------------------------------------- WMLA Newsletter Online November 1997 (Volume 18, Issue 4) ------------------------------ Letter from the WMLA President ------------------------------ Welcome to the inaugural issue of the electronic WMLA newsletter! I want to express my deep appreciation to Bill Gembala for his hard work and creativity in developing both the WMLA web site and the electronic version of the newsletter. I encourage all WMLA members to make use of the Web site - and to contribute items for inclusion in the newsletter. We all need to remember, Bill has agreed to be the EDITOR of the newsletter, not the writer of the entire thing. Apart from the development of the Web site, WMLA has had a pretty quiet year in 1997. As you remember we decided not to hold our annual spring meeting , since the MLA meeting in Seattle required lots of work on the part of many WMLA members. The traditional breakfast meeting at PNC was also canceled at the last minute due to a lack of registration. I am hopeful that this was just an unusual year and that 1998 will bring our members back into a more active group. To this end, I have agreed to take leadership responsibility for the 1998 annual meeting. I have already received a few ideas for both locations and speakers and would gladly consider additional suggestions - as well as people to serve on the committee. I'd also like ideas for potential CE courses . Please contact me soon if you would be willing to help out. The plan is to hold the meeting in April - look for more details soon! I was able to represent WMLA in August as one of several invited speakers at the Washington State Health Information Managers Association (WSHIMA) meeting. The meeting was on the use of the Internet/Intranet in Healthcare and I was part of a group that included speakers from Group Health, IBM and Microsoft. It was a great opportunity to showcase medical librarians, and was, hopefully the first of many such collaborative efforts. Our two organizations share many common interests and skills and the chance to share resources and talents seems to make a lot of sense. As the year comes to an end it's time to select a slate of officers for 1998. Val Lawrence, as President Elect, will be chairing the Nominating Committee. I know she would appreciate willing volunteers to serve on her Executive Board, rather than having to strong-arm people into serving. If you have ANY interest please contact me or Val (valerie@halcyon.com) right away! It's not a lot of work, looks great on a resume, helps with your MLA credentialling requirements and is generally a good idea! Best wishes for a happy holiday season! Cheryl Goodwin cgoodwin@pmcprov.org 206-320-2425 ------------------------- From the Editor's Cubicle ------------------------- I'd like to thank Cheryl and the WMLA Board for their confidence in me. I hope to make the WMLA Newsletter Online a publication of which we can be proud. It will be a new experience, and I hope that the WMLA membership will have patience and express any problems that they have with the new format. If there are things you would like to see, or things that you would rather not see, please drop me a line (gembala@u.washington.edu). I would also like to make an appeal to the membership to submit articles! I am looking for any kinds of articles that you can provide. Do you have a pilot project going on in your library? A compilation of interesting statistics? Book or software reviews? How about a nifty Web site that you used recently? The bottom line is, I hope to have each WMLA member submit something to the Newsletter in the next year. With the Newsletter in electronic format, mailing costs are no longer a factor--so feel free to be as eloquent or as brief as you like. Please see the WMLA Newsletter Online homepage (http://www.wmla.org/newsletter/index.html) for instructions on how to submit material for publication. I look forward to hearing from you! --Ed. Bill Gembala gembala@u.washington.edu (206) 616-7106 ----------------------------- From the Membership Secretary ----------------------------- Have you renewed your membership to WMLA for 1998? It is now very easy to renew! The WMLA Web site has a membership form, at http://www.wmla.org/member.html. You just need to print it, add a check for $15.00, and send both to: Martha Means WMLA Membership Secretary Box 357155 Health Sciences Library University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195-7155 To those members that have already renewed, thank you for your support of WMLA! ---------------------------- Software Review : WebWhacker ---------------------------- By Martha Means Research Funding Service Health Sciences Library and Information Center University of Washington Many of you have had the experience of frantically trying to get a World Wide Web connection to function five minutes before you had to give a presentation--or worse--as the audience was taking its seats. It is not a pleasant experience. There is software that can help. WebWhacker, created by Forefront, http://www.ffg.com/whacker/index.html, allows you to download Web pages, complete with text, graphics, and HTML links, to your hard drive. It then makes the links on the downloaded pages relative to each other so that you can move between the pages as if it were a live Web presentation. This use of WebWhacker is an "off-label" use, so to speak. WebWhacker was originally designed as an offline browser for downloading Web pages during low-use times for later viewing. In the language of WebWhacker, you "grab" the URLs and "whack" the pages--one page at a time or entire groups of pages at once. I put all the pages for a presentation on a 3.5" disk and stick it in the hard drive, ready to use if disaster strikes. The difficulties I've encountered are that it won't "whack" gopher sites or occasional URLs with CGI programming in them and won't capture certain kinds of interactive features, such as the "Proceed" button in Internet Grateful Med. (Thanks to Michael Boer, Regional Medical Library, for shedding light on the latter difficulty.) The difficulty with certain interactive features is a serious one, if you need to demonstrate these features on a Web page. I've circumvented the problem in one database by "whacking" the search interface page and the search results page independently. In the demonstration, I type my search strategy into the search page just as if I had a live connection. Then I pull up the previously whacked search results. It is a workable, although not particularly elegant, solution for demonstrating that database. I haven't used the Mac versions and can't comment on their usefulness. I would, however, recommend using the PC Windows 3.1 version, not the Win 95 version. Files "whacked" by the Win 3.1 version can be viewed on any computer, even one that doesn't have the WebWhacker software on it, whereas viewing the Win95 version files requires the WebWhacker software. WebWhacker doesn't work for all presentation situations, but for about $50, you can have some insurance for many presentations. As the audience is filing into the room and the computer keeps trying to establish a connection to the