Training at the postgraduate level for medical librarians: a review.

Postgraduate education for medical librarians is approachable from several perspectives, including internships, certificate programs, and continuing education programs. The diverse population of medical library personnel calls for a varied yet coordinated system of postgraduate education involving the Medical Library Association, regional medical libraries, library schools, and the National Library of Medical, in addition to active participation by all librarians in the health sciences field. Basic philosophies for each of the major types of programs are discussed and recommendations for future training of health sciences librarians are provided.     

Effects of Mass and Interpersonal Communication on Breast Cancer Screening: Advancing Agenda-Setting Theory in Health Contexts

Drawing on components of agenda-setting theory and the two-step flow of information from mass media to news audiences, this study examines the effects of mass and interpersonal communication on breast cancer screening practices among college- and middle-aged women (n = 284). We theorized that screening behaviors among younger women would be influenced more by interpersonal sources of information while screening among middle-aged women would be more influenced by exposure to mass-mediated information. Findings supported anticipated patterns, revealing important and varying roles for both mass and interpersonal communication in the health behaviors of women. Implications for health practitioners and campaign planners, as well as recommendations for future research, are discussed.     

Construction of query concepts based on feature clustering of documents

In Information Retrieval, since it is hard to identify users’ information needs, many approaches have been tried to solve this problem by expanding initial queries and reweighting the terms in the expanded queries using users’ relevance judgments. Although relevance feedback is most effective when relevance information about retrieved documents is provided by users, it is not always available. Another solution is to use correlated terms for query expansion. The main problem with this approach is how to construct the term-term correlations that can be used effectively to improve retrieval performance. In this study, we try to construct query concepts that denote users’ information needs from a document space, rather than to reformulate initial queries using the term correlations and/or users’ relevance feedback. To form query concepts, we extract features from each document, and then cluster the features into primitive concepts that are then used to form query concepts. Experiments are performed on the Associated Press (AP) dataset taken from the TREC collection. The experimental evaluation shows that our proposed framework called QCM (Query Concept Method) outperforms baseline probabilistic retrieval model on TREC retrieval.