Saturday 30 January 2010

NHS eLibrary becomes The Knowledge Network‏

(NHS = National Health Service)


But first, by means of some background to this. See this post on Open Access News and also this post on McBlawg.

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Via email yesterday:-

From the end of January, all visits to the eLibrary will redirect to The Knowledge Network at www.knowledge.scot.nhs.uk. We hope you like our new website, which includes :
  • a new faster search;
  • quicker access to journals, articles and books ;
  • many customisation features, enabling you to locate resources you use regularly
  • a new area called My Resource Space, giving you a personal webspace to save and organise resources. (Ed - this, I particularly like the sound of !!)
To contact us, please email eLibrary@nes.scot.nhs.uk.

We apologise if
you receive multiple copies of this email. ATHENS Administration Team NHS Education for Scotland Clifton House Clifton Place GLASGOW G3 7LD Tel: 0141 352 2892

Having access to the resources available via the NHS eLibrary has been an important part of my patient advocacy work over the last two years. I very much like the look and feel of The Knowledge Network website already. It's certainly an improvement for the old site good although as it was. I'll definately be keeping a close eye on the new one and must make contact with the people who maintain this really really useful information web portal.

From the new site, see the likes of:-
IMO, more people should be aware of these resources and how lay-people like myself and not just NHS staff, can gain access to them, hence this post.



Sunday 10 January 2010

ScienceOnline 2010 #scio10 - Virtual Attendance Tips


(Source: Science Online 2010 logo remix)

++UPDATE++ - All the linky links you might need are contained here
. H/T Bora



How is it possible to really look forward to attending a cool science Conference - without actually being there for the event in person?

"ScienceOnline2010, the fourth annual conference on science and the Web, will be held on January 14-17th, 2010 at Sigma Xi in the Research Triangle Park".

Quite easily, actually.

But before going into the detail, let's spin the clock back two years.

Cue post How was it for you which I posted on the JoVE blog 20th January 2008. That was my first experience of virtually attending a conference and it was an awesome experience. Also see How was it for you? Interview with Graham Steel over at A Blog Around The Clock.

What held this one together (IMO) for those following virtually was a combination of the live video streams and chatrooms. It was also very useful to familiarise oneself (pre-event) with the online tools required to follow events in real-time.

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Most unfortunately, I was unable to follow scienceonline09 as I was unable to connect to the interwebz that weekend (problem with local ISP connection). I did however still manage to fling together a photo montage of shots taken on the day before the main event:-

Science Online '09 - Friday Shots from Graham Steel on Vimeo.



I did catch up with events when I got my connection back thanks to the extensive blog and media coverage.

What I did miss out on was all the real-time coverage online.

Whilst one really wanted to attend this years event in person, I'll happily settle with virtual attendance based upon previous experiences.

Since I missed out on a large chunk of the last one I can only imagine that with the addition of Twitter and FriendFeed (these didn't exist in early 2008) on top of live-streaming etc. this is going to be quite an experience.

Walter Jessen has very recently uploaded a PDF version of the conference program which will come in handy to those attending in person or virtually. (Thanks, Walt).

The associated Flickr photo pool as below should start to fill up later in the coming week and am also looking forward to this:-



So, if you are interested in science and an annual science communication conference but can't get there in person, you now know some of the online places to check out next weekend.

Last and not least, don't forget the Blog and Media Coverage.

++UPDATE 1++ Also keep a check on the Official ScienceOnline2010 blog.

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"Please join us for this active three-day event to explore science on the Web. Our goal is to bring together scientists, physicians, patients, educators, students, publishers, editors, bloggers, journalists, writers, web developers, programmers and others to discuss, demonstrate and debate online strategies and tools for doing science, publishing science, teaching science, and promoting the public understanding of science".

"This BlogTogether conference is organized by Anton Zuiker, Bora Zivkovic, Stephanie Willen Brown and David Kroll, with the help of many of you".