Week 5

We've been focused mostly on how to do the tasks necessary for the annotated bibliographies, but really the course has the more general goals of getting you to think about and experiment with the broader questions of information access: when you need to find out about something, how do you do it?

Consider a few examples of information-finding challenges that call upon the tools we've been exploring, all from questions that came my way in the last week or so:

a faculty member asks about the "pedigree of Type 1 diabetes"
a student is hunting for a list of the "most commonly prescribed drugs"
somebody needs references to literature on the geographical distribution of risk factors for heart disease
somebody needs information on alkaloids and witchcraft, specifically tropanes

You have the skills to approach these problems, each of which has tricks hidden away inside. So how should we think about approaching each?

Type 1 Diabetes: ?what did the professor mean by 'pedigree'?
(think of some synonyms and contexts in which 'pedigree' crops up --how about 'inheritance'? and what sources deal with that? Anything that looks worthwhile on the Biology Department database menu? A quick check of the index in the back of Merck Index for 'pedigree' turns out to be quite enlightening, in a practical sort of way. [Another possibility is the online Merck Manual, and here's a link to the description of constructing a pedigre e]. And nearby on the shelf is a 3-volume Metabolic and Molecular Bases of Inherited Disease that's really eloquent)
prescribed drugs: ?why does the question arise?
(turns out the student was interested in antibiotic resistance, which is a whole other question [and PubMed is probably the way to approach that one] but it's an interesting challenge to try to find a list. How would it have been compiled, and by whom?)
geographical distribution: ?who knows or cares about this problem?
(this comes under the general heading of 'epidemiology', and probably MEDLINE is the single best source --but HOW should we construct the search?)
witchcraft:
(a Real World question, off-the-wall enough that AltaVista is probably the place to start, viz: 'alkaloids and witchcraft', 'tropane and witchcraft'. Is there more to be found somewhere somehow?)

We get information from all sorts of sources --we're swimming in information, maybe even drowning. Certainly it's necessary to know how to navigate the highly-processed and specialized forms like the indexes and databases we've been looking at, but you should also be aware of what you can do with less rarified forms.

I get a lot of my day-to-day information from NPR (I don't do TV, and don't read newspapers very often), and several times a week I hear stories on NPR that pique curiosity, connect with other things I'm doing or being asked about, or offer parts of answers to questions I've been considering. Case in point: Monday morning there was an interview with Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher about "emerging infectious diseases".

Question: once it's gone by on the airwaves, how can I find it again?

There are a couple of ways available to us:

The NPR web site (www.npr.org) has an archive of programs in RealAudio files, and the whole story is there: 9 March NPR morning news (this requires the RAPlayer software, which is free, and of course needs speakers)
Lexis/Nexis has transcripts of NPR (and other) material, though finding what you seek can be a bit challenging (I finally found the transcript in 'Top News' of the 'last 2 weeks' with the search "satcher and emerging".