-project at the Branch Library Medicine at Münster” GMS Medizin — Bibliothek — Information 2008;8(2):Doc16 http://www.egms.de/static/en/journals/mbi/2008-8/mbi000113.shtml and Wissens-Wiki: PDA Projekt: http://medbib.klinikum.uni-muenster.de/wiki/PDAProjekt
4. http://medbib.klinikum.uni-muenster.de/open/vertrag_ipad.pdf
5. You find new apps at http://medbib.klinikum.uni-muenster.de/php/ipad/apps-feed.php
6. http://medbib.klinikum.uni-muenster.de/php/ipad/apps-abc-med.php
7. http://medbib.klinikum.uni-muenster.de/open/umfrage_ipad.pdf
8. ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee: „2010 top ten trends in academic libraries: A review of the current literature” Coll Res Libr News 71(6):286-292 (2010) http://crln.acrl.org/content/71/6/286.full
9. Helen Blowers: “Reality Check 2010: 5 Trands [sic] Shaping Libraries” http://www.slideshare.net/hblowers/reality-check-2010-5-trands-shaping-libraries

Things worth to know [not in the printed issue]

• We install and rearrange new apps on one iPad, then backup it, and make a copy of the backup folder (located at user/AppData/Roaming/Apple Computer/MobileSync/Backup). We then restore all other iPads with this “default” backup, which takes usually 20-30 min
• Apparently, Apple has lifted the limit of syncing an app with only 5 devices, so in fact you should be able to buy an app only once and install it on an unlimited number of devices. [not tested]
• For buying we tested 2 ways: 1st we created an account on iTunes with a private credit card number and let the accounting reimburse the cc owner. 2nd, by installing an free app via the app store, you can create an account without any payment information. If buying a non-free app, the local Apple reseller will provide us with giftcards on the respective value.
• Fraser Speirs from the Cedars School of Excellence has written intensively and in detail about his experiences providing 110 pupils with an iPads each. Very worthwhile and readable.
• Librarienne has some nice blog posts on Libraries Loaning iPads, Is the iPad useful when temporary? A Library Loan Experiment, and Update on Library iPad Program.
• The MIT Music Library lend out iPads too
• Sara Q. Thompson wrote a useful guide Setting up a library iPad program – Guidelines for success
• Duke University Medical Center Library has an iPad Loaner Program
• Project iPad: Investigating Tablet Integration in Learning and Libraries at Ryerson University
• Melissa A. Venable provided a wonderful collection of 20 Coolest iPad Ideas for Your Library

PS: iPads on loan are easily trackable with MobileMe now iCloud, provided the user didn’t delete the respective Account in the iPad settings.

As I promised in the last issue, I thought about a new column title and finally decided on Emerging Challenges (Emerging Technologies is already taken ). It will widen the coverage of this column to include all items which challenge me and other librarians in both our daily and future life, such as the mobile library, electronic media, future of reading, and social media (TTFKAW) of course (1).

Electronic books have gained in popularity, as evidenced by the latest figures from Amazon. It sold 180 e-books for every 100 hardcovers, and three times as many e-books in the first six months of this year as it did in the first half of 2009 (2). Although it is likely that these were only fiction books, the sheer dominance of digital is surprising. Will this development also penetrate the textbook market? What is their future?

A recent survey of 5.360 library users in Bavarian universities evidenced that half of the students have no clear preference for printed books any more, and 37% of participants could well do without the printed textbook, if an e-book was available (3). The UK National E-Books Observatory Project came to similar conclusions ― as almost every study in the last years (4). That could well be the beginning of the end of the printed textbook as we know it. Libraries are very concerned with these developments, because the printed textbook is one of their main attractions. For decades, acquiring copies of top textbooks and lending them out to students was both a rewarding service and a successful business model. Now libraries are struggling to find new strategies for the coming “age of the e-textbook”, which is mainly determined by the following three factors:

1. New business models
Decan Butler from Nature (5) compares the future development of textbooks with the music industry, which dramatically changed because “they relied on selling content on a physical medium, such as the CD.” In the same way, better e-bookreaders “could similarly disrupt the textbook industry.” Like the music industry, textbook publishers fear cannibalism (e-textbooks will undermine sales of hardcovers) and piracy (e-textbooks will be distributed for free on file sharing platforms). For only two reasons they are willing to go ahead: (a) “e-textbooks may offer them a way to cut into the largest threat to their profits: the huge market for second-hand text books,” and (b) if they do not put their foot into this new niche, the other publishers will divide the market under themselves.

One of the companies which may revolutionize the way of selling textbooks is CourseSmart, a coalition of 15 major textbook publishers (6). It offers more than 12.000 textbooks for up to 50% of the price of the printed counterparts. However, the discount comes with some major limitations: CourseSmart’s digital rights management (DRM) forbids students from moving a book downloaded on one computer to another device, and cuts printing at 10 pages. E-textbooks usually ‘expire’ after their course has ended. Nevertheless, according to a study from the Northwest Missouri State University (NMSU), students like CourseSmart quite a lot, not because of the format or the DRM, but because it saves them money (7).

And even more surprising business modell is that of Flat World Knowledge, a New York based company, which creates electronic textbooks and distribute them freely. Their library friendly motto is: “Cheap prices are the most effective digital rights management.” [7b]

2. New content – customizable textbooks
Even if the content of the “new” e-textbooks may not change at all, the composition of the content will change and allow for much more flexibility and customization, interactivity features, multimedia, and personalization. “E-textbooks as we currently know them will look drastically different five years from now” (8).

Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks in the United States, launched the product dynamicbooks.com (“the new generation of interactive textbooks”), which allows college instructors “to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes. Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations” (9). These “Living Documents” are embedded in a community and will be commented by the community – a changing document, whose data is constantly remixed and reused.

3. New e-reader: the iPad
In 2009, everyone was racing to be the ultimate multi-function device: a convergent evolution among e-readers, laptops, portable music players and smart phones. Now it seems the race is over. As always, Apple has taken the lead with the iPad whose charming playfulness makes it a great learning environment. The operation by gestures is obviously a very human attitude: to understand something by touching it. There is much potential in the iPad for enhancing students’ learning experiences and being part of the next evolutionary step for textbooks. What device the iPad will replace? Gerry McKiernan and CourseSmart sum it up perfectly: “the iPad makes a lousy computer replacement, but does a great job of replacing paper” (10) and “for college students, the answer might just be that the “device” the iPad replaces is the printed textbook” (11). Consequently, CourseSmart recently launched an iPad application for reading textbooks (12).

Since the end of June, an iPad has been in everyday use at my own library. It has proved highly efficient for information presentation at a workshop. It is a mobile device for convenient and playful use of information of any kind. And it is precisely this very combination, mobile, comfortable, playful etc. that explains its great advantages over the alternatives: Smartphone, laptop, EeePC, Kindle (13).
I can also imagine the iPad being used very well in hospital wards, in presentations or in team meetings as a multimedia information machine, loaded with e-books, reading lists, pharmacopoeias, lecture recordings, videos of procedures (via iTunes U), e-learning tools, patient education tools etc. The Branch Library of Medicine at Munster are already lending out iPads preloaded with a pleopthera of respective learning tools, among them textbooks of course. The next step is just on the horizon: to embed this systematically and intelligently into the learning environment of the students, and merge it with the local curriculum. Here is the very place and time, where the librarian’s expertise will be in demand.

References
1. The Tools Formerly Known As Web2.0
2. Dylan F. Tweney: “Amazon sells more E-Books than Hardcovers” Wired 19.07.2010 http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/07/amazon-more-e-books-than-hardcovers/
3. Leo Matschkal: E-Books – Elektronische Bücher: Nutzung und Akzeptanz – Umfrage an bayerischen wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken. BIT Online 2009;12(4): http://www.b-i-t-online.de/archiv/2009-04/fach3.htm
4. “JISC national e-books observatory project: Key findings and recommendations” http://www.jiscebooksproject.org/reports/finalreport
5. Decan Butler: Technology: The textbook of the future Nature News 04/01/2009 http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090401/full/458568a.html
6. Among them Elsevier, McGraw Hill, Pearson, Sage, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Wolters Kluwer Health.
7. Jon T. Rickman, Roger Von Holzen, Paul G. Klute, and Teri Tobin: A Campus-Wide E-Textbook Initiative Educause quarterly 32(2):2009 http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/ACampusWideETextbookInitiative/174581
7b. http://www.flatworldknowledge.com. John L. Hilton III, David A. Wiley: “A sustainable future for open textbooks? The Flat World Knowledge story” First Monday, Volume 15, Number 8 – 2 August 2010 http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2800/2578
8. Paul Klute from NMSU in Decan Butler, Nature News 2009
9 .Motoko Rich. Textbooks That Professors Can Rewrite Digitally New York Times 21.2.2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/business/media/22textbook.html
10. http://mobile-libraries.blogspot.com/2010/07/inside-higher-education-ipad-for.html
11. CSAdmin: What will the iPad replace on campus? Let’s do the maths. CourseSmart Blog, 28.01.2010, http://coursesmart.info/blog/?p=196
12. CSAdmin eTextbooks for the iPad now live! CourseSmart Blog 11.04.2010 http://coursesmart.info/blog/?p=200
13. Whose slogan, “Easy • Excellent • Exciting” it in fact implemented.

The iPhone is the most important computer I have ever had – second only to my first office computer in 1993. Back then on a Friday afternoon in the beginning of the World Wide Web, I installed the program Nupop on my PC. Nupop opened an universe absolutely new to me – the universe of discussion groups by E-Mail and Usenet. I found myself quickly immersed into hundred thousands of newsgroups and mailing lists and enthusiastically subscribed to some twenty of them. After a quite weekend, I unsuspectingly opened my mail box … and suddenly my smile froze: “Cling, clong, cling, you have 713 messages!” It took me a day to wade through them (I red all of them) but, for the first time, I had the feeling of being connected with the whole world – or at least the whole library world.

