Thank you, Grand Rounds!

A Thanksgiving edition of Grand Rounds is up this morning at Colorado Health Insurance Insider. One of my favorite posts comes from Laika's MedLibLog, where a web 2.0 savvy health librarian shares a list of scientific journals that she follows on Twitter.

Maybe Twitter lists like this speak to me because I remember what accessing quality medical information once looked like: finding time to go to the university library, scrounging around for change, countless hours spent looking for high-end resources, doing the bump and grind with a recalcitrant copy machine (so that the prized materials might be made readily accessible in places more welcoming than the nasty, drafty, dirty library). And leaving with the nagging sense that I probably missed the best things anyway.

People who think that Twitter is a place where bores report the outcome of their children's travel soccer games are missing it. There are bores in Health 2.0. (There are bores everywhere: The 2009 word of the year is unfriend and I suspect unfollow, what you do to bores on Twitter, will pop up next year.)

But the ability to piggyback onto lists used by medical librarians, gaining access to real time output from 90 (just a start, no doubt) scientific journals a health information practitioner relies on.... well, it's enough to make you drop your dimes.

When you let go of old ways of doing things, it's nice to find something as a useful as a "follow" button.