World Wide Web, you know that you have some backup. ---------------------------- Email : The Great Equalizer? ---------------------------- Reprinted with permission from HLIB-NW I've been teaching in partnership with the Northwest Regional Primary Care Association for a year and a half. My students are health care professionals with patients who have very little money. When I first started teaching these people they said, "Only 20% of our patients have phones, they'll never get on the Internet!" NOW, my students say, "E-mail is the only way I can keep in contact my patients. Lots of them are homeless and they don't have phones, but they can get e-mail at the public library." It's terrific now that the new, free, e-mail systems are available over the Web! Nancy Ottman Press pressno@u.washington.edu Regional Medical Library, HSLIC 206-543-8262 University of Washington 800-338-7657 (from Pacific NW only) Box 357155 Fax: 206-543-2469 Seattle, Washington 98195-7155 -------------------------------------- Online Government Publications Catalog -------------------------------------- Washington State Library News Release October 17, 1997 Washington State Library Announces a New World Wide Web Resource to Locate Government Publications The "Virtual Government Documents Catalog" is now available at: http://wagils.wln.com "Washington State has recently been recognized as the national leader in providing access to state government through technologies such as the Internet," according to Nancy Zussy, State Librarian. "Today the State Library is announcing a new product to connect Washington citizens with local and state government information." As part of the Government Information Locator Service for Washington State (GILS), a new web-based catalog of government publications has been created and is now available for general public access. This database lists state and local government publications from Washington state and the Pacific Northwest, including Alaska, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia. It also includes selected books, pamphlets, and documents created by federal agencies when the item has a focus on the Pacific Northwest. The catalog is a subset of the WLN online bibliographic database and will be updated monthly. The "virtual catalog" identifies publications and shows which libraries in Washington state own them. The catalog lists and locates the items, but does not link to them directly. When copies of the item are not owned locally, they can be borrowed by asking a local library to initiate an interlibrary loan request. The Washington State Library partnered with WLN, Inc., a Lacey, Washington, non-profit information service company to produce the catalog site. WLN provides quality information-related services to libraries, government agencies, and businesses across the U.S. and the world. The GILS program also has a prototype database up and running to locate Washington State and local government Web pages that have been meta tagged. It provides an easily used, standardized, intuitive display to search government information. It also represents a purposeful, ongoing effort to help agencies make priority information available to the public electronically. This function has already collected more than 8,000 records even though it was specifically limited in scope during the development phase. It is expected to be fully operational in June 1998. Citizens using the GILS catalog services can easily find the government information they want and need most, all in one place. Indexed information not previously available through Internet searching can be found by searching several fields in addition to keywords. The GILS prototype demonstrates that it is possible to find resources across jurisdictions, servers, and levels of government using this accessible locator service, with limited or no knowledge of the structure of government. These electronic resources are brought to you by the Washington State Library's Government Information Locator Service. Visit the GILS homepage at: http://www.wa.gov/wsl/gils.htm For information contact: Nancy Zussy, (360) 704-5250 ------------------------------------- PubMed and IGM: The Ensemble Approach ------------------------------------- Reprinted with permission from the NN/LM PNR SUPPLEMENT by Linda Milgrom While there is tremendous excitement about PubMed and Internet Grateful Med (IGM), they aren't perfect (yet)! We are all struggling to understand their idiosyncrasies and can be frustrated when the search systems don't seem to behave as we wish. Articles comparing PubMed and Internet Grateful Med have appeared, some with fierce titles implying a desperate battle ("PubMed vs. IGM"). PubMed and IGM will improve. We expect them to incorporate the best features of each other--but, why wait? A popular complaint is the lack of MeSH thesaurus information in PubMed. IGM offers a thorough look through the Tree Structures, MeSH definitions, UMLS terms, and more. PubMed, on the other hand, offers the powerful "related articles" link. Why not consider having two browser windows open simultaneously? In one, run IGM; in the other, run PubMed. Use the strengths of each. You might, for example, use IGM to examine the MeSH trees and select the very best headings. "Copy" the terms you choose and "paste" them into your PubMed search window. This strategy was suggested by Benoit Thirion of Rouen, France. In his paper, "PubMed mode d'emploi : l'aide d'IGM" , Thirion provides great examples and convincing arguments. Naive users will search PubMed for a topic such as colitis by simply typing "colitis" in the basic search box. Although the user will get results, he probably does not realize he is missing articles indexed to toxic megacolon, enterocolitis, proctocolitis, and the like, since PubMed does not explode with the default [ALL] qualifier. We cannot expect all PubMed users to have the hefty print MeSH tools. However, serious searchers can use IGM's "Find MeSH/Meta Terms" to browse the colitis entry. They can select individual terms or may see a need to explode the selected term. By entering "colitis [mesh]" in PubMed's simple search, the searcher is asking for the term to be exploded. "Colitis [majr]" will explode the term as a major (asterisked) descriptor. Another example offered by Thirion is the term antibiotics. When entered without qualifier, Thirion's antibiotics query retrieved 114,000 articles.. When qualified [mesh], the system found nearly 300,000 articles! More is not always better. Users may be overwhelmed by such large sets. PubMed allows the searcher to easily link to articles pre-computed as "related to" one or more on-target articles. However, if a user searching for antibiotics in the treatment of pneumonia had really been interested in a particular antibiotic, he might have missed it and misinterpreted his results. What other novel ways of using PubMed have you uncovered? Please share. ------------------------- The WMLA Newsletter Online is published by and for members of the Washington Medical Librarians Association. For information about WMLA, please view our Website at http://www.wmla.org/ -------------------------