Whereas the desktop computer connected me with the world, the iPhone connected the world with me. Let me explain this strange statement: Today, the Web 2.0 comes with sophisticated tools and great omnipresence, but – in a nutshell – added nothing to this 93’ feeling, at least not for me. That changed completely when I bought an iPhone one and a half year ago. Looking up information or doing networking on my iPhone gave me a second “aha-experience”: Now everything was nearby (in the pocket), and it was available wherever I was and whenever I wanted! No idea has to be put off to a later date, no question remained unanswered, there was no undiscovered curiosity and no longing unquenched. (By the way: that is exactly what the new generation of library users expects from us.)

iPhone Applications (Apps)
I don’t know if you are familiar with the iPhone and its Applications? iPhone Apps turn the iPhone into a sound studio, into a glass of beer, into a game, into a car navigation. There are 120.000 Apps in the iTunes shop, which have been altogether installed more than 1 billion times in the last two years. A study reported that most people use their Apps only once, but I don’t believe that. I installed some 60 Apps and use them regularly and frequently (some are only nice gimmicks for posing). Equipped with Internet, Apps, and GPS, the iPhone is a perfect substitute for my laptop. You can take the whole world of information with you, and the whole social network too [1]. Which Apps are especially useful and noteworthy?

News
My favourite iPhone App is NewsRack [2]. NewsRack is a sophisticated RSS-Feed Reader and serves as my information centre (as every information is RSS-able today). It shows all the news feeds from my beloved blogs, newspapers, TV stations, announcements of our clinic, and so on. It can be synchronized with your Google Reader subscriptions and – most important – it permits the forwarding of interesting news items to Web 2.0 services such as Twitter and Delicious. You may know that in an interactive environment, reading is not enough; you have to be able to share the information as well – comparable with the snap of one’s fingers. The second great advantage of the iPhone / RSS couple: I can read the news wherever I want and whenever I have the time to – usually not on the job. NewsRack is a bargain at 3,99 Euro.
There are numerous RSS reader Apps for the iPhone, many for free. You may like to test some of them as well.

Twitter
Although you can read Twitter messages by NewsRack too, I strongly recommend installing one of the many Twitter Apps to get the full advantage of the Twitter interactivity of retweeting, replying, and direct messaging. Twittelator Pro [3] is one of the most powerful ones and it makes a lot of fun playing with its many features. I have had good experiences too with TweetDeck (there is also a free desktop version) and Echofon (formerly Twitterfon), but Twittelator is my one and only (but with Apps, you’re always spoilt for choice). On Twitter I follow 99 people [4], which is way too much, because some of them post hundreds of tweets a week. So I found myself quickly overwhelmed by over 400 tweets a day – in addition to the 100 news items on NewsRack. (One of the next issues will answer the question if you could omit Twitter or RSS.) Twittelator allows easy retweeting, replying, direct messaging, following, unfollowing, searching, and whatsoever – 3,99 Euro.

Skype
Skype is yet another powerful social networking thingy, it allows you to keep contact, chat, and phone all around the world for free or small money. In addition, my library is using Skype for communicating with our users – free.

Blogs
iBlogger allows editing and writing of blog entries on the road. Embedding of pictures is easy and straight forward. If you want to add a picture to your post, just make it with the built-in iPhone camera – 7,99 Euro. There is also a free WordPress App for editing WordPress blogs, but unfortunately it has problems connecting to blogs not hosted at wordpress.com.

Social Network Portals
In the meantime, every social network community or shop has an iPhone application – it’s like a scourge. Facebook, StudiVZ (the German Facebook), MySpace, eBay, Amazon, each and every network offers its dedicated client. There are also some social networks built specifically for the iPhone such as iRovr and iPHONEcolony, but I have not used them and I do not think they could compete with the above mentioned “standard” networks. A more detailed (but now a little out of date) comparison of 13 iPhone Apps for communities was done by Adam Hirsch in the blog Mashable [5].

Flickr and Delicious
Of course, these two dinosaurs of the Web 2.0 do also have their respective iPhone Apps. At the iTunes store you can find at least a two dozens of Apps for both the photo sharing site Flickr and the bookmark sharing site Delicious. Free as well as paid Apps let you do almost anything, what you can imagine, including basic stuff such as browsing photos/bookmarks, uploading photos/ bookmarks from the iPhone, and of course sharing photos/bookmarks. More Apps for managing bookmarks are annotated at the German iPhone Blog [6]. One feature especially nice to mention: due to geotagging, some Apps [7] are even capable to show you photos made at your very location (Fig. 8). In one of the next issues location based services will be covered in depth – there are one major advantage of smartphones.

Networking On-The-Go
An German blogger puts the Iphonization into a nut shell [8]: “meanwhile, the iPhone is quite good integrated in my daily routine. Thanks to some good Apps much has shifted to the iPhone and is used in public transport in the previously unproductive minutes. Besides Twitter, I do not use hardly any social networks regularly on the desktop any more. The result: in the office there is more time for real work and the flow. In fact, the iPhone has not discouraged me from work, but quite definitely reduces distractions.“
But beware: you don’t have to run to the next Apple shop buying iPhones! Almost every major phone manufacturer offers devices with similar if not identical applications. Look for Google Nexus, LG eXpo, Nokia N900, Sony Ericsson Xperia, or Blackberry Storm, to name just a few.

After 13 issues dedicated to Web 2.0 only, I would like to widen the coverage of this column to include other interesting things such as the mobile library, electronic media, future of reading, etc pp. I’m still looking for a suitable name. If you feel inspired, please email me your suggestions with the label Oliver’s Thoughts!

1. You may find all iPhone Apps for Social networking at http://www.apple.com/webapps/socialnetworking/
2. http://www.omz-software.de/newsstand/
3. http://www.stone.com/Twittelator/
4. http://twitter.com/obsto
5. Adam Hirsch: iPhone 2.0 Apps: The Social Networking App Comparison [URL: http://mashable.com/2008/07/17/iphone-social-networking-app-comparison/ visited 12.3.2010]
6. http://www.iphoneblog.de/2009/03/10/ubersicht-delicious-iphone-programme/
7. Flickit Pro: http://www.greenvolcanosoftware.com/flickitpro.html, Mobile Flickr http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mobile-flickr/id337423904?mt=8
8. Florian Fiegel: iPhone, Social Networks und der Flow. [URL: http://florian-fiegel.net/iphone-social-networks-flow visited 12.3.2010]

Much is talked about library users diving deep into digital social networks, but does it have an impact on the real library? Usually not, apart from users hacking vigorously at library computer keyboards. In this issue I will not write on libraries using social networking, but on libraries abused by social networking …

Recently, the Library Journal kindly made us aware on a new social movement taking place in libraries: Flashmobs. [1] According to Wikipedia a flash mob or flashmob is “a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, and then quickly disperse. The term flashmob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails”. [2]

You may all know about pillow fight flashmobs in public places: In social networks such as Facebook, young urban people conspire in meeting at a certain time for the desired performance. Flashmobs make take place at traffic junctions, underground stations, or … surprise, surprise … at medical libraries. What will the mob do there? Sometimes they hold “silent dance parties” in order not to disturb the peace in the library. At the Carleton College library they gathered at an appointed time and place, and dance (silently) with headphones, listening to music synchronized to a starting signal. [3] They just looking for fun, enjoying themselves, making just these sort of things, which are prohibited by these stubborn librarians: noise, music, singing, dancing to ghetto blasters (on desks), sweating in crazy dresses, e.g. all kind of nonsense! Afterwards it was put on YouTube.

What is the motivation for flashmobs? Quite often, stress is mentioned, especially in the exam weeks. The extended library opening hours made long nights of learning possible – stress may be bottled up. Looking for an outlet, the library is a perfectly suited victim: Firstly, as professors do, they force people to learn, learn, learn. And secondly, librarians are always saying “shshsh…”!

Libraries and stress prevention
Libraries are not the bad guys, they have a lot to offer in terms of stress prevention:

• Usually they have sweets & coffee automated machines, as well as plenty of text books, even e-books which you could say is the best learning environment one could by for money. The staff is well trained to be polite and competent, but not pushy.
• Some libraries do a lot more: for example, the Branch Library of Medicine, Münster, has a rest room, equipped with couches on which students may have a nap. [4]
• The Medical Library of the University of Queensland, Brisbane, provides flexible furniture which can be transformed by users from “group furniture” to “individual furniture”. In a way, students can create their own library, suitable for their needs. The library defined different user groups, and offered special designed spaces for each: spaces for extroverts, spaces for voyeurs, for introverts, etc pp. Since refurbishment took place, library usage has doubled. [5]
• The Alvin Sherman Library, Fort Lauderdale, offered sophisticated services to help their students relax while preparing for final exams: There was a ‘Zen Zone’, where students received free services such as yoga, guided meditation and massages. Other services included tutoring, reference help, resume help and a gaming room. [6]
• Would it be a good idea to offer a “stress prevention library disco” too? Really, I don’t know.

What should libraries learn from flashmobs?

1. Security Issues
Flashmobs are not altogether safe. Large gatherings of people have their own dynamics; as with football stadiums, railings may crash, and mass panics may arise. For example, take a look at the flashmob arranged by US students in libraries: Hundreds if not thousands students gather “to have a flash mob rave on the night before finals … to help relieve all the stress”. [7, 8] You could become anxious for students and libraries as well. I’m quite ambivalent how to react: do you:

• Get the police?
• Trigger the fire alarm?
• Make an evacuation call?
• Just sit there and try to relax as it will end soon either way?

I hope that something like this will never happen at my library…

2. Marketing
On the other hand, flashmobs are ingenious tools for activating people. Maybe the library could use some of the underlying viral techniques for marketing their services. Think on services which badly need attraction, on polls, on demonstrations, on every kind of action where the library needs support by many people (not necessary users). Flashmobs (or Smartmobs) could be used for gathering interest, for getting attention, for kick off services. A beautiful example of such a flashmob is the one done by the students of the medical faculty of the Charité Berlin for celebrating the extension of opening hours of the Central Medical Library [9]. Why is it that libraries do not use the fascinating combination of videos, crowds, and music more often for marketing purposes? Wouldn’t it be great to be for once just an incredible cool library?

