The use of electronic mail at the reference desk: impact of a computer-mediated communication technology on librarian-client interactions.

Commonly recognized computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools include virtual environments, bibliographic databases, listservers, newsgroups, group teleconferencing, interactive messaging systems and electronic mail. The use of these technologies in libraries has grown exponentially over the past decade. Electronic mail has emerged as an especially popular communication tool for librarians, and their colleagues and patrons. This paper explores the use of a reference department electronic mail service and its impact on reference services and librarian-client interactions. Several issues related to the implementation of CMC technologies are presented, including the maintenance and monitoring of reference electronic mail systems, the types of questions that are typically posted, and potential barriers to the implementation and use of reference e-mail.

Environmental health in the journals.

The environmental health aspects of general medical practice have attracted the attention of many professional organizations in the past few years, including the American College of Physicians, the Institute of Medicine, and the American College of Occupational Medicine. To assess the degree of emphasis placed on environmental health issues in professional journals, a survey of representative specialty and general medical journals was conducted through a Medline literature search. Over the past 15-year period (1976-1990) specialty journals demonstrated a dramatic and consistent increase in published articles that were indexed under the headings environmental pollution, environmental pollutants, and environmental cancer. General medical journals also demonstrated continued increases in the rate of published articles addressing these environmental health topics. Within the environmental categories, air pollution, especially that due to dusts, was the most heavily indexed topic, followed by water pollution, especially that due to chemical contamination. This study supports the notion that environmental health issues are assuming more importance in general medical practice, especially within the specialty of occupational medicine.

The influence of occupational medicine on general medicine: a look at the journals.

To assess how the occupational medicine literature may affect general medical practice, representative journals were reviewed to address (1) how frequently the specialties cite each others' literature and (2) which topics are published most commonly by the respective journals. Five general medical journals were selected to contrast with six occupational medical journals. Methods included Journal Citation Reports, which enable the tabulation of impact factor, self-citation rate, and the number of source items published by the journal. MEDLINE was used to cross reference the 11 journals with designated topics in occupational medicine. The findings indicated that occupational medical journals are nearly 50 times more likely to cite the general medical literature than the converse. The journals most likely to cite the core occupational medical literature, aside from the specialty journals themselves, were the American Review of Respiratory Diseases and the American Journal of Epidemiology. In comparing the 1976 through 1980 period with the 1986 through 1990 period, occupational medical journals published 2.5 times as many source items (letters, technical reports, and papers) compared with a decade earlier. The MEDLINE search indicated that both types of journals address the same types of occupational medicine topics with the exception of gas poisoning and toxic hepatitis, which were published much more frequently in general medical journals. Pneumoconiosis was the most frequently addressed topic by occupational medical journals. Other major categories included reproductive hazards, lead poisoning, and noise-induced hearing loss. This study indicates that occupational medicine, as reflected by its journals, is a much more active scientific discipline than it was a decade earlier.