News & Current Awareness

1. News & Current Awareness Nancy Allee and Helen Look Public Health Informatics Services & Access February 13, 2004

2. Acknowledgements • U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Network of Libraries of Medicine. Information Access in Public Health: A Training Manual. Bethesda, MD: National Library of Medicine, 2003.

3. Overview • Learn specific strategies for identifying the best resources for keeping current • Evaluate which strategies best suit your needs • Establish a personalized routine for staying informed

4. Class Participation • Question 1: What do you currently do to stay informed on public health issues? Please name specific resources/tools that you use

5. Class Participation • Question 2: What are some of the challenges/barriers to staying up to date on public health issues?

6. The Value of Staying Informed • Staying informed is essential for being able to inform, educate and empower people about health issues • An awareness of current hot topics enables you to be prepared for developing risks and opportunities • Consistently being aware of the latest information is important at any level of your career

7. The Cost of Staying Informed • The two primary costs: time and money • We will cover a list of strategies and the amount of time required • We will focus on resources and services that are free (unless otherwise indicated)

8. Organizing Your Information • Use folders/directories in your e-mail system to store electronic readings • Use web browser bookmarks or favorites to access frequently used web sites • Use physical folders to gather and store relevant readings

9. Top Ten Strategies For Staying Informed

10. Strategy 1:Receive E-mail Announcements/Notification Lists • Announcement lists provide one-way communication of information that you deem relevant to your interest • These lists may be daily, weekly, monthly, or only when there is news

11. Strategy 1: Receive E-mail Announcements/Notification Lists • CNN Health Week (every Friday) or CNN Breaking News http://www.cnn.com/EMAIL/

12. Strategy 2: Participate in E-mail Discussion Lists (Listservs) • Discussion lists are interactive lists where people may post or receive messages • Sign on to observe a list for a week or look at the archives • Consider the percentage of the messages that were on target or potentially valuable to you • Some lists offer options for a one-a-day digest format

13. Strategy 2: Participate in E-mail Discussion Lists (Listservs) • Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce’s Discussion and E-mail Lists http://phpartners.org/dlists.html

14. Strategy 2: Participate in E-mail Discussion Lists (Listservs)

15. Strategy 3: Regularly Review Web Sites With News Updates • Identify web sites related to your areas of interest that have news updates or continuous news feeds • You can add these sites to your browser bookmarks or favorites • You can make one of these web pages your default web page so it is the first thing you see in the morning

16. Strategy 3: Regularly Review Web Sites With News Updates • CDC in the News: http://www.cdc.gov/od/oc/media/

17. Strategy 4: Request Auto-Notification of Changes to Web Sites of Interest • If a web site you are interested in does not provide email updates, you can ask a free web service to track changes for you and notify you when a particular page is updated

18. Strategy 4: Request Auto-Notification of Changes to Web Sites of Interest • ChangeDetection.com http://changedetection.com/monitor.html • Be aware that not all changes to a page will be due to substantial content updates

19. Strategy 5: Browse Table of Contents of Relevant Journals • Some fields have their own journals and therefore receiving the contents is a good strategy for keeping up • This strategy is less successful for fields that are too narrow to have their own journals or so multidisciplinary that they are published in many journals. • Note: The automatic update search strategy is better suited for multidisciplinary fields

20. Strategy 5: Browse Table of Contents of Relevant Journals To identify relevant public health journals: • Core Journal List in the Public Health from the Public Health/Health Administration Section of the Medical Library Associationhttp://info.med.yale.edu/eph/library/phjournals/ • Lamar Soutter Library’s Evidence-Based Practice for Public Health Project http://library.umassmed.edu/ebpph/ • Your local librarian can also help you identify journals

21. Strategy 5: Browse Table of Contents of Relevant Journals • BioSecurity and BioTerrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science http://www.biosecurityjournal.com/index.asp

22. Strategy 5: Browse Table of Contents of Relevant Journals • After identifying relevant journals, user your favorite search engine to find the home page for the journal • The table of contents and/or the full-text of articles may be available for free • Some journals allow you to view articles that will appear in a future issue • Some journals will automatically e-mail you the table of contents for new issues. Look for a link to “email alerts” or “email notifications” • Some sites only require your email address while others require additional information for registration

23. Strategy 6: Activate Online Access for Journal Subscriptions • Many individuals and institutional subscriptions allow for online access to the full content of recent issues. • Be sure to activate the online access to your subscriptions, particularly those resulting from individual or organizational memberships.

24. Strategy 6: Activate Online Access for Journal Subscriptions • PubMed Link Out Journals by Title http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/journals/loftext_noprov.html • A list of PubMed journals that links to full text articles

25. Strategy 7: Run Automatic Updates Searches • You can set up automatic update searches in a variety of databases relevant to your discipline. • There are free services that you can use to set up automatic searches of the PubMed database to email regularly to you. • These searches can be by subject area, by author to track particular experts in your field, or by institution to track the work of particular organizations.

26. Strategy 7: Run Automatic Updates Searches • Some database producers have already prepared these “canned” searches on topics of interest that you can receive as email updates. • Another method of getting these search updates is to visit a page with links to live PubMed searches such as Healthy People 2010 Information Access Project http://phpartners.org/hp/

27. Strategy 7: Run Automatic Updates Searches • BioMail http://biomail.org • PubCrawler http://www.pubcrawler.ie/ • By Subscription: Current Contents

28. Strategy 7: Run Automatic Updates Searches • Demo Cubby feature in PubMed

29. Strategy 8: Form a Local Support System for Specific Projects/Topics • Journal Clubs • Newspaper Clippings • Routing Journals

30. Strategy 9: Join or follow organizations focused in your area of interest • Newsletters, discussion lists, real and virtual meetings, continuing education in a variety of formats from organizations focused on your area of interest may be some of the benefits of membership • See sample issues of the newsletter • Talk to colleagues about whether the networking in that group has been valuable to them • Local or regional groups tend to be less expensive and more relevant

31. Strategy 9: Join or follow organizations focused in your area of interest • Links to Public Health Organizations and Resources Online http://www.phf.org/links.htm

32. Top Ten Strategies For Staying Informed • Receive e-mail announcements/notification lists • Participate in e-mail discussion lists (listservs) • Regularly review web sites with news update • Request auto-notification of changes to web sites of interest • Browse table of contents of relevant journals • Activate online access for journal subscriptions • Run Automatic Update Searches (SDIs) • Form a local support system for specific projects/topics • Join or follow organizations in your area of interest • Develop a formal plan for staying informed on a regular basis (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.)

33. Evaluating Strategies • The most efficient strategies will maximize the equation: Value = Relevant Items/Time Spent • Strategies for keeping up can be short-term, long-term or project specific

34. Time for Staying Informed • With a list of possible strategies, consider how much time you can devote to keeping up to date • Five Minutes Per Day: • Read and respond to an e-mail announcement listing • Quickly read the topics from a listserv digest • Review the table of contents of a journal • One Hour Per Week: • Do all the activities listed above • Read abstracts of selected journal articles or newsletters • Review the results of an automatic update search and request journal articles

35. Final Class Activity • Develop a formal plan for staying informed on a regular basis

36. Additional Services for MI-INFO Project • Reference Service (Free): • E-mail: mi-info@umich.edu • Phone: 734-763-5109 • Loansome Doc Service (Fee): • http://www.lib.umich.edu/taubman/ldregister.html

37. Conclusion • Contact us: mi-info@umich.edu or 734-763-5109 Evaluations • Please remember to fill out your evaluations.