TK3: The Third Degree

This week  @ work I’ve had the opportunity to get acquainted with the iPad.  I have to say it is a highly interesting device and I do like it.  However,  when the day comes for me to purchase something for my personal use, I think I’ll have to hold out for the Google version.  :-)

So, I’ve spent the last couple of days furiously reading about the iPad and researching it’s applications for medicine.   Imagine, an iPad EMR — there’s a lot of good potential here!

In other news:

• On Monday, I’m off to Denver for the NLM Informatics Training Conference.  I am there to represent our research team and present our study which I previously presented on campus back in March.
• This week a Health 2.0 conference was held in DC and I actively followed the Twitter thread — spent way too much time!

If you know me, then you know that I am an avid WordPress (WP) user and supporter.  I run many WordPress-driven sites and blogs and try to stay up-to-date with WP developments.  One of my favorite sources of WP info is the wordpress.tv site and I’ve recently watched an  interesting video presentation that demonstrates how you can integrate WordPress with a library catalog to create an interface for searching a library catalog.  The project being described by presenter Cassey Maison is Scriblio.

Scriblio is free, open source & allows faceted & browsing searching.  You can see it in action for the 60,000+ item catalog of the the Collingswood Public Library. Essentially, the concept is that 1 blog post = 1 catalog record and each blog post is structured in an organized fashion.

On the front page, there is one search box (very Google-esque) and once you start typing what you’re looking for, suggestions are shown.

Click on the item of interest, and the sidebar presents you with more refinement options (these + more not shown)

There are many more features than I can go into, but more information can be found on the Scriblio site, including a couple of videos and links to places that are currently using this next-generation OPAC.   I do find the response time of the catalog to be on the slow side, but hopefully those kinds of issues will only get better with time.