Two articles from Journal of the Medical Library Association

Two articles of interest in the April 2009 issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association:

A bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature on Internet, video games, and cell phone addiction, by Xavier Carbonell, Elena Guardiola, Marta Beranuy, and Ana Bellés.

Web usability testing with a Hispanic medically underserved population, by Mary Moore, Randolph G. Bias, Katherine Prentice, Robin Fletcher, and Terry Vaughn.

American Black Journal

Detroit Public Television (DPTV) together with Michigan State University (MSU) have collaborated to catalog, preserve, and provide internet public access to the entire corpus of shows from the DPT television series, American Black Journal, that aired from 1968-2002.

Both DPTV and MSU shared in the two main goals of this project--digital preservation of the ABJ tapes and using the shows to create a significant, accessible multimedia archive of African-American history. The programs cover a broad spectrum of African American history:

1. Education and Families: Building Opportunity and Community
2. Leadership: Politics, Politicians, and Reform
3. Musical Roots: Jazz, Motown, Gospel, Hip Hop, & Techno
4. Literature and Language: The Richness and Diversity of Black Voices
5. Religion and Spiritual Life
6. Sports and Entertainment: Actors, Athletes and the Black Community
7. Africa and African-Americans
8. Urban Challenges: Development, Re-development, CommunityLife
9. Poverty, Progress, Rise of BlackBusinesses and Professionals
10. Motor City & Motown: Detroit in Regional and National Context

You can search the site by these themes as well as chronologically by decade; the programs themselves are a mere click or two away as you navigate this simple, handsomely designed site.

Journal of Communication in Healthcare

The Journal of Communication in Healthcare has just been added to Penn Library e-resources. In it's second year of publication, the quarterly publishes practice-oriented articles written by medical practitioners and related professionals, case studies by medical practitioners and communications managers, and research from medical research centres and universities showing how to improve communication management in healthcare, measure its effectiveness, and communicate its value in supporting medical and organizational goals.

In perusing a few issues to sample the range of topics covered and, more specifically, their bibliographies it quickly becomes obvious that the journal extends from the medical rather than the communications or social science literature. Take an article in the fourth issues of 2008, their first year, "The Development of a Local Cancer Awareness Communication Campaign." The article does not reference any communications or social science journals. Citations come from British Journal of Cancer, Thorax, and The British Journal of General Practice." This is true for most of the articles. "How to Develop a Cancer Information Internet Strategy" (Volume I, Number 3) cites Journal of Clinical Nursing, British Medical Journal, Oncology Times, New England Journal of Medicine, and European Journal of Cancer. I was able to find a reference to Health Education and Research in a piece called "Case Study: Consumer and Provider Perceptions of Offered Anticipatory Guidance During Prenatal Care" (Volume I, Number 3). Other social science titles I was able to spy include Health Information and Libraries Journal, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, Science Technology and Human Values, and Social Science and Medicine. But I had to look very thoroughly to come up with this small incursion from the social sciences. It certainly seems like the field of Health Communication as defined by doctors, practitioners and public health administrators and the one defined by communications researchers have a lot to share in just these kinds of journals. I'll keep looking for more signs of cross-pollination.

April CommQuote

Authors Joanne Roberts and John Armitage, in a recent article appearing in the December 2008 issue of Prometheus, compel us to think about the knowledge economy, a much bandied around concept related to the production and transmission of knowledge-based goods and services, in terms of its binary, the ignorance economy. I've strung a few quotes together from that article which I realize is cheating a little but still close enough to the spirit of our monthly rendezvous with quotable-things-related-to-communication. This article can be found in Penn's e-resources.

"Unlike the knowledge economy, the ignorance economy is not, or at least not yet, a common expression used amongst economists, managers, and policymakers. ...Nevertheless, we want to argue, the knowledge economy is precisely rooted in the production, distribution, and consumption of ignorance and lack of information. ...Indeed, as we shall see below, the knowledge economy is necessarily engaged in the speedy obsolescence of knowledge and thus in the expansion of ignorance....it is our contention that ICTs lead to a growth in ignorance. First, increasing amounts of knowledge are being codified and embedded in information management systems, databases, websites and so on. While this makes the information easily retrievable for those with access to the technologies (and we must remember that many even in the advanced nations have limited or no access), it also leads to the discarding of important tacit elements of knowledge that are not amenable to codification. ...Jean-Noël Jeanneney raises this concern in relation to Google's library project, arguing that its unsystematic digitization of works predominantly written in English and from a few partner libraries ignores the complexity of the world's cultural heritage. The result of such codification projects is the loss of valuable knowledge and the development of path-dependency in terms of future creativity and innovation."

--Joanne Roberts and John Armitage (from "The Ignorance Economy," Prometheus, Volume 26, Issue 4, pp. 345-347).