As I prepare my budget for 2016, the challenge is always to align the content we renew/purchase so that it reflects the research and medical activities of our user community. Scholarly journals tend to take a fair portion of our allocated content funds and considerable time is spent each year (and during the year) monitoring their use, identifying new research journals, and looking to see where research dollars have been assigned/diverted within the organization. Continue reading →

Scholarly Communication is a term that represents the overall process by which scholars (researchers) publish in order to share the outcomes of their research.  The scholarly communication continuum includes many aspects such as discovery, dissemination, and preservation of the intellectual output.  We are also seeing less formal textual communications to include blog posts, tweets, videos, computer code, and data sets. Continue reading →

I belong to a wonderful medical librarian discussion list which provides a forum for members of the Medical Library Association and other health sciences information professionals to discuss issues of mutual interest.  In early May, a library manager from Wales shared that Iceland’s tourist agency just launched a project called “Ask Gudmundur” – an extremely creative and clever way to encourage potential visitors to ask questions about Iceland via social media.  Their marketing message is simple — “If you’ve got a question about Iceland which the Internet can’t answer, a new “human search engine” might be able to help.”  Their video clip illustrates the type of questions posed to the great and all-knowing Gudmundur (by the way, Gudmundur is actually seven people with each member of the team coming from one of Iceland’s seven regions). Continue reading →