Online Searchable Death Indexes, Records & Obituaries. Personal Health Records: Lots of Interest, but Few Users - ReadW. According to Manhattan Research, a healthcare market research company, personal health records (PHR) are slowly becoming more popular in the U.S., but concerns about privacy and a lack of understanding, as well as doubts about the efficiency of PHRs are holding back widespread adoption.
Only about 7 million adults in the U.S. actually use PHRs. Especially those without serious illnesses often don't see the need for using electronic health records. Microsoft's HealthVault (our review), Google Health, and WebMD all offer interesting and consumer friendly services, but they have not been able to gain significant traction in the marketplace, even though there is compelling evidence that electronic records can reduce the chance of medical errors significantly. Maelstrom Over Metadata. A debate is carrying on in the undercurrents of the academic Web, pitting those who defend libraries' core mission of open access against the membership organization that collects and operates a massive online catalog on which many of them rely.
Early this month, the OCLC (for Online Computer Library Center) announced the first significant change in its policies governing how libraries use and share bibliographic records since 1987 -- years before the World Wide Web existed. Some of those rules were considered overly vague or out of touch, representing an era before Google searches and online catalogs transformed the way students and researchers use library databases. A major part of libraries' evolution since then has been a demand for more openness and the ability to search for materials that might exist at any number of institutions worldwide, driven by the ubiquity of search engines and an increasing commitment to digitizing texts. Blog Archive » Rule #1 for Surviving Paradi. So, OCLC decides to update its data licensing policy after 21 years and the librarians’ blogosphere goes berserk.
OCLC is a non-profit organization that offers services to libraries worldwide. The most important of their services is the collection and re-distribution of catalog metadata. Ideally, it’s a Wikipedia for library index cards: say a new books comes out, instead of having thousands of libraries around the world come up with the same (or very similar) index card for that book (therefore collecting all the data about it), one of them can do it, submit it to OCLC and every other library now has access to it and can use it for their own catalogs (and eventually correct it and submit it back corrected). Just like Wikipedia, the person that contributes the data is not who decides how this data gets used, but there is a mutual agreement, a contract, that regulates who can do what with this data.