You’d expect the largest medical library in the world to be on Facebook. And so they are.
If you are one of the National Library of Medicine’s 1,443 admirers and visited its page during the first week of May, you could have listened to Director Donald A.B. Lindberg’s podcast about progress on electronic health records or learned about a recent Friends of the NLM conference, The ePatient: Digital and Genomic Technologies for Personalized Health Care. Soon after the page debuted in February, you could have learned about NLM’s Haiti Earthquake People Locator.
And you’d know that NLM’s favorite pages include that of its own National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), plus those of NIH and CDC.
NLM has been expanding its social media presence. You can now choose among 9 Twitter and 7 RSS feeds, in addition to the aforementioned Director’s Comments podcast. First, Twitter:
- Some feeds are more active than others. Recent oil spill, earthquake, and H1N1 headlines have given @NLM_SIS (Specialized Information Services in toxicology, environmental health, and disaster information) plenty to tweet about. For a steady stream of consumer health news, follow @medlineplus4you.
- @NCBI just started in March, will keep users informed about new features in NCBI’s literature, molecular biology, and genetics resources, along with news and newly published research. Sample tweet topics: GenBank Release 177.0 and Roadmap Epigenomics data.
- Feeds such as @NLMGlobalHealth, @nlm_harrypotter and are linked to specific NLM exhibitions (which, by the way, have their own Facebook pages).
In the RSS list:
- Again, activity level varies. DailyMed Drug Label Updates, marketed drug information in a structured format, posts dozens of items a day, while the last NIH Clinical Alerts and Advisories posting was in 2007.
- Your HSLS librarians are avid readers of the NLM Technical Bulletin, which keeps us one step ahead of our patrons.
Don’t forget that you can create an RSS feed from any PubMed search.
And if @nlm_harrypotter doesn’t satisfy your craving for the supernatural, try Google Reader’s Sort by magic setting.
~ Patricia Weiss