It is Monday March 8, 2010 and is time for the monthly Medlib Blog Carnival hosted at the Krafty Librarian.  Next month will be hosted at EagleDawg so if you missed this month’s deadline please consider submitting your post to next month’s carnival.

So without further ado, let’s get this party started.

Laika’s MedLibLog starts us off with the book review Searching Skills Toolkit. Finding the Evidence [Book Review].

“Most books on Evidence Based Medicine give little attention to the first two steps of EBM: asking focused answerable questions and searching the evidence. Being able to appraise an article, but not being able to find the best evidence may be challenging and frustrating to the busy clinicians.”

Vivo project blogger and Bioinformatic Specialist at Becker Medical Library Kristi Holmes blogs about Libraries: perfect partners for research.

“There’s no doubt about it – we’re in the age of interdisciplinary science and it seems like everyone is looking to build innovative research teams. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to discover collaborators and make meaningful connections within one’s own building – let alone across campus or beyond.”

Medical and health librarians who like to pair some of their outreach and marketing efforts around various health observance days, months, etc. might be interested to read the post  The National Health Observances Toolkit by Walter Jessen.

In Dr. Shock’s post Read It Later, he discusses using the product Read It Later as a better alternative to Evernote and Google Notebook (of which Google dropped the development).

Nikki Detmar author of the EagleDawg blog (and next month’s Carnival Hosts) sets the bar for next month by submitting two of her interesting posts and recommending another post from Dean Giustini.

Nikki’s two posts Joint Commission: Transparency Obscured? and Ben Goldacre explains the placebo effect are great and Dean’s Top (20) Semantic Search Tools 2010 for those interested in a semantic search engines is a must read.

In the post, More Women Get Heart Disease Information from *the Newspaper* Than the Internet? Rachel Walden finds it odd that in this day and age when Pew Internet says more people are looking at the Internet to answer their health questions that still more women get their information about heart disease from newspapers.

Finally, Alisha Miles provides her insights on Rounding: A solo medical librarian’s perspective and also thoughts on the possibilities of ‘Beam’ing medical videos.

I hope there was something here that interested you and helped you think of things a little differently.  Additionally if you planned on submitting this month but it slipped your mind you still have the opportunity to submit a post for next month to be hosted at EagleDawg  just submitting your post.

Microbe Magazine has an interesting article and an audio interview about two ways people are using mobile devices and social networking to help monitor hand washing compliance and track infectious diseases.   

The first method they describe is an iPhone app called iScrub (free and available on iTunes App Store) which was developed to “automate the monitoring of hand-hygiene practices in health care settings.”  Originally developed for hospital settings, the article states the app could be as a “stealth app” to be used in other non-hospital environments where hand hygiene is important such as food handling. 

The second method they describe is using Twitter to track infectious diseases.  The article states Alessio Signoroni and Philip Polgreen used the 2009 H1N1 outbreak to test Twitter as method for tracking disease outbreaks.  They started in April 2009 and by June they had collected 950,000 tweets containing terms such as H1N1, swine, flu, or influenza. 

And you thought iPhone apps and Twitter were just for fun and had no real world value?  While I know there are practical applications for these tools, I have to admit I would have never thought about creating a hand washing app or tracking tweets.  It will be interesting to see how these and other things like them pan out.