1. Josh Hadro: “As Finals Approach, Students De-Stress at Library Dance Parties” Library Journal, 10. Dec. 2009 [URL: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6711077.html]
2. Wikipedia: “Flash Mob” [URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob]
3. Casey Wolf/seedubbayou: “Stress at Carleton College” 3. Dec. 2009 [URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKhDmAAiE0E]
4. Branch Library of Medicine, Münster: “Mal Ausruhen vom Lernen? Der neue Ruheraum macht’s möglich!“ 23. June 2009 [URL: http://www.uni-muenster.de/ZBMed/aktuelles/1560]
5. Heather Todd: “Library spaces – new theatres of learning: a case study” Presentation at the EAHIL Conference in Helsinki, 26. June 2008 [URL: http://eahil2008.blogspot.com/2008/06/thursday-plenary-session.html]
6. Annarely Rodriguez: “Library Helps Students Relax During “Crunch Time” In: The Current Newsletter 19(26) 14. Apr. 2009. page 5 [URL: http://issuu.com/thecurrent/docs/volume_19_issue_26_web_site]
7. skyrepsol: “JMU East Campus Library flash mob rave (Complete highlights)” 7. Dec. 2009 [URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdfmO8iurCE]
8. cackalacky789: UNC Chapel Hill UL Flash Mob Rave 9. Dec. 2008 [URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruEMaDZWRcs]
9. PublicFSI: “Länger ist besser – Flashmob” 18. June 2009 [URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TYyeHfm4_M, not available any more]

When I first created a personal account on Twitter (@franknorman) I did not have any strategy – I just did it. I observed how other twitterers used the service then I copied and adapted their practices. I am still learning and I still do not really have an explicit strategy though there is some underlying rationale to my twittering. It’s a different matter when you start using an institutional Twitter account. If you are representing your institution by sending messages (tweets) through Twitter then you need to have a plan in order to avoid problems later.
Jeremiah Owyang (http://bit.ly/3fZOHt) suggests that there are four kinds of Twitter profile: pure corporate, corporate with persona, employee with corporate association, pure personal. I am mostly considering the pure corporate profile.

Is Twitter a good tool for PR?
Twitter is inherently a personal tool, but PR is essentially a corporate activity. There is therefore tension when you use Twitter for PR purposes. Twitter provides an opportunity to engage more directly with the audience you are trying to reach; it can be a good way to establish and maintain relationships. A well-thought-out Twitter feed can keep your institution in the consciousness of your followers – this has been called ambient awareness.. The little snippets of information you post to Twitter, when taken together over time, will coalesce into a portrait of the institution.

Twitter also has the capability to reach out to a wide variety of constituencies – but the reach is very sensitive to the content of the Twitter feed. If people do not like what they read in your Twitter feed (for example if the feed is too corporate and impersonal) they may stop looking at your messages. You need to provide a human voice and devote some time to monitoring and interacting with your audience in order to develop the relationship and the respect for your institutional brand.

Your aim then should be to create a stream of Tweets about your institution that will attract a growing band of followers and give them a sense of intellectual engagement with the institution.

Preparations
The first step is to choose a username for your institutional Twitter account. Your username should be not too long and should ideally contain only letters, no numbers or other characters. This will ensure it is easy for other Twitter users to to respond to and re-use your tweets. Jack Leblond gives further guidance (http://bit.ly/21vyi). Next you need to choose an avatar, or associated image. This has to be square (48 pixels by 48 pixels) so it is possible that your standard institutional logo will not be suitable and you may need to create a new image. If you wish you can also choose a background image for your Twitter profile page.

Guidelines for Tweeting
I am not a great lover of rules. Twitter is still a new and evolving medium: people use it in different ways and I am sure that Twitter styles will change as the community of users grows and that different norms will develop as the community diversifies. The best way to develop a Twitter style is to observe and copy, learning from other Twitterers but injecting your own ideas. Developing tight institutional guidelines for content on Twitter may produce a too-safe, too-controlled channel. Twitter can be unpredictable and quirky and this is one of its attractions.

You should create some basic guidelines in order to give some consistency to your tweets, especially if more than one person is going to be sending out ttweets on the institutional account. For example,

• use third person plural (we, us, our);
• decide what name you will use to refer to the institution;
• use a conversational tone, but not too casual;
• avoid text-speak.

You will also need to decide on language – are you aiming for a national or an international audience, or a mixture. You should consider whether it would be useful to include some tweets in English as well as your own language.

If there is an RSS feed of news about your institution it is possible to feed this into your Twitter account automatically. You can even feed multiple RSS feeds into the account. However, automatic tweeting in this way makes your Twitter stream less personal, less human. Remember that Twitter is a social medium and thrives on personality; social media without people defeats the purpose. Although ideally every tweet should be hand typed it is OK to include some automatic feeds, so long as they do not dominate.

Some Twitter gurus insist that the frequency of tweets should be no less than 2 and no more than 10 per day. I think this is over-prescriptive. Whilst it is true that too few tweets may make you invisible while too many tweets can be overwhelming. I think it is more important to allow your Twitter stream to develop naturally, not to force yourself to send out Tweets just to make up the numbers.

Building your followers
The best-written and most interesting tweets in the world are no use unless someone is reading them. You will therefore want to develop your Twitter followers. When a Twitter user follows you it means that your tweets will appear on their incoming Twitter stream. If they follow you, you do not have to follow them back but you may wish to. Some Twitter etiquette guides suggest that it is rude not to reciprocate if someone follows you but I disagree. It is fine to follow just those Twitter users that you are interested in. On the other hand, you may want to build up your list of followers initially by following other Twitter users in the hope that they will follow you.

Unless you have protected your tweets (so that only those following you can read them) then your tweets will be readable by any Twitter user. One of the surprising things about Twitter is the extent to which activity generates followers. The more you Twitter, the more followers you gain. Some of these may be spam followers – accounts that are not genuine. These do not do much harm but you may still wish to block them. The Twitblock service (http://bit.ly/qEeif) helps to identify potential spam followers.

Depending on your objectives, you may wish to build followers from the media, your alumni, your staff and students, other similar organizations, policymakers or the general public. Remember that though it is easy to follow a Twitter account, it is just as easy to stop following! Your tweets therefore need to keep your followers interested.

You should also develop some guidelines on who you will follow, whether you will monitor their tweets, whether/when you will retweet (RT) their tweets and whether you will enter into conversations with them. You may wish to follow members of your institution who are Twitterers and retweet any tweets they write about the institution. They will probably appreciate the exposure and may be inspired to retweet you from time to time. Entering into conversation with followers through Twitter can be time-consuming if you have a large number of followers but can be rewarding and helps with relationship building.

You may also want to routinely monitor what is being said about your institution by others on Twitter, not just those who you follow. Various Twitter services allow you to do this. Again, you may want to enter into conversations in some cases.

Managing the activity
Different problems arise depending on whether the Twitter account is controlled by one person or a team of people. It is obviously easier to maintain consistency if there is a single Twitterer, but you need to consider what happens when that person is absent, and also make plans to sustain the activity if that person should leave the organisation. The activity needs to be embedded rather than just relying on the enthusiasm of one person. If a team of people are Twittering on the same account then guidelines and a way of coordinating are essential. It is important that the Twitter team are knowledgeable about the institution, especially if they will be responding to Tweets as well as generating them.

Another approach is to encourage Twitterers from within the institution to tweet on their own behalf but with an institutional slant. This can add to the overall volume of tweets coming out of the institution and adds personality but you need to be sure that the extra Twitterers will follow the institutional guidelines. If you are successful in recruiting extra Twitterers you may want to use one of the various Twitter tools to organise them into a group to make it easier to see all their activity.

A Twitter feed can be seen as a transient stream of messages that has no permanence or presence, but you may wish to preserve it or to display it on the institutional website. You can also display Twitter activity from other institutional twitterers. Brian Kelly has reviewed tools for preserving tweets (http://bit.ly/zLFks). Glen Stansberry has a good tutorial on how to integrate Twitter with your website (http://bit.ly/sAnc8).

It is good practice to include a statement on the website to make it clear who is providing the Twitter feed, the purpose of the service, policies on following other Twitter users and responding to comments, a privacy statement and a legal disclaimer.

Is it worthwhile?
Twitter is an important medium in 2009 and establishing an institutional presence makes good sense. It would be wise to review the situation after 6 or 12 months to judge whether the time spent on Twitter is still worthwhile, and whether the strategy is achieving results. The latter can be difficult to prove, but your number of followers and the number of times your messages have been retweeted give some indicator of your impact.

Conclusion
An institutional Twitter account can extend the reach of your existing communication channels. It can also provide a more human voice than other channels and shows the institution’s commitment to the digital world.

Further reading
JISCInvolve have provided a good overview of Twitter (http://bit.ly/ufVtz) and WeAreEmedia have links to other guides for the nont-for-profit sector (http://bit.ly/C0iV). There is an excellent guide to Twitter strategy from the UK Government (http://bit.ly/3wpN14) and very sound advice from Aaron Rester about using Twitter in Higher Education (http://bit.ly/Z1GG6). Paul Boag recently gave a presentation on using Twitter in an institutional context (http://bit.ly/30owF2). Brian Kelly has reviewed emerging best practice for institutional use of Twitter (http://bit.ly/EMmnP).

Frank Norman, MRC National Institute for Medical Research, The Ridgeway, London

Contrary to the statements I made in the last issue, I’m now – slightly – optimistic that Twitter makes sense. In the meantime, I have 160 followers on twitter.com/obsto, 43 on twitter.com/zbmed (unfortunately not any library user, I’ll come back to this later) and 26 on my private account. The number of your followers is the unerring impact factor of Twitter – 160 is not that much, the vanities in the library twittersphere (@librarycongress, @nypl) do have some thousands followers and real celebrities such as @google or @kevinrose run in the hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers.

