Text 4 Health: Addressing Consumer Health Information Needs via Text Reference Service

This study seeks to provide empirical evidence about how health-related questions are answered in text reference service in order to further the understanding of how to best use texting as a reference service venue to fulfill people’s health information needs. Two hundred health reference transactions from My Info Quest, the first nation-wide collaborative text reference service, were analyzed identify the types of questions, length of transactions, question-answering behavior, and information sources used in the transactions. Findings indicate that texting-based health reference transactions are usually brief, and cover a wide variety of topics. The most popular questions are those seeking general factual information about human body, medical/health conditions, diseases, or medical concepts/jargons. Great variance is discovered among the question-answering behavior, with only a little more than half of the answers containing citation to information sources. The study will inform the practice of health reference service via texting, and help libraries make evidence-based decisions on establishing service policies and procedures, providing training for librarians, and ultimately implementing the service successfully

Promoting Improved Access to Consumer Health Information

“Do you have any information on lupus?” “What are the side effects of Prozac?” “I want to find an herbal remedy for arthritis.” Questions such as these are asked each day across the country at public library reference desks. The boom of interest in consumer health, fueled by changes in society and the medical system itself, has strained the infrastructure for dissemination of such information, including at the local public library. In response to this problem, medical libraries, led by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), have explored methods of partnering with public libraries to provide improved consumer health information for their clientele. Cooperation between medical and public libraries has proven to be quite effective

Hidden Surveillance on Consumer Health Information Websites

Behavioural tracking presents a significant privacy risk to Canadians, particularly when their online behaviours reveal sensitive information that could be used to discriminate against them. This concern is particularly relevant in the context of online health information seeking, since searches can reveal details about health conditions and concerns that the individual may wish to keep private. The privacy threats are exacerbated because behavioural tracking mechanisms are large invisible to users, and many are unaware of the strategies and mechanisms available to track online behaviour. In this project, we seek to document the behavioural tracking practices of consumer health websites, and to examine the privacy policy disclosures of these same practices. The results of our research demonstrate that tracking is widespread on consumer health information websites; furthermore, sites recommended by Information Professionals are similar to sites returned in Google searches in terms of overall tracking, though they show lower levels of third-party advertiser presence. Privacy policy disclosure of tracking practices is largely ineffective, and website visitors cannot easily determine tracking practices from a review of the website privacy policies. Taken together, these results suggest that alternative mechanisms are required to detect and/or mitigate or neutralize the behavioural tracking measures used on many consumer health information websites

Consumer Health Information System

ABSTRACT World Wide Web acts as one of the major sources of information for health related questions. However, often, there are multiple conflicting answers to a single question and it is hard to come up with "a single best correct answer". Therefore, it is highly desirable to identify conflicting perspectives about a particular question (or topic). In this paper, we have described our participation in Consumer Health Information System(CHIS) task at FIRE 2016. There were two sub-tasks in this contest. The first sub-task deals with identifying if a particular answer is relevant to a given question. The second sub-task deals with detecting if a particular answer agrees or refuses the claim posed in a given question. We pose both these tasks as supervised pair classification tasks. We report our results for various document representations and classification algorithms

Healthnet News v.18:no.1 Spring 2003

A newsletter for public librarians and others interested in consumer health information services

Healthnet News v.21:no.3 Fall 2006

A newsletter for public librarians and others interested in consumer health information services

Healthnet News v.19:no.1 Spring 2004

A newsletter for public librarians and others interested in consumer health information services