Re: [CODE4LIB] openphi and/or healthlibrarian
Thanks, Eric. I hadn't heard of these. We'll check it out. Another interesting one is Mednar (who named this thing?) - a medical open access federated search engine launched by fed search veterans Deep Web. http://mednar.com/mednar/ Jason -- On 7/9/2009 at 6:18 PM, in message bb97ff1f-b194-4519-9723-4a73480de...@nd.edu, Eric Lease Morgan emor...@nd.edu wrote: How many people here work in a library where medicine is a topic of interest, and how many of those are familiar with OpenPHI [1] and/or HealthLibrarian [2] ? OpenPHI is a start-up company who is using open source software to harvest and index open access content for the purposes of creating useful indexes to medical information. For example, they have collected content from MEDLINE, Biomed, and other peer-reviewed sites to create a pretty comprehensive and competitive index called HealthLibrarian. Lots o' content! I'm not sure of all the details, but the folks at OpenPHI are looking for librarians like ourselves (hackers) to integrate HealthLibrarian into their library offerings -- a possible alternative or supplement to the indexes we are already providing. I think they are offering free trials to their index through Web Services interfaces sans the advertising, etc. Being a new company and very open to all things... open, I believe the folks at OpenPHI are open to constructive criticism on how to provide viable library services to... libraries. [1] http://www.openphi.com/ [2] http://www.healthlibrarian.net/
Re: [CODE4LIB] openphi and/or healthlibrarian
On Jul 10, 2009, at 10:55 AM, Jason Stirnaman wrote: OpenPHI is a start-up company who is using open source software to harvest and index open access content for the purposes of creating useful indexes to medical information. For example, they have collected content from MEDLINE, Biomed, and other peer-reviewed sites to create a pretty comprehensive and competitive index called HealthLibrarian. [1] http://www.openphi.com/ [2] http://www.healthlibrarian.net/ Another interesting one is Mednar (who named this thing?) - a medical open access federated search engine launched by fed search veterans Deep Web. http://mednar.com/mednar/ I think things like HealthLibrarian, Mednar, the previous work done by Index Data with open content, the cooperative alluded to by OCLC and Ebsco, and Serials Solutions Summon all represent a trend and/or opportunity for folks like ourselves. Identify (open access) content, harvest it, index it, and provide access to the index. If we were smart and cooperative, then we would create these indexes in some sort of sharable format (like a specifically structured Lucene index) allowing libraries to mix match indexes to meet local needs. I will collect and index philosophy and theology materials. MIT will index computer science and mathematics. NCSU will collect engineering and agriculture. Etc. Once we get this process under our belts we could then go after the closed access content. By going through such a process we will educate ourselves, improve our skills, become more self-reliant, and save buckets of money in the long run. Not to mention provide value-added access to the materials needed by our patrons. At the same time, I also understand many of us would rather pay for the convenience of having this index packaged for us. If not, then there never would have been a market of Poole's original periodical index. -- Eric Lease Morgan University of Notre Dame (574) 631-8604
Re: [CODE4LIB] openphi and/or healthlibrarian
On Fri, 10 Jul 2009, Eric Lease Morgan wrote: I think things like HealthLibrarian, Mednar, the previous work done by Index Data with open content, the cooperative alluded to by OCLC and Ebsco, and Serials Solutions Summon all represent a trend and/or opportunity for folks like ourselves. Identify (open access) content, harvest it, index it, and provide access to the index. If we were smart and cooperative, then we would create these indexes in some sort of sharable format (like a specifically structured Lucene index) allowing libraries to mix match indexes to meet local needs. I will collect and index philosophy and theology materials. MIT will index computer science and mathematics. NCSU will collect engineering and agriculture. Etc. Once we get this process under our belts we could then go after the closed access content. By going through such a process we will educate ourselves, improve our skills, become more self-reliant, and save buckets of money in the long run. Not to mention provide value-added access to the materials needed by our patrons. At the same time, I also understand many of us would rather pay for the convenience of having this index packaged for us. If not, then there never would have been a market of Poole's original periodical index. Didn't someone suggest a while back that if every major research library were to chip in a fraction of an FTE, we could then pool resources and dedicate a couple of people to make stuff (I believe it might've been mentioned in the context of open source software) for the library community? -Joe
[CODE4LIB] openphi and/or healthlibrarian
How many people here work in a library where medicine is a topic of interest, and how many of those are familiar with OpenPHI [1] and/or HealthLibrarian [2] ? OpenPHI is a start-up company who is using open source software to harvest and index open access content for the purposes of creating useful indexes to medical information. For example, they have collected content from MEDLINE, Biomed, and other peer-reviewed sites to create a pretty comprehensive and competitive index called HealthLibrarian. Lots o' content! I'm not sure of all the details, but the folks at OpenPHI are looking for librarians like ourselves (hackers) to integrate HealthLibrarian into their library offerings -- a possible alternative or supplement to the indexes we are already providing. I think they are offering free trials to their index through Web Services interfaces sans the advertising, etc. Being a new company and very open to all things... open, I believe the folks at OpenPHI are open to constructive criticism on how to provide viable library services to... libraries. [1] http://www.openphi.com/ [2] http://www.healthlibrarian.net/ -- Eric Lease Morgan University of Notre Dame
