I need a tool. Or rather, a doctor I’m trying to help needs a tool. And I feel like it should exist, but I’m kind of thinking it doesn’t. I’ve solicited advice from all the lovely medlibs I follow on Twitter, and have had a few suggestions, but I’m not sure 140 characters really lets me describe my need. But I have a blog! A not-oft used blog, but that’s an issue for another time.
So. Our hospital system’s libraries provide a Table of Contents service. I’m in charge of the ToC for Administrators, a monthly aggregation of the latest issues of journals relevant to administrators that we subscribe to the full text of. As I’m sure many of you are aware, e-journals are not all on the same platform. On my Admin ToC, there’s even a non-e-journal (I think they call them print?) that I have to post the .PDF copy of. Here’s what the page looks like:
So you click on a title and you’re taken to the most current list of articles for that journal, maybe on the Ebsco platform, maybe on Ovid…maybe even on the Gale Health & Wellness Resource Center *shivers*. All the full text is available to employees, but of course there a multiple clicks involved, and you have to save PDFs, and what if you just want a nice set of the articles you want to read later? Our doc is a a tech-saavy guy, he knows how and that he could spend the time saving everything he wanted to read later, but what if he wants to just circle the ones he’s interested in, then pass it on to his assistant (or me) to nicely package everything together?
Can he do this:
+ 
—–> folder—–>assistant/me?
Does that make any sense? Any help would be appreciated. Oh, and the app? Yeah, bonus if this is something my doc can do on his iPad. I’ve had some thoughts/suggestions:
- Springpad (captures URLs, which don’t work because of authentication issues, but it does let you easily e-mail things to others, and you could always say “I want 1 & 2 from this one” instead of circling…)
- Instapaper (I don’t this would really work at all)
- Skitch (seems overly powerful for what we want to do, and isn’t an app)
- BO.LT (pretty cool tool for capturing and sharing webpages, but the authentication issues again come up…)
UPDATE: after looking at Jing, I’m thinking this tool might be my best bet…but it’s still not an app. Is there anything like this available for iPads?
Hacks, tricks, and all other alternate work-arounds are also welcomed! This is something of a last ditch effort, and I thank all of my readers in advance. 🙂
The (Ultimate) Librarian 