The number of my postings in Twitter (remember, they’re called “tweets” or “updates”) grew to almost 400. Do not be under the impression that I have stopped working for my library – This was all done within the blink of an eye. To write your message in 140 characters or less is not as easy as it sounds, but you get accustomed and after some weeks it is far quicker and more convenient than to blog or write emails. In addition, with twitterfeed.com, I redirected my whole weblog postings to twitter – and I had nothing to do at all.

Don’t get confused
The only thing you have to keep in mind is, where you write what and to which source it will be redirected. That of course is true for the Web 2.0 in general: The tools are easy and straight forward, but if you redirect and forward your posts via Mashups to other social cites, it will get far more complicated. For example: do you write a wordpress blog? The plugin “Twitter Tools” [1] will post your blog entries automatically to your Twitter account. So far, so good. But Twitter Tools allows also the other way around: it will post your Tweets in the blog! Now beware: if you activate both options by mistake, both tools will run amok and pass on the entries to each other in eternity. Due to be networked/mashable character of the Web 2.0 this may happen with every tool. It is easy to lose track of the many Web2.0 sites, which you are using.

Is Twitter essential?
Twitter is certainly an important way to stay current on a lot of topics. Experts are twittering in many fields and can be followed. By selecting the people you’re following and by grouping them you can optimize your information gathering scheme. To follow too many people can be quite a hassle, so keep it small and simple. RSS makes looking for information far more comfortable, but maybe that’s because I’m already accustomed to it and follow only a hand-graded few resources.
On the other hand, Twitter is perfectly suited for libraries to get the news out. As I told before, its shortness and quickness aid the whole process of information pushing. And it’s a great advantage that you know your audience (your followers) by name.

Who follows you?
If I take a closer look on the 43 people who are following our library on Twitter, I have to confess that actually no-one is a user of our library. Guessing at the attitude of our students and doctors (I could easily perform a survey but I’m anxious), only 1% are using Twitter right away. It’s very much the same with RSS – nobody knows and nobody cares. Either the library is years ahead in using modern technology/Web2.0 or we are simply doing the wrong thing at the wrong time…

Nevertheless, the single most important parameter for successful twittering is to get your clients to follow you. Anne from the University of Hamburg [2] tells us, how this could be achieved:

• Identify a few Alpha Twitterers and made them to follow you.
• Look who is on the Web2.0-train; among science bloggers there are certainly many Twitterers.
• Announce your Twitter activities on your website, which usually attracts followers.
• To follow someone can be useful if you know him personally or he twitters on your library or you had responded to a tweet of his/her (actually most Twitterers are female – not surprisingly ).
• You can even turn into conversations; for instance if something is asked, and you as a library knows the answer, then just answer it.
• Take a look at your neighbourhood (see below).

Twitter Tools
How do you find fellow twitters in your neighbourhood? I was too lazy to look up Google and struggle through the results, so I simply twittered this question. Not surprisingly, I received hand-chosen results within minutes: One recommended nearbytweets.com, the other tweetmondo.com (but beware, they will tweet for you!). The third one works best for me: search.twitter.com (search with “near:Münster within:15km”) is great and seemingly quite customizable. Today I joined the group “Münster” at twittgroups.com, which organizes Twitter-like groups for universities and cities.

If you are too busy for Twitter or subscribe to hundreds of people, Twitter for busy people [3] lets us keep the persons, which you are following, quite organized.

1. http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress
2. http://log.netbib.de/archives/2009/06/23/bibliotheks-gewitscher-zum-erfolg-bringen/
3. http://www.twitterforbusypeople.com/index.html

I recently came across Twitter and gave it a try. I ended up with mixed feelings and therefore would like to give you some of my thoughts on this universe of fast and endless messages. Twitter is often defined as micro-blogging[1] or continuous chatting. Each “micro-blog post” or message is limited to 140 characters. Sending and receiving messages is for free. The Twitter social network results from your subscription to messages of other users and their subscriptions to your’s. Contrary to Facebook this can be highly asymmetric[2], as messages of some users are subscribed by hundred thousands whereas they subscribe to only a handful other people. Despite this subscription thing, your messages can be red by anyone worldwide and will be found by Google too.

To fully perceive what Twitter is all about, as with every new Web 2.0 stuff you have to experience it by yourself. Dig in the twitter ocean and literally “twitter at the top of your voice”. Therefore I strongly recommend that you do two things to become a twitter expert yourself, in that very order: First, open up a Twitter account at www.twitter.com, look up some people to follow (I suggest the usual suspects: davidrothman, digicmb, giustini, krafty, mlrethlefsen[3] … don’t follow too many people in the beginning). After a while lurking write your own tweets and see what happens.

To have a say in Twitter, you need to learn some Twitterspeak:

• Tweets: Each Twitter message is called a “tweet”.
• Following: If you subscribe to someone’s tweets it means you’re “following” him.
• Followers: People who subscribed to your tweets (in Facebook they are called “Fans”).
• #hashtag: Like in blogs, tweets can be tagged using keywords. Because in Twitter the tags are started with the hash sign (#), the tags are called hashtags.
• @username: You can address messages to certain users by writing their name starting with the @-sign. This is regarded as a reply, but of course anybody can read this message.

Fortunately there are many Twitter tools which make twittering more comfortable: If you are already writing a blog you can redirect your blog posts to become Twitter messages. You can reuse your tweets in Facebook or make RSS feeds out of them. [4]

Is Twitter just a gimmick?
If you look randomly at tweets you may get the feeling, that it’s an incredible bunch of personal, irrelevant banalities. It is the same with blogs. And again, mass media experts are highly critical about Twitter as they were prejudiced about blogs. But if you dig deeper, you may find precious pearls hidden in the vast ocean of blogs and the same holds true for Twitter. There is one difference: The blogger who posts rarely, if ever, private things will be more intimate on Twitter. The medium changes the message.

Twitter can be successfully used for…
Did you know that Twitter is the third biggest social network site on earth after Facebook and MySpace? How can libraries use this great portal successfully?

• Keep you up-to-date. Twitter is much more current than any other media and does a better job of getting news out, but remember that the needle maybe somewhat smaller (140) and the haystack has the size of the earth. Twitter makes it easy to recognize trends and ask questions: “What are people talking about right now?” You simply don’t get this material using the dinosaur search engines like Google.[5]
• Keep and get you in connection. When you follow a twitter guy, he will notice it and maybe as a result he follows you. So you get in contact with people, which allows you to quickly identify experts. Mashups like twitnest[6] and Mailana[7] will show you relationship networks between users and who is where interested on what (Fig.1: Mailana graph of people discussing the term “medlib”).
• Spread the word. The Research Medical Library at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center[8], twitter name: MDAndersonLib, posts regularly news about the library and has over 100 followers. lindyjb publishes an impressive list of hundreds “Libraries on Twitter”.[9]
• Live-twitter conferences (@mla2009), surgical procedures (#twor), or make real-time satisfaction surveys with immediate follow-up for problem resolution.[10]
• For more ideas take a look at Phil Bradley’s weblog: Using Twitter in libraries5, Twitter for Librarians: The Ultimate Guide[11], and iLibrarian: A Guide to Twitter in Libraries.[12]

Should I use Twitter?
Please notice, that the cost of being a technology evangelist can easily outstrip the received value.[13] Using Twitter can easily be addictive and eat up your day. Nevertheless I believe that as information professionals at least we have to know something about these new tools of communication. And now I would like to unveil the second thing you have to do to become an Twitter expert: watch the Current News video “Twouble with Twitter” from Super_Josh.[14] I hope it shakes your brain like it shook mine. Afterwards you will understand Twitter a lot better for sure.

________________________________________
[1] For a list of micro-blogging services go to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-blogging
[2] http://bokardo.com/archives/relationship-symmetry-in-social-networks-why-facebook-will-go-fully-asymmetric/
[3] Or follow the “GroupTweet for Medical Libraryfolk”, twitter name: medlibs. BTW: My favourite blogger, T Scott Plutchak, doesn’t twitter apparently, which makes him even more pleasant
[4] twitterfeed.com, http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/readme?project=twitter-tools
[5] http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2009/01/using-twitter-in-libraries.html
[6] http://twitnest.appspot.com/nest/index.html
[7] http://twitter.mailana.com/
[8] http://www3.mdanderson.org/library/ and http://twitter.com/MDAndersonLib
[9] http://lindyjb.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/libraries-on-twitter-updated-list/
[10] http://www.kraftylibrarian.com/2009/01/twitter-in-health-care.html
[11] http://www.collegeathome.com/blog/2008/05/27/twitter-for-librarians-the-ultimate-guide/
[12] http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/2007/a-guide-to-twitter-in-libraries/
[13] Dean Giustini: “Technology Evangelist? Well Yes & No” [http://blogs.ubc.ca/dean/2009/03/technology-evangelist-well-yes-no]
Bryan P. Bergeron: “The costs of being first: Can you afford to be a technology pioneer?” Postgraduate Medicine 105(3) 1999 [http://www.postgradmed.com/index.php?art=pgm_03_1999?article=644]
[14] http://current.com/items/89891774/twouble_with_twitters.htm

You will find several meanings for the acronym RSS – I stick to “Really Simple Syndication”. RSS is being used to distribute information. In contrast to HTML web pages or PDF documents, RSS-style information can be easily managed, manipulated, mixed or re-arranged and allows therefore for the syndication and synchronization of web pages.

