Web 2.0 and The Cochrane Collaboration: A Case Study

The Cochrane Collaboration and Web 2.0: A Case Study Chris Mavergames Web Operations Manager/Information Architect The Cochrane Collaboration EAHIL Workshop, Dublin Castle 2 June 2009

The Cochrane Collaboration

Cochrane in one sentence:

The Cochrane Collaboration is a global network of dedicated volunteers supported by a small staff who produce Systematic Reviews of healthcare interventions published in The Cochrane Library.

Cochrane on the web in one sentence:

Cochrane on the web consists of our flagship site, cochrane.org, along with roughly 80 other entity websites (Review Groups, Centres, Branches, etc.) as well as www.thecochranelibrary.com (WileyInterScience).

cochrane.org

Web 2.0 tools we have tried

Social networking: Facebook

Microblogging: Twitter

Social bookmarking: del.icio.us

Wikis: cochrane.org/ideas, ccreview.wikispaces.com

Subscription services: RSS for

Podcasts

News

Calendars, events

Slideshare: embedded Slidecasts on cochrane.org

YouTube and Google Video: embedded videos on cochrane.org

Web 2.0 tools we want to try

Cochrane blog(s)

Live broadcast events: livestream.com (i.e., an “Ask the Author” broadcast)

Yammer: Institutional Twitter

Twitter as polling and conference “tweet-up” tool (at Colloquia and meetings)

Other ideas that have been circulated:

Wiki as a training tool?

Wiki as Intranet?

A Cochrane Facebook

Web 2.0 tools we have tried

Summary of each followed by lessons learned and recommendations

Summary: The CC on

Started without the knowledge of anyone “official” or “central” to the .org – we found out about it by accident !

Quickly joined forces with the creator and got Admin access.

Haven’t used to greatest potential but are looking at ways to do this.

We are considering creating an internal Cochrane “Facebook” – “Faces of Cochrane” or similar – within our new CMS (Drupal)

Cochrane Collaboration on Facebook

Medical Libraries on Facebook

Lessons learned/Recommendations

Lessons learned:

Web 2.0 is not about control

These types of Web 2.0 presences develop organically

Thus, I believe they are more effective, engaging, etc. when they ARE allowed to develop organically (albeit with some guidance)

Social interaction can quickly turn into or be mixed with professional interaction

Recommendations:

Facebook hasn’t really “taken off” for us but we feel it’s important to have a presence there

A must for most tradition al library settings (XYZ Medical Library)

Summary: The CC on

Presence since end of January (twitter.com/cochranecollab)

We now have over 300 followers and have posted several hundred updates

We‘ve found it to be a great tool for disseminating Cochrane news and evidence and for networking with other institutions (WHO, NHS, etc.)

Especially relevant is our experience during the swine flu period outbreak – combating bad information with Cochrane evidence!

Someone described Cochrane‘s presence on Twitter by saying that we had a “rush of blood to the head“ – quite accurate

Cochrane Collaboration on Twitter

twitter.com/tsc_oh

Twitter Poll

Hashtags.org

Lessons learned:

Twitter is an excellent dissemination and resource discovery tool

Don’t underestimate the power of this seemingly trite tool (I did!)

Twitter can used as a polling tool and “crowdsourcing” tool

Enables a huge .org like the CC to engage with individuals

Recommendations:

Absolutely recommend it as a personal, professional development tool

Also recommend it for institutions and libraries (LISNews, Brooklyn Public Library, etc.)

Summary: The CC and social bookmarking

We have an account at del.icio.us/cochrane.collaboration

Mainly used so far to store collections of bookmarks related to projects we are working on (CMS Project, for example)

Replaces lists of links pages on internal websites, documentation we have – we can just add bookmarks their collectively under the same account and tag them appropriately and point everyone there: “look under tag ‘Drupal’” for example

Have considered using it more widely but haven’t as of yet

del.icio.us

Lessons learned:

Del.icio.us is a very helpful tool for organizing both one‘s own, personal bookmarks as well as collections managed by groups

Recommendations:

Perhaps CiteULike and Connotea are more appropriate for researchers or scientists as the collections available for browsing from other members might be more relevant

Del.icio.us will work for organizing bookmarks for most “general“ purposes

Summary: The CC – blogs and wikis

No blogs yet from a central, Cochrane source but we are discussing creating topic-specific blogs related, for example, to Cochrane Review Groups or a blog for our new Editor-in-Chief

However, some Cochrane people are already blogging! (see next slide)

We have used wikis such as cochrane.org/ideas (see slide after next) and plan to use them more in the future, including the idea of an intranet or portion of an intranet as a Wiki

http://laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com/

http:// cochrane.org/ideas

Lessons learned:

Blogs: nothing yet in practice but in theory, we‘ve had a lot of discussion about focus – we don‘t want a general “Cochrane blog“ as it would be way too general

Wikis: Have used them a bit and find them helpful, if you can get people to actually contribute!

