medinfo

Library Journal’s 2007 Movers and Shakers

2. April 2007 by ob | Kategorien: Bibliotheken

[Thanks to Krafty] (Peter hatte kürzlich in Bibliothek2.0 vorgeschlagen, auch so eine Liste für Deutschland aufzustellen.)
Congratulations to LJ’s 2007 Movers and Shakers! Again there a lot of interesting things that librarians are doing and here is just a sampling of some of them. While I think all of the shaker and movers deserve the recognition, I am going to highlight a few of them that might be of interest to the medical library community.

Casey Bisson Have you ever complained about your OPAC and how un-friendly it is to regular library users? Well Casey Bisson, troubled by the fact that most people start their research in general search engines, which usually do not search libraries’ content and information, created Scriblio. Scriblio “provides keyword searching, faceted searching and browsing, stable URLs for easy linking, and an easily configurable record display.” According to code4lib, Wordpress-based catalog and he source code has not yet been released (current production versions are based off Innovative Interfaces data). You can see the software in action at http://www.plymouth.edu/library/opac/.

Ross Singer
If his name sounds familiar to this blog it is because I have mentioned him and his creation, Umlaut, before. Umlaut is a personalized link resolver. While not a standalone link resolver, “it attempts to bridge library services more efficiently.” Usability testing revealed that Georgia Tech’s SFX link resolver was confusing to patrons and Umlaut was intended to help ease the confusion. It combines information from an OpenURL Link Resolver program, with web content from Amazon.com and WorldCat.org. One of the greatest things is that Umlaut is open source and can be used in any library. For more information on Umlaut you can look at OCLC’s pages or Umlaut-Trac. Try Umlaut at http://umlaut.library.gatech.edu/.

Amanda Etches-Johnson
As one of the organizers of the Five Weeks to Social Library, she provides free, online courses devoted to social software and its use in libraries. She is the the User Experience Librarian at McMaster University Library, author of blogwithoutalibrary.net, and set up the Blogging Libraries Wiki.

Denise Koufogiannakis
A former health sciences librarian and creator and former editor of Librarians’ Rx, applied her knowledge of evidence-based medicine to become “a key driver in the International Evidence-Based Librarianship movement.” As co-founder of the new open access journal Evidence-Based Library and Information Practice, she has provides a “forum for librarians and other information professionals to discover research that may contribute to decision making in professional practice.”

Lorely Ambriz
A librarian for Pan American Health Organization, her primary responsibility was creating the Border Health Virtual Library web site. The Border VHL is a “gateway to scientific and technical information on health in the Internet. Its objective is to contribute towards the social development and equal access to information. It provides a collection of sources of information on health in the border line (scientific and technical literature databases, directory of institutions, projects and specialists related to health on the border, etc.).

Jill Grogg
Before the first commercially available link resolver was available, Jill coauthored an article on linking and OpenURL and has since published extensively on the subject. She has become the “go-to person on anything to do with linking,” for Searcher magazine. She believes link resolvers offer a patrons an immediate and seamless access to electronic content.

Anita Coleman
With little more than a $5000 grant (for a server), graduate students, and volunteer help, Anita began an open access archive for information sciences called dLIST. She encouraged people to contribute to dLIST by self archiving their work and by serving as subject editors. dList includes journal articles, conference presentations, technical reports, and LIS books and papers.

Again congrats to all of the 2007 Movers and Shakers. If you know somebody who you think is movin’ and shakin’ the library world, nominate them for 2008!