On July 1st the Library will launch a redesigned website. The organization provides quick access to important resources and services. A new section, Assistance, links you to research help including a new “How do I…” section. You can easily bookmark and share pages to a variety of social media tools and rate pages using a star rating system.

The new SEARCH feature allows you to quickly access some of our most used resources. Pull down the SEARCH menu and choose from the following: Library Website, the Library Catalog, Journals, Databases, PubMed or Newspapers.

Please note that some pages will have new URLs – please update your bookmarks. On July 1st the URL for the home page of the library will be http://www.hshsl.umaryland.edu.

A new HS/HSL toolbar will also be launched on July 1st. Unlike the current toolbar, the new toolbar can be updated seamlessly, and allows to send notifications about new resources and services. You install it once and we can keep it up-to-date.

We wish to thank the faculty, staff and students who provided us with comments and suggestions as we redesigned the website.

One of the most common questions or requests that our staff receives is how to get access to the resources of the Health Sciences and Human Services Library. When we still lived in a primarily print environment, the solution was fairly simple: If you came to the library with a valid picture ID you could use the databases or search the catalog, and could use the books and journals onsite. If you were really needy, you could become a member which would allow you to borrow books. An online environment increasingly linked to full text has made the desire to access our resources from offsite even greater. Because of licensing restrictions our response has been, unless you are paid by the University of Maryland, Baltimore or enrolled, offsite access to our resources was not permitted.

Well, we decided to try to do something about it, and for the past year have been working on a solution.

I am very pleased to announce the availability, on July 1, of Resources Plus!, a full-service research package that includes online full-text journals, databases and more for UMB alumni, volunteer faculty and clinical instructors as well as other associates. Through Resources Plus!, users search in one of four ProQuest databases – Health and Medical Complete™, Nursing & Allied Health Source™, Social Science Journals™, and Medline®/Medline with Full Text® – or search them all simultaneously using the 360 searching feature. Resources Plus! includes coverage from over 7,000 publications, many available in full-text. In July 2008, subscribers to Resources Plus! will also have the opportunity to schedule a consultation with a research librarian, borrow books, and register for any of the HS/HSL’s information management workshops.

The cost of Resources Plus! is $150 per year, but group discounts are available. For more information, email the Resources Plus! team.

Friday, May 16, 2007 – Tuesday, September 2, 2007

Holiday Hours

We’re excited to announce that, for the first time ever, the Library will be hosting workshops throughout the summer.

Workshops are free for all UMB faculty, staff, and students and are held every Tuesday and Wednesday from 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Topics covered will include RefWorks, PubMed Advanced, Grant Writing, Navigating the Library and NIH Public Access Mandate.

We hope to see you there! [Full description, schedule, & registration]

New Programs and Resources from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM)

Undiagnosed Diseases Program

The Undiagnosed Diseases Program pursues two goals: To provide answers to patients with mysterious conditions that have long eluded diagnosis and to advance medical knowledge about rare and common diseases.

The program is organized by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), the NIH Office of Rare Diseases (ORD), and the NIH Clinical Center. Senior physicians representing many medical specialties will contribute their expertise to the program’s clinical research.

For more information visit: http://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/Undiagnosed

Drug Portal

The NLM Drug Information Portal gives the public, healthcare professionals, and researchers a gateway to current, accurate drug information from the NLM and other government agencies.

Over 12,000 drug records are available. The interface is straightforward, requiring only a drug name as a search term, and successful searching is enhanced by the assistance of a spellchecker.

For more information visit: http://druginfo.nlm.nih.gov

Disaster Management Resources: Focus on WISER and REMM

The NLM is developing a Disaster Information Management Research Center to ensure the effective use of libraries in the nation’s disaster management efforts. The Center will collect, organize, and disseminate information resources as part of the Federal effort to prepare for, respond to, and reduce the adverse health effects of disasters.

The following two resources are particularly helpful for first responders:

• Wireless Information System for Emergency Responder (WISER), a system designed to assist first responders in hazardous material incidents
  
• Radiation Event Medical Management (REMM), a web site providing guidance to physicians concerning clinical diagnosis and treatment during mass casualty radiological/nuclear events

PubMed has been modified frequently over the years to optimize retrieval or provide features that lead searchers to additional information. PubMed is undergoing two changes which continue this trend. One change is in the way Automatic Term Mapping (ATM) works and the other is a new feature called Citation Sensor.

The Automatic Term Mapping feature was developed to enable PubMed to recognize author names, journal titles, and MeSH vocabulary terms that are used in searches without search tags. In the past when an author name or journal title was the same as a MeSH term, ATM performed a subject search. This caused many searches to fail – especially those looking for a specific article.

