Research of a Medical Librarian

Would someone tell me why I have been avoiding del.icio.us? As part of our assignment I signed up yesterday and started seeing good applications today. I have a few medical research search engines in my regular bookmarks. There are others I’d add but it’s getting messy, especially when I don’t remember what the brief title means.

So I started opening them and adding del.icio.us tags to them. Plus I came across another one today that I didn’t have time to investigate. So I tagged it and can easily go back to it without feeling like I’m adding to an unwieldy list. The del.icio.us personal bookmarks screen is easy to read and the tags are easy for me to follow.

I also quickly decided to set up two accounts - one for professional tags and one for personal (i.e. fun) tags. That way if I decide to share my del.icio.us account later with my colleagues, it won’t be cluttered with my book review or scrapbooking sites.

While del.icio.us will probably be a good tool for me personally, I don’t know yet if it will be helpful at my work library. Before I could consider adding it (or any of the social networking tools we have been using in this continuing education class) I’d have to consider how to present it so that my patrons would think it’s the best library help since emailing them a pdf file (they love that one for quick articles) .

The Medical Library Association (MLA) is sponsoring a continuing education online class on using second generation web tools. Our first assignment is to create a blog. Since I graduated from San Jose State University’s MLIS program, I have worked as a medical librarian with a guidelines publication. Originally I was involved in document retrieval and delivery.

Now my main focus is in assisting our writers in the research and maintaining an information resource library for them. I’ve learned a lot in the last couple years and will learn a lot more. This blog is a place I can share what I’ve learned or discovered.