RSS has experienced a widespread use in the last years. It is unique in contrast to other forms of web-based information such as HTML, Flash or PDF because you can subscribe to it. RSS is based on XML and, according to Wikipedia, it is one of the first applications of the Semantic Web. After the advent of desktop publishing in the 80s and the web pages in the 90s, RSS is considered the most important Internet technology of the 2000s. With RSS it is possible to control the flow of information far more effectively than with E-mail: with a click of the mouse you can subscribe/unsubscribe and so determine which information is “fed” to your desktop. RSS has become commonly used for dissemination of information in the scientific setting too. Some examples include:

• RSS feeds of newspapers, news and broadcasting agencies such as the Nature news feeds (1), Reuters consumer health eLine service (2), Yahoo health news (3) (with in depth subject categories) or the feeds from the National Library of Medicine, USA (4);
• PubMed searches can be subscribed as RSS feeds as well;
• scientific journals offer table of content services via RSS;
• libraries use RSS to inform their customers on opening hours, new services or acquisitions.

If you are looking for a directory of 6,000 medical RSS feeds, give Medworm a chance (5).

RSS feeds can be read by modern browsers, but to make the most out of RSS you should use a RSS reader such as Bloglines or Google reader. Please note that frequently RSS readers allow the up – and download of RSS feeds as socalled OPML files. This universal archiving format makes it easy to down- and upload comprehensive lists of RSS feeds.

How to create your own RSS feeds?
The easiest way to offer your own RSS feeds is to write a blog at platforms such as wordpress.com or blogger.org. These services automatically generate RSS feeds of your blog entries. So even if you do not promote the weblog as such, you could offer a RSS feed of the entries.

How to publish other people’s RSS feeds?
Because of the universal nature of RSS you can embed RSS feeds in any web page you like. For instance, the Google reader allows not only for easy reading of RSS feeds, but also for remixing und republishing them. Go to “Manage Subscriptions” and assign a folder name to some of the feeds you have subscribed to. You can choose from existing folders or create new ones.
Each feed can be assigned to more than one folder. Once this is done, go to “Folders and Tags” where you will find your folders listed with three options:

1. public page;
2. e-mail link;
3. add a clip to your site.

The “public page” lists all entries of the specific folders on a dedicated web page. The second lets you mail around the link to this page, and the third provides you with a HTML code, which you can embed in any web page you like. This code creates a window or a box with the collected news entries from the very folder you have chosen – whether it contains one RSS feed or hundreds. They are nicely sorted by date and you can choose from a number of layouts. The German Central Medical Library shows on its homepage an example of such a “news box”. You will find another example at the sidebar of the blog of NVB-BMI (6).

With this method you can easily enhance your library’s homepage or your blog with additional information which are updated dynamically without any further involvement of you. At our campus we promote two such news feeds:

• a feed of ongoing activities in our faculty, merged from news items from the university clinic, the Dean, the students and the library;
• a feed of medical news from all over Germany, merged from various resources such as scientific newspapers, blogs, and press agencies.

Our customers love this kind of service because previously they had to monitor dozens of web pages to find the information we now offer all in one place.

1. http://www.nature.com/webfeeds/
2. http://www.reutershealth.com/eline.rss
3. http://health.yahoo.com/news/rss/
4. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/listserv/rss_podcasts.html
5. http://www.medworm.com
6. http://biomedbiblog.blogse.nl

There is a common marketing rule, which seems to fit nicely to libraries in the digital age: “Use that very method of communication that the user prefers.” This may be Email, phone, face to face, SMS, Skype, ICQ, instant messaging, but also – increasingly – social networks. Email is out and social portals such as StudiVZ, MySpace or Facebook are “in”.[1]

A study on the communication behavior of the Millennials published by OCLC supports this experience: „It is to be expected that an online population equipped with do-it-yourself discovery tools will continue to expand their reach, as well as their desire to be self-sufficient, looking for information on their own in more and more places. Now experts themselves at search and find techniques, users naturally would move away from last-generation, “expert-based” information systems and gravitate to sites designed for them and by them, sites offering self service, quick access and limited rules. No authentication needed, no ILL forms to fill out, just free content and the tools to share it or create it.“ [2] As a result, the use of library web sites is decreasing. In Münster we made the experience that users visit our library’s homepage not by choice but by chance: The HTTP referrers tell us, that most visitors are referred to our library’s website from Google searches but not from local web sites. Millennials make more use of do-it-yourself discovery tools such as Google, social networks or recommendation systems than library web sites. As (real or self-assessed) experts they are more independent on library information services then one would like to know.

In that picture, social networking is more than just mingling with peers: “It is redefining roles, muddying the waters between audience and creator, rules and relationships, trust and security, private and public”[3] and between users and library, one may add. It is not sufficient to just pep up one’s library website with interactive features like RSS feeds, blogs or wikis. First you must ensure that the library’s homepage technically can act as a social meeting point and second that it is attractive enough for users to work with.

By that way: The demand to met the users where they are, is not new: “To continue to be vital to society, libraries must adopt new objectives. In particular, they must strive to participate with individuals in their cultural activities; passive, depersonalized service is no longer enough.” [Frederick Kilgour: “Evolving, Computerizing, Personalizing” American Libraries, February 1972]

The OCLC report recommended to increase the engagement of the library on social sites and many libraries, especially in the USA, have dependences at Facebook. My library created at first a profile on StudiVZ (Students Directory), the German competitor to Facebook[4] and with 4 Mio. users the largest social network in Germany. Even without much public relation, the library’s engagement was quickly recognized and welcomed. Students like this way to get in contact with the library management very much and obviously it lowered the barrier for interaction such as asking for improvements. Students even founded a group called “The residents of the medical library Münster” with about 70 members. From these informal contacts a joint taskforce for improvement of library services started.

Recently we opened a site on Facebook too. Facebook allows far more features than StudiVZ, and there are many EAHIL members too on Facebook to mingle with. Let me cite Anne Christensen, a colleague from the University Library of Hamburg[5], about the advantages of starting a library web site at Facebook:[6]

“For almost a year, it is possible at Facebook to build pages for products, companies or even libraries (yes, there is an extra-page type for libraries!). In the U.S., where Facebook is the market leader, the number of libraries with a Facebook presence increased rapidly. In relevant discussion forums there is an intense and ongoing debate about possible services from libraries via Facebook. Actually, a library page at Facebook is created easily: Upload a picture, addresses, opening hours, enter the RSS feed of your library’s blog: All in all no more than 10 minutes of work. Then: Wait for users (in Facebook there are called “fans”). Do not be afraid of the “empty restaurant” symptom, because within a few days, people will quickly learn about your new offer. Mainly students will be attracted, who know Facebook before (maybe because they were abroad) and are therefore used to an international platform for exchange. In 2007 we invited all our 90 fans to a (physical) workshop on literary management – the training room was full and the parallel Facebook page of the event became a lively discussion forum. What else could you do with a Facebook site? For example a widget to search your catalog, which could be installed by your fans on their own sites (making them even more self-sufficient). Other libraries offer instant messaging applications or a counseling service on Facebook. The list of potential activities is long.[7] My conclusion: Facebook is an ideal playground for libraries in social networks. With little effort you can present your library – and any RSS-based services such as blogs and book lists can easily be integrated. You can met students at eye level and present yourself as trendy.”

If you act as an individual in these social networks, you should note however, that not everybody loves the interference with administrative supervisor such as librarians. In ACRLog, “StevenB” made us aware of students, who like to be among themselves: [8] “For the most part, [administrators shouldn’t use Facebook]. I’d much rather they stay out of it. However, I do have one professor who is known for being fairly hip. He’s on Facebook and I have no problem with this because I know he’s not going to abuse that position.”

So it seems that, all in all, the only thing to worry about is not the use of Facebook by librarians but by students. A recent study reveals, that medical students’ use of social networks is far from being professional:[9] „One of the major findings of this study is that medical students and residents are using Facebook [unprofessionally]. Many medical students seem unaware of or unconcerned with the possible ramifications of sharing personal information in publicly available online profiles even though such information could affect their professional lives.” They concluded: “Medical educators need to become more involved in electronic social networking.”

________________________________________

[1] Marcus Banks: „Facebook is so much cooler than an Email address“ http://mbanks.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/01/facebook-is-so.html

[2] „Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World” http://www.oclc.org/reports/sharing/; http://www.oclc.org/reports/pdfs/sharing.pdf pg. 219

[3] footnote 2, pg.220

[4] StudiVZ is hold by Holtzbrinck, who also owns Macmillan Publishing.

[5] http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/Hamburg-Germany/Universitatsbibliothek-der-Technischen-Universitat-Hamburg-Harburg/20334581960

[6] Anne Christensen: „Bibliotheken in Facebook“ http://log.netbib.de/archives/2008/10/10/bibliotheken-in-facebook/

[7] See for example Sarah Elizabeth Miller and Lauren A. Jensen. “Connecting and Communicating with Students on Facebook” Computers in Libraries 27.8 (2007): 18-22. http://works.bepress.com/sarahmiller/1

[8] StevenB: „What students think of authority figures in Facebook” http://acrlog.org/2007/03/19/what-students-think-of-authority-figures-in-facebook/

[9] Justin M. Grimes, Paul T. Jaeger, Kenneth R. Fleischmann: „Medical students’ and residents’ use of online social networking tools: Implications for teaching professionalism in medical education“ First Monday 13(9):2008 http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2161/2026

Have you been in Helsinki? Then you surely noticed all those wonderful Web 2.0 tools that help librarians to communicate with their users and create community around their library. But all those tools are located at different places and each requires a specific login and password. Would it be possible to have the same functionalities at one place? Some Open source content management systems could help in some way, and among them, Drupal.

Drupal open source CMS
Drupal (http://drupal.org) is a content management system (CMS) using the common MySQL PHP technologies. A content Management System is a web-based software that allows you to add content to your Website without any knowledge of HTML. Drupal was created in 2000 by a Belgian student: Dries Buytaert. After its public release in 2002, it was rapidly sustained by a community of users and developers, among them some librarians. The evolution of the software is regular (version 4 in 2006, now in version 6.2) and support from free software services companies is available in several countries.

