August 26th, 2008 Brian Herzog
This email came in to my work address yesterday from EBSCO:
Dear EBSCO Customer,
Some of you have asked us to consider adding full text blog content to our databases, which would have no impact on the cost of your subscriptions.
Before we move forward with this idea, we would like your opinion. Below is a link to a quick, five-question survey. Your answers will help us to gauge the value of adding this type of content to certain EBSCO databases.
http://support.epnet.com/contact/surveys/index.php?sid=71644&lang=en
Please note that we would only consider using “vetted” blogs, and would provide you with the option of disabling access to blogs.
Thank you for your participation in this survey. We will carefully evaluate all responses, as they represent a very important part of our product development process.
I don’t know what criteria will be used in the “vetting” process, but I was very happy to see this initiative.
They aren’t saying they are absolutely doing this; they are saying they see an emerging source of potentially reliable information, and are asking us what we think about it.
Imagine - getting our input to help design a product that we will use. Thank you, EBSCO.
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Posted under Library, Technology | No Comments »
August 23rd, 2008 Brian Herzog
A few months ago, I listed online services that provide answers to peoples’ questions.
In the library world, the big concern is usually the quality of the answers - do these services provide the same level of quality in the answers that someone would get from a librarian?
As I read on studio twentysix2, perhaps we should be more concerned with the quality of the question.
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Posted under Conferences, Library, Random, Reference Question | No Comments »
August 21st, 2008 Brian Herzog
So apparently, in 34 years, I’ve never looked up in the phone book a business name starting with the word “The.”
While looking up a phone number of someone whose name started with “Terr,” I happened to glance at the rest of the page. I was surprised to notice that there were business listings filed under “the” - The Pizza Place, The Family Eye Care Center, etc.
Since listings like this in a library catalog would be an error, it caught my eye. It seems like it should be wrong for a phone book, too, but I could understand there are business where “The” is an official part of their name.
But I was amazed I’d never noticed this before. Just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, I looked up some of these businesses where I would have thought they’d be - under “P” for Pizza, “F” for Family, etc. Some were listed, and some weren’t. How strange.
So I checked the other phone books we have, to see if all the publishers did it that way. I found that some businesses are listed under “The,” some aren’t, and some are under both. And then I found something even stranger.
On the “T” page of one of the books, there were listings for “Test Test.” This is something I commonly do when entering junk information to test a new system, and I was thoroughly entertained to see it published in a phone book.
All of the various “Test” entries were listed at the same address, but with different phone numbers. Curiosity got the better of me, and I tried a few of the numbers - but they all just went right to a generic voicemail. These “Test” entries were listed in the other phone books, too, so I’m guessing it tracks back to whoever complied the data originally and sold their database to the publishers. Ha.
But again, this underscores the important of knowing the appropriateness and limitations of your resources.
And so, now the world knows that I can entertain myself for a good twenty minutes reading the telephone book.
Tags: book, Books, listing, listings, page, pages, phone, test, testing, the, yellow See Also
Posted under Random | 1 Comment »
August 16th, 2008 Brian Herzog
One difficult question I get occasionally is “do you have rankings for doctor/lawyers?”
I think what people are expecting is a Consumer Reports-like ranking of these two professions, but unfortunately, we don’t have anything exactly like that. We do have some resources for doctors, but lawyers are different.
A patron asked me to help her find lawyer rankings this past week. I did find a few websites showing some rankings, but I had no idea how reliable any of them were, and none of them got down to the local level needed by a patron in a small public library. Another thing I found were lots of articles talking about lawyers suing websites about their rankings, so that might explain the scarcity of resources.
In the end, two resources appeared promising, but only one ended up helping:
- The American Bar Association has a Lawyer Locater, which is powered by martindale.com and LexisNexis. It does provide some information on a lawyer’s background, including the Martindale-Hubbell peer review rating from their Law Directory. The amount of information varies by lawyer, but in this case, the lawyer my patron was looking for wasn’t listed at all
- The Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers provides an attorney status report which, while it doesn’t rate lawyers, does indicate when the lawyer was admitted to the bar and if they’ve had any complaints against them (my patron was shocked to find out her lawyer was admitted to the bar just eight months ago)
- A third resource the patron left with was the phone number of the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Dial-A-Lawyer referral program, which assists private citizens in choosing legal council
Finding resources to research local doctors is slightly easier. This might be because the medical profession is more closely watched than the legal profession, or that people are more willing/able to travel for medical procedures than law suits.
One book I often turn to in our reference collection is America’s Top Doctors, which lists doctors by region, specialty, hospital, and by name.
Another nice local resource is the Boston Consumers’ Checkbook (which is also available for other cities). This magazine is similar to Consumer Reports, but instead of rating products, it rates services, including many medical services.
Part of the Mass.gov website reports on Health Care Quality and Cost Information. It includes lots of information for patients, but what I usually steer people towards are the “Volume by Surgeon and Hospital” reports - these aren’t rankings exactly, but instead show how often a doctor or hospital performs a certain procedure. Other reports also list cost and mortality rates for doctors and hospitals.
Another state-level website is the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine’s On-Line Physician Profile Site. Each profile includes general biographical information supplied by the doctor, and also has sections showing any malpractice payments made or any disciplinary and/or criminal actions taken against the doctor.
Additional web resources are:
- The American Medical Association’s doctor finder doesn’t provide rankings, but it does show contact and biographical information for both AMA members and non-members (it gives priority to members, it does list non-members if you click the right buttons)
- DrScore.com lets people score their own doctors and report on their experiences. Although the ratings are voluntary and anonymous, I did notice they indicate “Castle Connolly Top Doctors,” which is the America’s Top Doctor’s resource I mentioned above. And in addition to the ratings, this website is also useful as doctor finder
- RateMDs.com seems more commercial than DrScore.com, but it also seems to have more ratings and comments. This also has nice feature search for finding local doctors
I list these because they are free and useful, and accessible for my patrons. I’m sure there are many more not-free websites out there too, as well as additional good print resources. I’d appreciate hearing suggestions for more resources in the comments below - thanks.
Tags: doctor, doctors, hospital, lawyer, lawyers, legal, libraries, Library, medical, public, ranking, rankings, rating, ratings, Reference Question, Resources, sources, Websites See Also
Posted under Library, Reference Question, Resources | 1 Comment »
