Biomedical Libraries in the Next Decades: Open, Diffuse, and Very Personal
This talk will look at some of the forces that are reshaping both biomedical informatics and biomedical libraries, and the complex convergence occurring between the two on intellectual and institutional levels; it will also examine radical changes building up the scholarly publishing system that serves this discipline. Finally, I'll briefly discuss the unstable consensus about privacy, database development, and scientific inquiry in the context of broader social developments in health care and citizen science and the opportunities for perhaps profound shifts that could enhance discovery.
In addition, Elisa Oreglia will be presenting on “Social Relationships, Information Flows, and Agriculture in Rural China”:
Can a mobile phone make farmers in developing regions rich? Some economists believe so: information technologies can improve access to price information and to markets, reducing price dispersion and improving efficiency. However, access to markets and information are also socially negotiated processes that can result in counter-intuitive behaviors. In this presentation, I will discuss how Chinese farmers find and make sense of agricultural and market-related information, how the social relationships within the village shape their reactions to it, and how mobile phones and computers still have not found a place in this process.
Clifford Lynch has been the director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) since July 1997. CNI, jointly sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and Educause, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the use of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual productivity. Prior to joining CNI, Lynch spent 18 years at the UC Office of the President, the last 10 as Director of Library Automation. Lynch holds a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley and is an adjunct professor at the School of Information. He is a past president of the American Society for Information Science and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Information Standards Organization.
Elisa Oreglia is a Ph.D. student at the School of Information. Her research focuses on the circulation of technology and knowledge between rural and urban China and the role played by young migrant workers.