How Google is changing medicine

doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7531.1487

BMJ 2005;331:1487-1488 (24 December), doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7531.1487

Editorial

How Google is changing medicine

A medical portal is the logical next step

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

What a remarkable year it has been for those of us monitoringchanges in the global information landscape. Since last Christmas,there has been a flurry of activity: the digitisation of theworld's libraries began in earnest (despite the copyright fracas);open access publishing gained much-needed support internationally(especially in science and medicine); and Google, MSN Search,and Yahoo introduced a number of customisation tools for desktopsand mobiles, podcasts, blogs, and video searches.^{1 2}

Google's influence and power is writ large in the search field—solarge that librarians are asking themselves some difficult questions.With all of this technology and freely available digital information,what will happen to physical libraries? Google's mission isto provide access to the world's information—but thisis librarians' mission too. Will they be needed in the new informationage?³

For all the benefits technology provides, it does provoke anxiety.In a recent letter in . . . [Full text of this article]

Dean Giustini, UBC biomedical branch librarian

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z1
(giustini@interchange.ubc.ca)

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