Description
The tree main concepts of Drupal are: nodes, modules and themes. Lets have a look.

Nodes
In Drupal, a « node » is the basic information element. A node is constituted of a title, a teaser and a content bloc. It has also some properties like the place published (first page or not), the comments options, the classifications, etc. By default, there are two node types: story (news) and page. Regarding the modules you activate, some other nodes type may appear like blog entry or forum message.

The core modules
«Out of the box », you will get a content management system with several core modules, some of them still need to be activated. The User module allows to create different roles with specific rights on the system. The first user is the administrator with all rights on the system. A user registered to one Drupal site may also be recognized on other sites thanks to OpenID. The taxonomy module allows you to define vocabularies (sets of categories) which are used to classify content. The module supports hierarchical classification and association between terms, allowing for truly flexible information retrieval and classification. Free tagging allows users to enter a free term into a thesaurus, users with taxonomy administration rights may then rearrange the thesaurus. A lot of third party modules enhance the taxonomy functionalities.

Every node may receive a comment feed ; forums can be rapidly installed ; blog is also available: every user may start his own blog within the site developed with Drupal. Drupal generates RSS feeds but also contain a RSS aggregator: several external feeds may be aggregated and presented within Drupal, each feed may be categorized.

Optional modules
Drupal has a lot of optional modules developed by third parties (http://drupal.org/projects/modules). These allow to rapidly and easily extend Drupal functionalities. But selecting one is sometimes a challenge: you must evaluate the ability of the module to be updated in the future, or be ready to do it on your own. Several module are indeed well maintained (since version 4), here follows a selection of the most common optional modules that could be of interest for a library.
Drupal has several WYSIWYG modules available. Those module allows to get the usual icons to format the text of a node. The administrator may choose to most suited one (TinyMCE, FKC editor, BUE, YUI….).
To enhance the presentation of nodes, the Views module is often used. The CCK module allows to add fields to specific node types in order to get structured information. It allows to build simple databases within Drupal. Those two modules are almost core modules.
A module allows to import and export data from Drupal ; another allows the basic database management within Drupal. Additional software, like PHPMyAdmin is thus not necessary. Authenthication may also occur via an external active directory thanks to the LDAP module.
Some modules also help to manage different languages within a single Drupal site.

The MARC module allows to import MARC records as nodes (for Drupal 6). The Z39.50 module allows to search external catalogues and present results. The Millenium Integration module allows to import bibliographic information from the Millenium WebOPAC and generates biblio type nodes.
The bibliography module allows show bibliographical references on a Website. It is fitted with an import function for common text files (RIS, BibTex) or Endnote format, and export as well. Some other additional modules may be added: normalize which normalize the names and faceted search which creates a link between the bibliography module and the faceted search module, and the OAI-PMH module will transforms your system into an OAI-PMH harvestable depot.

Themes
Layout is store in theme with page templates and cascading style sheets (CSS). It is easy to switch from theme, and the admin part of the site may have a different stye than the public.

Examples
Here, we provide some examples suited for libraries.

Providing an OPAC 2.0 with Drupal
A first example is SOPAC (social OPAC), based on Drupal 4.x and implemented at the Ann Harbour Library. It has not been updated for the most recent versions of Drupal (http://www.blyberg.net/2007/01/21/aadlorg-goes-social/). Another example is . It is based on the beta MARC module. (http://fish4info.org/).

Building a catalogue
Leo Klein, an American librarian that started the Drupal4lib discussion list, has produced an impressive screen-cast showing how to combine different modules to quickly set up a database catalogue on the Website of a library (http://chicagolibrarian.com/node/262). Another great example is provided by the tinytax module that allows to navigate into the taxonomy and list the related content, like the MeSH browser. (http://sandbox.scratchpads.eu/)

Creating collaborative documents
Drupal is not a wiki system, but it has the « book » concept. This is a set of node hierarchically organized with a table of content. Drupal handles rights management and may store the different versions of a node.
An interesting example is the support site of Biblioscape (http://support.biblioscape.com). In this case, the edition is limited to a specific group of editors.

Building an internet / intranet
Drupal is powering a lot of well known websites, including libraries websites (http://drupalib.interoperating.info/library_sites). One nice thing is that Drupal may handle multi-sites: each site has its own folder with specific database connection infos, modules and themes folder. All sites are thus run by the same Drupal, facilitating the update process that must occur once only. But each site has its own look and feel.

Conclusion
Drupal is a mature Open source project and has been adopted by a large amount of Webmaster, including librarians. Drupal offers indeed a lot of opportunities to develop into one site several services for the users, and give them several tools to participate to the library life. More than an Content Management System, Drupal is an open source social publishing system that should be considered for any project related to diffusion of information by librarians. For more information, visit DrupalLib (http://drupalib.interoperating.info/), join the librarians Drupal group (http://groups.drupal.org/libraries) and subscribe to the Drupa4Lib mailing list (http://listserv.uic.edu/archives/drupal4lib.html)

Patrice Chalon, MSc, Knowledge Manager, KCE – Belgian Health Care Knowledge Centre, Brussels, Belgium

Last issue I put your attention on wikis, the Web 2.0 tool behind – for example – Wikipedia. I pointed to some useful health related wikis and the ease of editing Wikipedia pages (hopefully you didn’t edit that entry on EAHIL too much …). Today I found a nice definition: “Wiki pages look and act like normal web pages, except they have an ‘Edit’ link that makes it easy to modify existing pages and add new pages”.[1] In the meantime I was able to play a little bit around with some wikis – as well software to be installed as web hosts. Here are my experiences:

PBworks (formerly PBwiki)

If you look for an thoroughly easy way to start a wiki by yourself, there is no way around hosted wikis[2]. PeanutButter Wiki[3] (PBWiki) is a cute example and definitely worth a try:You can just cut&paste whole web sites into the editor and PBWiki will understand it – no need for sophisticated reformatting and remembering that ##xyz## is for bold and [[url anchor]] is for a hyperlink. That feature is a great benefit if you don’t start from the scratch, but have already some web pages to build on.

• You can embed any RSS feed in your wiki’s sidebar.
• You can choose from three layouts.
• You don’t have to bother on technique, software, security, spam, storage, etc.

Take a look at the zbmed wiki, which I created in half an hour for our medical library.[4] PBWiki is for free, but – of course – you can upgrade for a fee. Eight dollars a month will give you seven layouts, 1GB storage, and RSS feeds for each page not only the start page. Even if the advertising mails are sometimes boring, the human support will reply to your questions in time (although they didn’t know, why the use of their new point-and-click editor crashed my FireFox browser). There were no problems with Microsoft Internet Explorer.

PmWiki

On their server, the University Zürich provides PmWiki for faculty, staff, and students. With this wiki software, Anna Schlosser from the Medical Library Careum[5] successfully created a wiki for internal management purposes. PmWiki[6] can be downloaded for free by anyone, it needs only PHP-support – a prerequisite nearly every web server provides. It comes with a nice and well organized layout, which can be modified by skins and templates. By using extensions (‘recipes’)[7] one can customize the wiki greatly and add new mark-up.

MediaWiki

If you think in terms of user friendliness and acceptance, MediaWiki[8] should be one of the first options: It’s the very wiki software Wikipedia is based on. It’s free and can be installed on any web server with PHP and MySQL (but beware, it’s really huge) and provides the look & feel of Wikipedia to your wiki. Virtually anybody which you would like to make happy with a wiki is already acquainted with Wikipedia, so MediaWiki will be a real advantage. If you don’t have access to a server or don’t like to install and maintain hundreds and thousands of files, MediaWiki can also be used via hosted server, e.g. at WikiCities.[9]

WikkaWiki is a “flexible, standards-compliant and lightweight wiki engine”.[10] It is released under an Open License and can be used by anyone. It strikes me, because of its many features:

• It’s much more plain and clearly laid out than MediaWiki and therefore easier to administrate.
• It stores the pages in a MySQL database, so I could “just copy” my respective blog entries to the wiki.
• Such as MediaWiki it can be installed on any standard web server which supports PHP and MySQL.
• And last but not least: I know the developer

How can you make use of wikis?

At my library’s blog we have a category called FAQ – Fragen & Antworten.[11] There we offer and archive the frequently asked questions of our customers and the respective answers of the library. Recently it became clear to us that for this kind of knowledge database a blog isn’t that useful at all. The about 100 FAQ entries were partly outdated, not linked to each other, and not easy accessible because there were buried in the huge overall blog. Both to promote this special set of information to our customers and to benefit from the wiki features, we created a distinct point of access by converting the FAQ entries to a WikkaWiki wiki[12] (Fig.1). The advantages:

• Tremendously easy creating, modifying, and linking of pages: Just type a word with a capital in between such as MedicCenter and the wiki will embed a link to that respective page. If the page does not exist, a click on the link will let you create that page from the scratch.
• A “Page History” preserves older versions of a page and makes it possible to restore it.
• The reader can comment on the entries such as in blogs. If you don’t mind, the readers can even modify them.
• The list of “Recent Changes” to your wiki pages keep you informed of what’s going on. Of course, you can subscribe via RSS to every page. If you write for instance a page on PubMed and keep it updated, the user will be currently aware, if there are downtimes or new features or whatsoever happened with that database.
• You can fine-tune access and browsing by providing categories.

Knowledge-Wiki of the Medical Library Münster

A second usage for a wiki which hits you right in the face is the library homepage itself. With WikkaWiki you can easily create a homepage in no time, with Pbwiki you don’t even need a server and get your own web address in addition. Or make use of a wiki for promoting conferences. For the example, the organizers of the EAHIL conference at Helsinki choosed Atlassian Confluence[13], an “Enterprise solution wiki”, for their nice
programme web site.[14]

Since years I had hesitated to take a closer look at wikis, because I was already satisfied by the features of weblogs and tried to concentrate on that tool. But now I’m somewhat overwhelmed and excited by the power of wikis. I will explore this Web 2.0 tool further and let you know.

