Volume 5, No 1, 2008
Application of Web 2.0 Tools in Medical Librarianship to Support Medicine 2.0
Vahideh Zarea Gavgani and V. Vishwa Mohan
Abstract
It is almost a decade that social networking technology along with its tools such as blogs, wikis, slidesharing/videosharing and photosharing softwares, podcasts, RSS feeds, mashups, folksonomies, and bookmarks has developed its influence on all human fields of study/activity. It is obvious that these tools are increasingly growing, in different languages, regions and fields, due to social dynamic and liberal characteristic of Web 2.0 technologies. Medical sciences and library science also are not exception to this influence. Consequently, library 2.0 and newly coined concepts of Medicine 2.0, and Health 2.0 have become the buzzwords in the Internet culture. In spite of proliferation of such social tools listed above, there is no aggregation and harmony for the utilization of the potential of these technologies in specific subject areas and the sources of information on the Web is almost proliferating and uncontrolled. This gives rise to the problem of webliographic control due to which the information seekers find difficulties in information retrieval. The paper presents application of Web 2.0 in medical libraries to support Medicine 2.0 emphasizing the above-mentioned problems. Considering the nature of an original article the experience of the authors, as a medical librarian and a faculty member in Library and Information Science, through observation of the needs, problems and prospects, played an important role in forming the idea and presentation. The study also used secondary data collected from related literatures. Standardization and webliographic control would solve the problem. In addition, governmental support and creating awareness at the management level in the organizations is also crucial.
Pages: 1-8
Keywords: Web 2.0; Medicine 2.0; Medical Library 2.0; Medical Librarianship 2.0