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Strategies for Staying Informed about Public
Health Concerns
Kristine Alpi, MLS, [email protected]
November 6, 2004
Objectives and Competencies• Articulate three strategies for staying informed
about news and developments relevant to public health.
• Analytic assessment. “Identifies relevant and appropriate data and information sources.”
• Inform, educate and empower people about health issues. “Research for new insights and innovative solutions to health problems”
Why Adopt Strategies to Stay Informed?
• Credibility and advance preparation time• Limited budgets for meetings, etc.• Potential to identify collaborators • Professional responsibility• Changes in speed of information access
• Are there other reasons that would convince colleagues or administration to make time for keeping up?
Strategies for Keeping Up
• Identify specific resources in areas of interest:1. Web sites that have news updates or continuous
news feeds.2. E-mail discussion lists (Listservs™)3. E-mail announcement/notification lists4. Journal table of contents (TOC) of the latest issue5. Automated subject-specific literature searches 6. Professional organizations
• Outline a plan for incorporating keeping up-to-date into a work routine
Characteristics of Workable Strategies
• Efficient – provide the most useful items in the least amount of time
• Maintainable – share monitoring duties with others
• Modifiable – change easily as issue develops • Reasonable – require limited information
disclosure for registration; opt-outs available• Time-sensitive – can be short-term, project-
specific, long-term & ongoing
Web Sites with News Updates• Find a relevant general site or specific
topic site [search on keyword and news or what’s new or update]– Bookmark it– Make it your default home page
• Follow up on the news to actual studies• Track page without a what’s new category
– Change detector sends E-mail when changed http://www.changedetection.com/monitor.html
Medscapewww.medscape.com/publichealthhome
NY State Home
What’s New page
Change Detection
E-mail Discussion Lists (Listservs™)
• Discussion lists are interactive lists – Disadvantages –postings volume, no quality
control– Advantages – ability to post questions and get
feedback
• Reduce volume with daily Digest format
• Review or search list archives
• Sign on to observe a list for a week and then re-evaluate.
E-mail Discussion Lists• Find relevant lists by searching the Web sites of likely
organizations or browsing some of the following resources:
Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce - Discussion and E-mail Lists– http://phpartners.org/dlists.html
The School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of Washington has several lists through the Mailman system (example on next screen)– http://mailman.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/
Central list directories:– CataList: L-Soft - http://www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html– Topica (formerly Listz of Lists) - http://lists.topica.com/– Tile.Net - http://tile.net/lists/
PH-Info List
Yes to Digest if you want to have fewer messages.
E-mail Announcement Lists
• One-way communication of information • Frequency varies• Volume of these lists tends to be lower
and more predictable than interactive lists• Many Sites offer a What’s New E-mail
update• Subject-specific or organization-specific
– See Discussion & E-mail Lists page on the Partners site
Partners Lists
http://phpartners.org/dlists.html
Tables of Contents of Journals• Offered from publisher Web sites (E-Alerts)
– Single journal or multiple journals from same publisher
– Some require registration
• Activate the online access for print subscriptions• Can also set up for multiple journals as
automatic search (next slide)• Core Journal List provides possible titles
– http://publichealth.yale.edu/phlibrary/phjournals/
Tables of Contents• Individual title services such as:
– Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR)– http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwrsubscribe.html– Emerging Infectious Diseases– http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/subscrib.htm
• Examples of multiple title alert services include:– Individual publisher sites– BioMail searches of PubMed by journal title– Paid services
Oxford Sample Contentshttp://www3.oup.co.uk/jnls/tocmail/
Automated Subject-Specific Literature Searches
• Search by subject, author, institution or journal title
• Free searches of PubMed (MEDLINE) by Biomail (www.biomail.org) or PubCrawler (www.pubcrawler.ie)
• Pre-prepared searches linked from a web site – Healthy People 2010 Information Access Project (http://phpartners.org/hp/)
PubCrawler
http://www.pubcrawler.ie
Professional Organizations
• Benefits of membership for keeping up– Newsletters and journal subscriptions– Discussion lists– Live and virtual meetings– Continuing education opportunities
• Assessing an organization– Examine sample newsletters on web– Ask colleagues about networking – Consider local chapters of national organizations
Discussion and Planning
• Has anyone tried any of these strategies already? How did it go?
• How much time could you make available for keeping up? Each day? Each week?
• Set-up time takes longer than maintenance. Ask an information professional colleague to assist with set up.
Outline a Plan to Stay Informed
• How much time do you have?
• Will you follow the resources yourself or assign to staff members?
• What is your focus? News, legal, best practices, scientific research…
• Do you prefer to receive E-mail or go out to resources?
Case Study Exercises