________________________________________

[1] http://www.pmwiki.org/
[2] http://pascal.vanhecke.info/2005/10/30/free-hosted-wikis-comparison-of-wiki-farms/
[3] http://www.pbworks.com/
[4] http://zbmed.pbworks.com/
[5] http://www.hbz.unizh.ch/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=334
[6] http://www.pmwiki.org/
[7] http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Cookbook
[8] http://www.mediawiki.org/
[9] http://www.wikia.com/index.php/Wikicities
[10] http://wikkawiki.org/
[11] http://zbmed.uni-muenster.de/aktuelles/category/faq/
[12] http://medbib.klinikum.uni-muenster.de/wiki/
[13] http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/
[14] https://wiki.helsinki.fi/display/EAHILScientificProgramme/Home

The proposed National Library in Bucharest

• Dr. Wiki[17] is an online repository of medical information with approved physician-only authors;
• Ganfyd[18] is a collaborative medical reference by medical experts and invited non-medical experts;
• PubDrug[19] is an open-access drug database;
• WiserWiki[20], sponsored by Elsevier, is a book (Textbook of Primary Care Medicine, 3rd Edition 2000, by John Noble), which will be continuously updated by invited physicians;
• UBC Health Library wiki[21] is an knowledge database for health librarians run by Vancouver University of British Columbia, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies;
• LIS-Wiki[22] is dedicated to Library and Information Science. For example, a list of Weblogs for medical librarianship[23] is managed here;
• Be sure to take a look at David Rothman’s “More on wikis for health librarians”[24] or the interdisciplinary directory Wiki-Index[25] (about 3.000 wikis, incl. a Harry Potter wiki[26]).

Quite a lot happened in the Medical Librarians Blogosphere since the last issue of this column – as well professionally as personally. Besides hundreds of individual blogs from medical librarians, there were only a handful “official” ones, inaugurated by professional organizations to announce and discuss professional topics in the members. The MLA comes with two official blogs which are worth watching. MLA president Mark Funk reports in his blog Only Connect! irregularly on his presidential duties, travels, and experiences in the office.[1] Secondly, the Task Force on Social Networking Software (SNSTF)[2], started a blog working on Web 2.0 software, suggested guidelines for MLA units or members wanting to collaborate via social software like. SNSTF is discussing hot themes like “Is staying current even possible?” and “love to hear your comments / nightmares / opinions on keeping up with 2.0 technology”.[3] For me it was a big relief to hear that even the technophile and most modern Americans librarians suffer from the rapid changes in our professional environment… The SNSTF did a survey of MLA members’ use and attitude towards Web 2.0. About 500 responded, and many claimed that some important web2.0 sites or applications are being blocked at their hospital due to tight security rules and firewalls. The results are made public as a 19 pages PDF full of charts.[4] The SNSTF concluded: “It is clear from the survey that new social networking technologies are important to MLA members, but only up to a point. While MLA members understand that these technologies may be important, they do not always see a personal or professional use in them (yet!).” [5]

Nearly unnoticed by the public, two blogs dedicated to medical library conferences were founded. They intend to provide information and news on the conferences, their organization, venues, social attractions, as well as topics and speakers way before they started. One could get a lot of insights and ideas long before (and after) the few days of the event itself. Take a look and be sure to leave some comments!

- 10th International Congress on Medical Librarianship, Brisbane, Australia[6]
- 11th European Conference of Medical and Health Libraries, Helsinki, Finland[7]

I’m fearing having to change my preferences, as my favourite blogger, The Krafty Librarian,[8] who regularly provides me with important news, details, and thoughts, is leaving her job.[9] Even though it isn’t yet clear, if the new job permits her to keep on blogging, I’m still anxious that this valuable source of information could dry out and nobody would point me ever again to exciting news such as “Librarians can help decrease hospital length of stay”[10] or “Are College Students Techno Idiots?”[11].

David Rothman is one of the most indefatigable bloggers around, and as a result his blog davidrothman.net – Exploring Medical Librarianship and Web Geekery is the only one who is ranked in the top 10 healthcare blogs worldwide.[12] Congratulations! However, David recently suffered a spontaneous pneumothorax[13] and had slow down blogging for some time. Now – back again at his job – he feeled seriously pooped.[14] Nevertheless, his personal experience taught us much about thoracic surgery and NEJM videos on chest-tube insertion[15] as well as the benefits of the generous use of anaesthesia and conscious sedation.

Viewing at the medical librarian bloggership from a distance, one could get easily excited about their splendid variety. Not two share a common scope, each one express his or her own unique motivation, is written in a personal and characteristic way. For example, Krafty is writing from the essential day-to-day needs of a medical librarian, David collects all information sources one could imagine, Guus[16] will tell us everything on Second Life, and I posts everything what I think a German medical librarian ought to know.[17]

The blog of T.Scott[18] is unique in a different way. The MLA board member and former chief editor of the JMLA writes very personally and vivaciously about his life, wife, grandchild, playing in a band, loosing his hat – everything. When he writes about the profession, one really has to pay attention, because nobody is thinking so profoundly and thoughtfully as he does. A look at his two last blog entries may serve as a proof. Ethical boundaries for medical librarians[19] or Debating OA at the Charleston conference[20] contains many things like “libraries will become more marginalized in higher education institutions“, „there are plenty of potential hazards along the way [to Open Access]“, or „I don’t want to hear anymore about what we need to do to make ourselves relevant so that our libraries can survive“. First it’s amazing and even embarrasing, but then … I love the thought provoking kind of T.Scott quite much. It’s absolutely essential to get to know what really moves us.

________________________________________

[1] http://president.mlanet.org/mfunk/
[2] http://sns.mlanet.org/blog/
[3] http://sns.mlanet.org/blog/2007/09/20/is-staying-current-even-possible/
[4] http://www.mlanet.org/survey/snssurvey_public_charts.pdf
[5] http://sns.mlanet.org/blog/2007/09/24/what-mla-members-told-us-about-social-networking/
[6] http://icml2009.blogspot.com/
[7] http://eahil2008.blogspot.com/
[8] http://www.kraftylibrarian.com/
[9] http://kraftylibrarian.com/2007/10/new-job.html
[10] http://kraftylibrarian.com/2007/10/librarians-can-help-decrease-hospital.html
[11] http://kraftylibrarian.com/2006/11/are-college-students-techno-idiots.html
[12] http://edrugsearch.com/edsblog/google-reader-subscriber-totals-for-the-top-20-health-and-medical-blogs/
[13] http://davidrothman.net/2007/09/14/this-blog-is-on-pause/
[14] http://davidrothman.net/2007/10/16/pooped/
[15] http://content.nejm.org/cgi/video/357/15/e15/
[16] http://digicmb.blogspot.com/
[17] http://medinfo.netbib.de
[18] http://tscott.typepad.com/tsp/
[19] http://tscott.typepad.com/tsp/2007/10/ethical-boundar.html

[20] http://tscott.typepad.com/tsp/2007/10/debating-oa-at-.html

Podcast is short for “iPod Broadcasting”, because it all started with the iPod from Apple Computers. Podcasting is nothing but MP3 files broadcasted to the public. Meanwhile, it’s common for big journal publishers and press agencies to offer information in form of audio or video files. Radio or television stations use podcasts to offer their programmes around the clock, that one can enjoy them whenever he or she likes to.

Subject podcasts

From among the scientific podcasts, most well-known are the ones from Nature on the fields Chemistry, Genetics, Heredity, Neuroscience, and Nature itself (http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index.html). Quite a few universities and medical schools use podcasts for promotional and educational purposes as well, top examples worth to mention are the John Hopkins University health podcast, “a lively discussion of the week’s medical news and how it may affect you” (http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/mediaII/Podcastsinstructions.html) or the Medical Edge podcasts of the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, “making the daily audio and weekly video health news more convenient and accessible than ever before, and feature general health and people-focused stories covering medical breakthroughs and compelling health information“ (http://www.mayoclinic.org/podcasts/). Medical subject specific podcast could cover a range as broad as continuing education video courses for paradontologists (University of Münster), the American Heart Association’s podcast for the general public “on ways to lower your risk for cardiovascular disease and stroke” (http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=3037153) or the Rheumatology Radio “the very first Rheumatology PodCast over the Internet” (http://rheumatologyradio.blogspot.com/). An extensive and updated list of podcasts in the field medicine is offered by Krafty Librarian at http://www.kraftylibrarian.com/podcasts2.doc.

Library podcasts

Medical Libraries too came across this new medium and tried to examine the benefits accompanied. So did the Health Sciences Library of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, which offers podcasts “that summarize highlights of library workshops and orientations that students can view in about 5 minutes or less. Podcasts include information on health information resources, database search strategies, literature and resource guides, Internet safety tips, general orientation to the library, and more. New library podcasts will be posted each month.” (http://library.utmem.edu/media/podcasting/Podcast/Podcast.html).

The central medical library of the University of Münster, Germany, uses a podcast called “Wochenrückblick” (review of the week) to provide an continuous stream of news and information to its clients. The podcast summarize what happened in the library in the last weeks, which new e-books, e-journals, and databases are on the shelf or which budget constraints the library has to cope with. Introduction courses on how to search medical literature or how to use the library are planned. The podcast episodes can be subscribed – as everything in the Web 2.0 – via a news or RSS feed (http://medbib.klinikum.uni-muenster.de/mp3/podcast.xml). The weekly reviews can be supplemented by any material which you think is of benefit to your customers. For instance, training sessions or conference presentations can be recorded and broadcasted instantly. For me, a personal digital assistant (PDA) put on my talking desk worked quite satisfactorily.

