New Year's Resolution - More Women's Health News Posts

Okay, it's not exactly a resolution. This spring will be my final semester in the University of Pittsburgh's Masters of Library and Information Science program, where I'm a distance student while working full-time at a Nashville medical library. Having exhausted most of the distance courses I'm interested in, I'm taking medical informatics, and a self-designed independent study. That independent study consists of working on this blog. That's right, fair readers, I'll be working on this blog for Masters credit.

Lest you think that this is just formal slacking in my last semester, I submitted a fairly detailed proposal to my advisor on what this activity would consist of. The goals/objectives are as follows:

Build subject knowledge base in women’s health, which can include obstetrics, gynecology, midwifery, infectious disease, oncology, cardiology, and other subjects

Develop communication and writing skills through creation of brief yet informative blog entries

Enhance critical research appraisal skills through review of topical journal articles

Develop skills for ongoing continuing education through monitoring of research, policy, news, and other outlets for medical information

Enhance cataloging/subject selection training through assignment tags to blog posts including MeSH subject terms linking to PubMed searches as well as “folksonomy” tags through del.icio.us and Technorati online services

Expand knowledge of relevant web resources through identification and summarization of sites tied to the topic of blog postings

Monitor and develop understanding of popular interest in medical subjects through observance of search strings and clicked tags leading to the blog, as well as mass media items that appear during the course of the project

I'm excited about this project, the main side effect of which will be increased postings to this blog, as I have to complete a certain number of hours of work on the postings in order to fulfill the credit requirement. The time spent on reading and appraising resources, searching for information, writing for posts, and working with subject assignments will be valuable in improving my nexgen medical librarian skills, but I hope it will also make the experience better for my readers as more frequent posts appear. I look forward to your comments!

Technorati Tags: Blogs; librarians; Librarianship
MeSH Tags: Internet; Librarians