Recommendations:

Blogs: As a personal tool to create a web presence for your work, highly recommended; for an institution, keep in mind to keep it focused

Wikis: Recommended but offer “incentives to get people to contribute“

Summary: The Cochrane Collaboration – Podcasts

Podcasts from The Cochrane Library – launched with Issue 1, 2008 of The Cochrane Library

Originally set up to Podcasts audio summaries of Reviews from each issue of The Cochrane Library

Has now been expanded to include special podcast collections on topics such as influenza and events such as International Clinical Trials Day

Usually recorded by the authors of Cochrane Reviews themselves and centrally managed via a Podcast RSS feed and player pages on cochrane.org

Has been fairly successful so far with 100s of subscribers and 10,000 of thousands of hits on the player pages

cochrane.org/podcasts

Lessons learned:

Podcasts are an excellent knowledge dissemination or “transfer“ tool especially for summarizing long and complicated pieces of information such as Cochrane Reviews

Technical challenges (learning how to use audio recording software, sample rates of .mp3 files can be tricky and movement of files via email among other technical aspects make Podcasts somewhat challenging to get off the ground)

Recommendations:

Highly recommend setting up a Podcast feed and trying to record some Podcasts

See our ‘Guide to Podcasting‘ here: http://www.cochrane.org/resources/podcasting_guide.htm

Summary: The Cochrane Collaboration – RSS

We currently offer some of our news channels as RSS feeds as well as our Podcasts

Our use of RSS is very limited at present but with our new CMS (Drupal), we plan to make many more RSS feed options including RSS feeds for:

New and updated Cochrane Reviews

“ Cochrane in the news“ press announcements

Calendars, events, workshops, training

More or less any content that would be suitably received as an RSS feed

cochrane.org/news

Lessons learned:

RSS is an excellent way to “push“ content to your users without them having to “pull“ it from your site(s)

We have not exploited the possibilities of RSS feeds enough

Recommendations:

Offering some information from your site(s) as RSS feeds is almost certainly a must nowadays as people can‘t/shouldn‘t always be expected to actually visit your site to get information you provide

Using RSS for something like “saved search“, news or events is a recommended path to get started

Summary: The Cochrane Collaboration – Slideshare.net

Slideshare.net is a site that allows you to upload Powerpoint presentations for easy embedding on other sites

One can also create so-called “Slidecasts“ which are Powerpoint presentations with audio (an .mp3 file synced to the .ppt)

We have used Slideshare heavily to create so-called “Slidecasts“ of presentations from Cochrane meetings and Colloquia with much success

An effective way to keep people on your site (the Slidecasts are embeddable on a page on your site so users don‘t download and leave your site but are viewing content right on the page)

slideshare.net/cochrane.collaboration

http://www.cochrane.org/multimedia/colloquium_2008/

Lessons learned:

Slideshare is an excellent, free service for sharing Powerpoint presentations and creating Slidecasts

Since the service is free, you can‘t always be sure the site is running properly and thus the embedded Slideshows(casts) are therefore loading but we haven‘t had many reports of this happening

Recommendations:

Absolutely recommended for both institutions and esp. for individuals (Slideshare integrates with LinkedIn and Facebook for embedding of your slideshows right into your profile)

Summary: The Cochrane Collaboration -

Mainly used for embedding videos on cochrane.org and other Cochrane websites

We haven‘t developed our channels on these two sites very much but would like to create more of a presence on these services

Great way to save server and storage space (embedding vs. streaming of content from another service)

youtube.com/cochranecollab

Lessons learned:

Great for embedding videos freely on your sites

Similar to Slideshare, however, there is now way to know if your videos are loading from YouTube/Google Video but as with Slideshare, we haven‘t had many complaints

Recommendations:

If you are thinking of creating video content, definitely recommend having a presence on YouTube/Google Video

Allows users 2 “channels“ within which to discover your content: your site where the content is embedded and via YouTube/Google Video

Web 2.0 tools we want to try

A preview of some other Web 2.0 tools we are

considering...

Future Cochrane blog(s)

Lots of discussion around creating blogs within Cochrane Collaboration

Difficulty has been in trying to find a focus for such a blog or blogs

Someone suggested a general Cochrane blog but this seems much to broad

So, direction we‘re now considering is topic specific blogs (Schizophrenia Review Group blog, for example) or an Editor-in-Chief blog

Our new CMS, Drupal, offers many blogging possibilities

Yammer (private Twitter)

Many in Cochrane are either already on Twitter or have shown interest

However, many don’t feel comfortable discussing some things in public

Enter Yammer, a Twitter service for institutions

Only with the same email address domain (person@yourorg.com) are allowed into the network

Potential problem: many within institutions don’t have same domain in their email (esp. in Cochrane!)

Could work for many institutions, however

yammer.com

Livestream.com (live broadcasting)

Livestream.com (formerly Mogulus.com) is a free online broadcasting solution

You create a channel and with a webcam are able to broadcast live to the web

Your channel is embeddable on any site

We are thinking of using this for a weekly “Ask the author” spot on cochrane.org or similar feature

livestream.com/cochrane

Other ideas that are circulating

Wiki as a training tool?

Wiki as Intranet?

A Cochrane Collaboration Facebook (an internal, Cochrane-only version of the popular social networking tool created with the Drupal platform)

Co-tweeting on Cochrane Collaboration twitter account (already doing this with a few people) and multiple Twitter users (twitter.com/cochranelibusers, etc.)