Medical informatics and the Ovid party
To tidy up yesterday's blog here's an account of the medical informatics session I attended yesterday afternoon. It was a pity that Elizabeth Wood, who was to have given a paper on the changing role of the librarian, was unwell. Her place was taken by Steve Marine from the Unversity of Cincinnati, who gave three case studies from his institution. Julie McGowan from Vermont urged librarians to do PhDs in informatics. The most interesting paper for me was from Chuck Friedman, a NLM fellow, who discusssed the relationship between informaticians and librarians and tried to define the boundaries and common ground between the two, using Venn diagrams. I've already mentioned his FRIP project. One of the things he said about the user focus of both disciplines reminded me of one of Ranganthan's laws, save the time of the user.
There was a long Q&A session which I fear lost me rather, as much of the discussion was rather US-specific.
in the evening I went to the Ovid party. Ovid were splendid hosts, as they always are. I don't frequent clubs much so possibly this is unremarkable, but they gave out small red flashing lights which could be attached to one's clothing with a small magnet, which I though a nice touch. Again this may be commonplace in the 21st century club, but a video camera wandered round the floor, and its pictures, enhanced in an amusingly psychedlic way, were projected on screens around the room. However the music was predictably dire.
Curious that apart from mine and the DLNet blog, no one else at MLA seems to be blogging about the conference. Surely the British delegates can't be the only ones to have taken up this technology?