UX Caucus' Favorite Features and Sneaky Solutions

 

The Medial Library Association's User Experience (UX) Caucus released a recording of their popular event, "Favorite Features and Sneaky Solutions." These lightning rounds feature tips and insights relating to health sciences databases. 

This event's roster included:

• Sneaky Solution: Searching for Articles on Ethical Values
• RSS Feeds for Librarians: Tracking Subtopics and Trends 
• Using Ovid's Basic Search Function to Build Search Strategies
• Quotations Around Single-Word Terms in PubMed
• Special Characters in PubMed

Check out the recording via this OSF link! For additional database tips for expert searching, check out the UX Caucus' Blog. 

Thanks for reading, and have a happy Tuesday!

Germany's Plan for an Open and Independent PubMed Safety Net

Hilda Bastian on the Absolutely Maybe blog at PLOS updated her previous post about the possible enshitification of PubMed by the current political regime in the US, and the need for a backup plan.  It looks like Germany is taking the lead ...

A few months ago, I wrote about reasons to be concerned about the reliability of PubMed under the new regime at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). PubMed is a critical biomedical literature database, with a range of associated services. It’s produced by one of the institutes of the NIH, the US National Library of Medicine (NLM). I listed several questions: Could PubMed go down more often, and for longer? Might services no longer be free? How else could the quality and reliability of its services be degraded? Could junk science flood flood in, if (when?) the NLM is no longer a reliable gatekeeper?

If there are only short-term service delivery problems, we will be fine using Europe PMC – but we would need more than that if PubMed was severely affected. (You can read more about this and some of the technical issues I discuss below in my earlier post.)

Now, Germany has stepped up to this challenge. On May 2, the German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED), announced they were planning to develop an “open, reliable, and sustainable” alternative to PubMed. And today they held an open virtual meeting to discuss their plans for “resilient and independent life science research infrastructure.”

Read more ...

MLA 2025: First Timer, first thoughts

 MLA 2025 was last week in Pittsburgh. I was lucky to attend and it was my first MLA as well as my first national conference. I've attended many WAAL conferences, but this was my first national experience. 

First impressions: MLA is felt small and large at the same time. I ran into some people many times in similar sessions. However, I never ran into any of the WHSLA librarians that I wanted to connect with aside from Kathy Koch day one in the elevator. (Need to plan ahead next time)

Two: I signed up for the First time attendee mentor program, but my mentor was quite busy and we didn't connect quite as much as I hoped. We'll keep in touch, but didn't work out as planned. Still the new member/first timer breakfast was great and really enjoyed making connections there. 

Three: I enjoyed the vendor events I attended. These were the best opportunities I had for connecting with other hospital librarians. I enjoyed the evening opportunities a lot, even though I didn't get the EBSCO invite to the Warhol Museum.  😞

More to come in additional posts, but wanted to get my initial thoughts out right away. 

The Dangers of Raw Milk by Dr. Glaucomflecken

The Dangers of Raw Milk by Dr. Glaucomflecken 

with subtle commentary on our new Surgeon General.

If I didn't laugh, I would cry about the knocks Public Health and food safety has taken since the start of 2025.   A social media influencer as Surgeon General?  It could be good for the American public and Make America Healthy -- It just depends on her messages.   So far a lot of them have been mis-guided and mis-informed, and not otherwise based on evidence.  

I grew up on a farm in north central WI.  We drank raw milk.  And I don't remember pasteurizing it at home before we drank it.  Thankfully no one got sick.  My parents were pretty good about hygiene in the barn and milk house.  Not everyone is ...  Later after my mom became an RN, she worked in Public Health, and investigated several food safety cases resulting from consumption of raw eggs, raw milk and other raw products.  

EndNote 2025 is here (with an AI key takeaway tool)

 EndNote 2025 was released at the end of April, and, like so many tools nowadays, it comes with a new artificial intelligence tool (it seems AI is everywhere, for better or worse).

I managed to install EndNote 2025 a few weeks ago, and have had some time to play with the system. 

As you can see, the interface isn't too different from EndNote 21. Though the appearance has been tweaked a bit, it still has a lot of the same features. For a full list of EndNote 2025's new features, you can check out Clarivate's site (I particularly enjoy the Web of Science citing articles feature, which shows you which articles in Web of Science have cited your reference!).

 

One key difference is the introduction of its new AI powered summarizing tool for PDFs (i.e., key takeaway tool). This large language model (LLM) tool scans the full text of attached PDFs and generates summaries of their content. According to Clarivate, "Neither your input nor the licensed content are stored by the large language model or used for any other purpose than the immediate interaction session. Clarivate does not use your data to directly or indirectly train LLMs."

The tool is only capable of generating summaries for machine readable PDFs (specifically those with OCR optimization), and may sometimes have trouble interpreting PDFs with unexpected formatting quirks. 

 

In cases where a PDF isn't machine readable, or where the formatting can't be interpreted by the tool, the AI will output summaries based on the abstract field of a reference. This can be quite fun to play with, as evinced in the below screenshot.

 

While EndNote 2025's AI key takeaway tool can only generate basic summaries at this time, it sounds like more AI features are in the works, so stay tuned!