Happy New Fiscal Year! We celebrated by scrapping all of our Ovid databases in favor of the EBSCO interface and PubMed. Our users are pissed, even though they had a month's warning. Not being a true medical librarian at heart, I'm not exactly disappointed to switch to interfaces that I find more familiar (and more similar to every other bibliographic database). I wish I felt sorrier for the docs, but I'm bothered more by their simple lack of information literacy. You put healthcare professionals in a situation where they need to learn to use a new tool, and they freak out and don't know what to do. And then they get angry, in the name of patient care, of course, except that when one offers to help (for example, by emailing the relevant review tutorial citations limited to those available through our library), they don't want it--even if, due to ignorance and stubborness, the patient is the one who's going to suffer. Yeah, I want my doctor to act like that.

I think PubMed is a better tool than Ovid. It's different, certainly, but it does more of what I want a database to do: I can run big long Boolean keyword searches that map to subject headings instead of having to run each search term separately, map it to the subject heading, and then combine the searches and limits at the end. (I'm more of the add lots of things and then remove or refine them type of searcher, but that's just me.) PubMed is free and available to anyone with internet access (funded by American tax dollars to provide access to health information directly to those who need it), which appeals to all the reasons I went into librarianship (mediating people and information for minimal cost to all involved). PubMed goes back to 1953 or beyond; Ovid has an "Old Medline" feature but still stops at 1966 for main Medline (and includes options to only search the last 5 and/or 10 years, which downright scares me since I worry about docs missing things just because they're old). PubMed includes various filters that represent what were once individual databases (AIDSLINE and CancerLit, for example)--so it's one-stop shopping. (Of course, our own homegrown databases--also funded by the National Library Medicine--will probably never be included and thus no one will ever really know about them, but that's because we don't play well with others.)

What scares me most is that highly educated professionals don't feel comfortable a) figuring out what information they want and b) translating that "information need" to a format the best tool (whatever it may be) can understand. That's what searching Ovid did for our users--while the rest of the library-using world learned that there are a lot of great databases that have similar features but different page designs and might have their own distinct syntax requirements, ours used Ovid or nothing at all. Until I came to a health sciences library (where the larger culture of our users is one resistant to learning anything that isn't going to be on a test or that doesn't have an automatic right or wrong answer) I thought that's what librarians were supposed to do in user education: teach general searching strategies and techniques and encourage users to become familiar with databases most useful to them and checking the help screen when stuck. Interfaces change, but learning to think is a tool people have forever.

Maybe it's a generational thing--I grew up as computers blossomed from Apple IIe's into what they are now, so I expect the technology to revamp itself on a regular basis. Or maybe it's all those science classes that started out with a discussion of the phrase "the only thing constant is change." Either way, I'm worried that professionals in other fields don't want to adapt. Maybe the docs look down their noses just because PubMed is free. (If we pay $50,000 or whatever for Ovid, it must be the best, right?) Maybe we just should have slashed the full text we pay for instead. Either way, I hope I'm not hospitalized any time soon because I can just see it... The doc on the phone yelling at the provider of some important machine, say the morphine pump, yelling, "This used to be so easy and you went and moved all the buttons around and now it won't work." Replies the person on the other end, "Well, tell me what you're trying to do and I'll walk you through it." "I don't have time for this. Transfer me to your supervisor so I can complain." Days later, he's still angry and unable to use the machine, and I'm still in pain, waiting for someone who knows how to make the morphine pump work correctly.

Adaptation is a key component in the survival of the fittest, people.