Mashups and API

Mashups are intriguing! It seems that the applications are limited only by the imagination but execution is not flawless. I used Hub Med but only received an "Internal Server Error" and no results.

eTBLAST is a text similarity-based engine for searching biomedical literature collections and that was more successful. You can compare results, find experts in the field, locate an appropriate journal for submitting a manuscript, and use the Bibus bibliography tool to manage references. The search tool on eTBLAST differs from PubMed in that it searches an entire paragraph of text and produces results that contain similar content. A search on "ice cream headache" produced several different citations than a similar search on PubMed.

Search Crystal is a megasearch tool that searches multiple search engines. It is predicated on the idea that better results are those that are found by multiple search engines and the more agreement between the engines, the better quality of the results. There are nice tabs so you can easly limit your search to images, videos, news, blogs, tags, mashups, and Wikipedia. The analytics feature allows you to analyze the results in various ways.

Privacy on Web 2.0 technologies is an issue. I've been uncomfortable registering for membership in the required tools for this course. I was glad to see this reference in the OA Librarian blog: "University undergraduate students and library-related privacy issues” in Library & Information Science Research, 27 (Sept 2005) 485-495, and even more glad that students objected to their personal data being used by the library even if it would provide improved tools and better service. Some research had indicated that young people don't share the same privacy concerns of older folks but are more concerned about having improved functions and personalization of Internet tools.

Scanning the Rollyo Library Blogs was disheartening in that most are personal rants (like this one, I confess!), quite a few were poorly written, and some were downright crude.
I created a searchroll for Evidence Based Practice in Nursing, listing high quality sites. The sites could be searched for specific topics like fall prevention or medication errors and the items within those sites that pertained to the search topic are listed.
http://rollyo.com/librarycardcatalog/ebp/

This tool could be applied to numerous topics in healthcare education. As with most of the free Web 2.0 Internet tools, there is advertising. I would put in a notice to alert students to that fact before making use of the tool in an educational setting.