Podcast Feeds

New versions of the browsers Firefox or Internet Explorer recognize RSS Feeds automatically, and therefore also Podcasts. With common stand alone newsreaders such as Bloglines or Feeddemon you can subscribe podcasts like any other news feed. However, only with dedicated podcasts clients, called Podcatcher, you can download and manage podcasts really comfortable (you may find a list at http://wiki.podcast.de/Podcatcher). They enable they easy subscription, announcement, playing, burning, and synchronization with a MP3-Player. The most well-known Podcatcher in town is iTunes from Apple. What do you need technically to create your own podcast? There are surprisingly few gears needed:

Hardware

As explained above, you can start with the built-in microphone on a laptop or a PDA or a MP3 player. However, for a better quality you have to buy external microphones or computer headsets. On the other hand of the price range I would like to suggest a dedicated mobile device such as the Edirol R-09 from Roland (http://www.thomann.de/de/edirol_r09.htm) (which I use with an external Sennheiser microphone by that way). As an free application for recording and editing WAV files I use Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), which is available both for Windows and Mac. Audacity is able to export audio files as MP3s if you add an free MP3 encoder such as the LAME Encoder (http://www.free-codecs.com/Lame_Encoder_download.htm). iTunes can also convert recordings to MP3.

Software

There are various software applications specialized in producing podcasts. You may find a suitable list at Podcasting Software (http://www.podcastingnews.com/topics/Podcasting_Software.html). Here comes a selection of software: Podcast Maker (Mac, http://www.lemonzdream.com/), MAGIX Podcast Maker (http://site.magix.net/deutsch/startseite/musik-produkte/podcast-maker-e-version/), Jvw Podcast creator (http://www.jvwinc.com/podcast-creator.php), Open Source Podcast Generator – (http://podcastgen.sourceforge.net/).

Finally the feed

When you have your podcasts recorded successfully, the only thing which is left is to upload the MP3 files on a server and the offer them as a feed by an XML file. Put simply, Podcast are MP3 files offered via a RSS Feed. To create Podcast Feeds you can use one of the Podcast Makers mentioned above or a dedicated software like Podcast RSS creator (http://www.softpedia.com/get/IPOD-TOOLS/Podcast/podcast-RSS-creator.shtml). Even easier to start from the scratch are web sites, where you simply fill out fields that are used to generate the RSS file in need. Examples are Podcastblaster (http://www.podcastblaster.com/) or Podcast RSS Feed Generator (http://www.tdscripts.com/webmaster_utilities/podcast-generator.php). At some sites you can set up an account, to go back and add new MP3 files. Or you add new episodes by simply text editing the generated XML file. All you need to do is to duplicate the text bordered by the tags and manually enter the required information, e.g. Review Nr. 03, woche03.mp3, and so on – that’s it!

The Beta version of the new EAHIL Toolbar is now available at http://eahil.ourtoolbar.com. I don’t know where exactly I was when I thought about creating a EAHIL Toolbar, but it must have been somewhere in Krakow, while thinking about other EAHIL members and their hospitals, libraries and organizations, realizing we form a great community to use some community tools such as Toolbars or maybe even a social network tool like Ning or Facebook. It could even have been in bed, not being able to sleep after the great fireworks and the grand dinner at Folwark. So, first, a toolbar right in your browser, so you have EAHIL always next to you.

Fig. 1

CONNECT
Do you want to feel closer to EAHIL members and be able to make contact between EAHIL members easier? You now can access the EAHIL site with one click or go to the Membership login page directly.

CHAT
Or do you want to start a CHAT session with other EAHIL TOOLBAR-users from within your browser, no installation of chat-software involved?

SEARCH
You could start searching right away in: Medical Libraries Blogs, Cochrane Reviews, Google Scholar, Medical Dictionary (Merriam Webster), MerckManual, OAISTER, PUBMED, SUMSearch, Trip databases, Scirus, Wikipedia & Worldcat. (Fig. 2) Type your search term and choose your preferred search engine/database and go! You don’t even need to type in a word, just mark a phrase in the website you’re watching and this phrase is automatically transferred to the search box of the toolbar.

Fig. 2

NEWS
You can keep up with what is going on in Medical Librarianship via the News feeds. Hundreds of resources are scanned on a daily basis and offered to you in one simple overview. (Fig. 3) You can scan what the medical librarians are blogging about and of course the European Medical Librarians Blog is included. You can actually see the news scrolling over your screen, being updated every hour.

Fig. 3

LINKS
The Toolbar contains all the links to content of the EAHIL official website and in one clear overview, including previous & future conference links, as well as access to the JEAHIL & Newsletter. (Fig. 4)

Fig. 4

PODCAST
As a bonus you can listen to Medical Podcasts of JAMA, NEJM and INfoPOEMS via this toolbar.

Many things are possible and this is only a start. Is it a good start? Let me know. We will adjust the Toolbar to the wishes of the community of EAHIL members and hope to be discussing the functionality of the Toolbar in our future meetings. An extended manual will be available soon, but here are some useful details.

WORTH KNOWING
Installation of the EAHIL Toolbar is possible for Internet Explorer and FireFox. Librarians should choose FireFox because of the wonderful options it offers to create library presence in the browser. Uninstallation is possible via Control Panel Add/Remove. The toolbar is save, without a doubt. Don’t let IT folks tell you otherwise. It can however use some of your Internet connection while refreshing the feeds and the News ticker. Make it (in)visible in your browser by View; Toolbars, (de)select. Use Toolbar Options (next to the EAHIL-logo) to adjust the components and settings that YOU want to use or to shrink/unshrink the toolbar. Have a look at http://Librarytoolbar.blogspot.com to see some extra info about how to do things with Toolbars including the Workshop “How To Make a Library toolbar”. Any questions and/or remarks about the EAHIL toolbar can be directed to the author:

Guus van den Brekel, Central Medical Library, University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG), The Netherlands.

Starting a weblog can be as easy as to write an E-Mail. Content is King: Knowledge about technology or HTML is not necessary, the author can concentrate himself just on the content. 175,000 blogs are created each day – altogether 70 millions weblogs world-wide witness from the popularity of this idea (as of April 2007, doubling rate every 12 months). There are various tools for the creation and maintenance of weblogs. Most easy to use are free web sites like blogger.com (now Google) or wordpress.com. It really works as in the advertisements: 1, 2, 3, finished!

If you choose one of the freely accessible software packages such as wordpress.org or movabletype.org instead, it becomes somewhat more difficult, because they have to be installed on your own web site. But then you are much more flexible and could adapt the blog in accordance to your very needs and requirements. The WordPress software used by the author for various weblogs is open source, the most widespread blog software around, and based on the ubiquitous PHP script and mySQL database. Everyone with even some knowledge in IT can probably help if you encounter problems. If you choose to buy some server space on the web, it can be as cheap as 5 Euros per month to get PHP and mySQL support.

Tools

There is a multiplicity of tools to add value to your blog and thereby strengthen the interaction with your readers. Some are related to RSS (universal language to syndicate content): Tools to extract RSS, tools to merge RSS, tools to manipulate RSS. Some are coming from Google or other comopanies such as conduit.com. But most are Plugins, made available by the giant developer community of wordpress http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/. Many are just nice, some are useful, but that one is really indispensable: Akismet for filtering and deleting comment spam. Further useful Plugins are:

• AutoClose Comments supports the protection against comment spam.
• Get Recent Comments shows, like the name implies, the most current comments, as well as references from other Blogs (Trackbacks). Both promote networking and interactivity.
• WP-Polls let you make votes on your blog.
• Simple tagging permits the tagging of blog posts and the display of ‚related posts’. 
• Amazon Media Manager serves announcement and discussion of new acquisitions and is very useful for libraries.

If you use one of the web-based blog hosts, there are less features. However, they offer little “functionality boxes”, called widgets or page elements, which you can drag&drop into the layout template of your blog.

Fig.1: Enhancing the blog with widgets

Feedscrapers

The so called Feedscrapers enable you to extract an RSS feed from literally every web page with list entries. This is extremely useful, if the web page does not offer a RSS feed. A typical example are the press announcements of my university clinic. They display the news to the clinic’s homepage by means of a PHP/mySQL script, however a RSS feed was not offered. After some failed attempts with various Feedscrapers, finally I manage to extract the news with feed43.com and transform them into a regular RSS feed. Now I can universally re-use these news, mixed them with other feeds, and offered them to anyone – in the library’s blog, in the library’s toolbar or in every web pages I desire.

Google Reader

Google reader can be used as a reader for RSS feeds only, but also you can publish public pages with it (“sharing/public pages”). You just define which of your own, subscribed feeds or posts you want to share with the public (“shared items”) by tags or by manually selecting posts. Like competing services such as feedburner.com or feeddigest.com, Google reader offers a HMTL code, which permits the imbedding of the feed into any web page. You will find a nice example at the sidebar of biomedbiblog.blogse.nl.

Yahoo Pipes

Only recently, Yahoo! started a Web2.0-service called Yahoo Pipes, which raised the idea of feed manipulation to a new level. It has a great flexibility; owing to the object-oriented interface you can arrange and work on every feed in the simplest way. The following image shows the Yahoo Pipe for the English translation of the weblog medinfo.

Fig.2: Yahoo Pipe for the translation of medinfo

Library Toolbar

Inspired by Guus van the Brekel of the UB Groningen, since 2004 our library is offering the free toolbar of conduit.com. The purpose was to promote our news feeds with this congenial toolbar, which could be easily installed by users and docks on their browsers. The library toolbar brought an powerful answer for two of the greatest challenges of today: The growing remoteness of the (scientific) user, and the fight for the browser’s start page. The toolbar supplies the catalogues and data bases of the library seaming less to the user. Independently of the very web site the user is viewing, with one click he can use the most important library services, were it catalogs, data bases, news feeds, or can immediately return to the library’s homepage. In order to gain the user, further useful sources were integrated: The German phone directory, the university phone directory, the Google PageRank, the University News, the University Clinics News, local weather forecasts etc. pp. – the toolbar permits almost unlimited extensions. Don’t miss Guus’ workshop at Krakow on Building a Library Toolbar!

First published in Journal of the EAHIL 3(2): 40-43 (2007)