The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is “mining”
Facebook and Twitter to improve its social media footprint and to assess how
Tweets can be used as “change-agents” for health behaviors.
The NLM, a division of the Department of Health and
Human Services (HHS), will have software installed on government computers that
will store data from social media as part of a $30,000 project announced last
week.
“The National Library of Medicine is the world’s
largest biomedical library and makes its stored information available online at
no charge to consumers, health professionals, and biomedical scientists through
a diverse suite of resources,” the agency said in a contract posted recently.
“Evaluating how its databases and other resources are utilized is an important
component of continuing quality improvement and has long been an on-going
program of NLM management through a potpourri of monitoring tools.”
“The world-wide explosion in the use of social media
provides a unique opportunity for sampling sentiment and use patterns of NLM’s
‘customers’ and for comparing NLM to other sources of health-related
information,” the agency said.
“By examining relevant tweets and other comments,”
the contract said, “NLM will gain insights to extent of use, context for which
information was sought, and effects of various health-related announcements and
events on usage patterns.”
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Specifically, NLM will look at the “value of tweets
and other messages as teaching tools and change-agents for health-relevant
behavior.”
“The overarching objective of these studies is to
obtain a richer understanding of how consumers, clinicians, researchers
actually look for the health-related information they seek, and what they do
with what they find,” NLM said in a response to frequently asked questions about
the project.
OhMyGov Inc., a media company that specializes in
the promotion of government agencies, will be paid $30,660 to monitor social
media for NLM for one year.
The company will install software on computers at
NLM headquarters in Bethesda, Md. to “maintain a comprehensive ‘universe’ of
social media data.” Government bureaucrats will be trained on the software so
they can search the database for health-related content.
“Content from Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news sites,
discussion boards, video and image sharing sites will be maintained by the
Contractor and kept up-to-date in a timely manner and made available for query
by Government,” the contract said.
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