For example, a search using citation data: Burns 2005 31 145, where Burns is the journal title, fails with old ATM because "burns" mapped to a MeSH heading and Text Word search of that word. To address this problem, Automatic Term Mapping has been modified to make it more inclusive. With new ATM, the same search retrieves the record in PubMed for the article in Burns.

The MeSH and journals translations of new ATM have been augmented to include “All Fields” searching. Individual words are searched using the All Fields search tag, and, in the case of multi-word terms, those words are ANDed together. This broadens the search considerably by including citations with relevant terms that are not retrieved using old ATM.

For example, with new ATM a search for gene therapy can retrieve an in process record with the phrase, “…clinical application of gene silencing therapy…” which is not retrieved with old ATM. New ATM also searches multi-word terms with the All Fields tag. This allows retrieval of journal names which can only be retrieved using the complete name or abbreviation. It’s a good idea to check Details to verify how your terms have been translated. New ATM retrieves more citations than old ATM and searchers may notice more citations in the retrieval (and saved search updates) that are not of interest.

Citation Sensor is a new PubMed feature that matches searches with citations. It recognizes combinations of search terms that are characteristic of citation searching, e.g., volume/issue numbers, author names, journal titles, and publication dates, which it then matches to citations. If your search invokes the Citation Sensor, you will see a yellow area above the retrieval with links to one or more citations for your consideration. Please note: the Citation Sensor will not work with terms entered with search tags, e.g., chen [au].

For more information about these and other new PubMed features, visit: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/feed/rss.cgi?ChanKey=PubMedNews

For instruction about this and other advanced searching techniques in PubMed, sign up for our July 16 PubMed Advanced Workshop.

GreenFILE offers well-researched information covering all aspects of human impact on the environment. Its collection of scholarly, government and general-interest titles includes content on global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and more. The database provides indexing and abstracts for approximately 295,000 records, as well as Open Access full text for more than 4,600 records.

GreenFILE is a resource designed to help individuals and organizations interested in reducing the negative impact and increasing the positive impact they have on the environment. The database includes information for individuals, such as installing solar panels and recycling; for corporation needing information on green agriculture, hybrid cars or waste management; as well as, environmental laws, regulations and studies. The goal is for GreenFILE to be a practical tool for everyday information and a resource for academic study and classroom activities.

GreenFILE covers content going back more than 35 years. Journal articles unique to GreenFILE include: Bioscience, Journal of Environmental Planning & Management, Journal of Ecology, and Conservation Biology. The database also contains bibliographic information for key non-scholarly titles such as: E-The Environmental Magazine, Natural Life, and Mother Earth News.

To access GreenFILE, go to http://www.greeninfoonline.com.

HS/HSL faculty presentations at the Medical Library Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, May 2008.

"Community Connections through Collaboration: Social Workers and Health Science Librarians," Anna Tatro. Poster Presentation.

• Discussed the efficacy of collaboration between social workers and health sciences librarians in providing health information outreach to underserved populations.

"Connecting with Remote Patrons using 2.0 Widget and Knowledgebase," Ryan Harris and Tierney Lyons. Poster Presentation.

• Reference staff implemented Meebo and MediaWiki both free web-based software to create a virtual reference chat service for patrons and to improve communication among reference staff during building renovations.

"Connecting the Campus: Library Leadership in Social Networking," Alexa Mayo, Stefanie Warlick and M.J. Tooey. Poster Presentation.

• This poster reports on planning efforts for a Web 2.0 symposium in an academic health sciences setting, participation of a campus-wide advisory group and feedback from attendees.

"Creative Partnerships: Collaborative Approaches to Cost," Eric Rector and Alexa Mayo. Poster Presentation.

• By developing campus partnerships, the library is able to share the costs of licensing campus-wide resources and identify new avenues for marketing.

"Examining the Connections: Uses of Emerging Technologies for Web-based Instruction," Jaime Blanck, Anna Tatro, and Stefanie Warlick. Paper Presentation.

• Reported on a survey conducted to gather data on the emerging technologies and logistics involved in delivering innovative web-based education.

At the Library’s June staff meeting, Harriet Mandell-Olson from the Department of Family Medicine thanked the HS/HSL staff for their donation of books and funds. In December, 2007, Library staff held a raffle that raised $383.00 for the Reach Out and Read program. The money will be used to purchase books for children visiting Family Practice physicians.

The HS/HSL has once again fielded a team in the UMB Recreation & Wellness Services league. The team is made up of library staff and friends from UMB, UMBC, and Coppin State University. We’d love to see you at the games and encourage you to enjoy the blogged reports and pictures of our exploits.

Informers Softball … Where it doesn’t always hurt to catch.