Superimposition of being: the collision of maternal and fetal rights.
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Abortion, Legal↗
Biomedical subjects
S J Kolner
Publications and source records attributed to S J Kolner.
Teaching skills in medical information retrieval to medical students.
Most students are admitted to medical school with little or no prior training in medical information retrieval. Despite the increasing dependence of physicians on new information tools, such as computer data bases and on-line literature searching, few medical schools have included more than token emphasis on information retrieval skills in their curricula. Reports on information skills courses have revealed that the courses often encounter serious obstacles, including poor student acceptance. The authors here describe a project that attempts to overcome the principal obstacles and to provide an efficient and effective method of teaching information retrieval skills to second-year medical students. The method includes a pretest that contains case scenarios, a diagnosis of individual students' deficiencies in information skills, a self-paced individual learning module, and a posttest. Evaluation of the program showed that the students had deficiencies in information retrieval skills and that the students who used the self-instruction module had significantly higher scores on the posttest than the students who did not.
Illinois↗
The book availability study as an objective measure of performance in a health sciences library.
In its search for an objective overall diagnostic evaluation, the University of Illinois Library of the Health Sciences' Program Evaluation Committee selected a book availability measure; it is easy to administer and repeat, results are reproducible, and comparable data exist for other academic and health sciences libraries. The study followed the standard methodology in the literature with minor modifications. Patrons searching for particular books were asked to record item(s) needed and the outcome of the search. Library staff members then determined the reasons for failures in obtaining desired items. The results of the study are five performance scores. The first four represent the percentage probability of a library's operating with ideal effectiveness; the last provides an overall performance score. The scores of the Library of the Health Sciences demonstrated no unusual availability problems. The study was easy to implement and provided meaningful, quantitative, and objective data.
Books↗
A regional union list as an online catalog for consumer health information.
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Health Education↗
Improving the MEDLARS search interview: a checklist approach.
An analogy is drawn between searching a computer data base and conducting laboratory research: the crucial process in both is phrasing the question to the system to obtain meaningful and useful results. The searcher must act as an intermediary for the library user in questioning the data base; for this reason every effort must be made to maximize the efficiency with which a query is transferred from requester to searcher. Studies reported in the literature tend to distribute themselves into one of two categories: flowchart analyses or nonverbal communication approaches. Because message transfer in an interview is an entirely human process, the flowchart approach, while perhaps providing a correct analysis, is rejected as a means of improvement. Similarly, emphasis on nonverbal cues and communication inhibitors is assessed as misplaced. Rather, the method recommended is guided practice, using a checklist of areas to be covered in an interview for a MEDLARS search. Topic appropriateness, form design, and postsearch follow-through are included in the discussion.
MEDLARS↗