Another academic year has begun, and here at the HS/HSL we are already exhausted as we contemplate all the projects we have started or will be starting during the next year. For example:

1. The opening of another video conferencing room. The Boughman/Alpern Conference Room on the main floor of the library has added videoconferencing capabilities and has room for 18-20 people. The Balis Conference Room on the fifth floor has room for 8-10. See the article below for more information.
2. Development of a Research Support Service which will include a systematic review service, bibliometric analysis, referral services, research impact analysis, and new tools to support research, such as Open Helix. Stay tuned for more information about this new service.
3. The MPower Virtual Research Library. The libraries at UMB and College Park have been funded to jointly license new resources to support the MPower initiative. As soon as the resources are fully licensed, expect a special edition of Connective Issues.
4. Our 200th Anniversary celebrations continue. This year we will be hosting two symposia. On October 22, save the date for our Mobile Health Symposium. Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet and American Life project will be our keynote speaker. More information is forthcoming. Next spring we will be co-hosting with Elsevier Publishing a symposium on measuring the impact of research. Three major exhibits will be found in the Weise Gallery. The first is "WHACK’ed: and then everything was different," in which Eliette Markhbein uses art to explore traumatic brain injury and to highlight some legendary traumatic brain injury survivors like David Bowie, Keith Richards, and Gabrielle Giffords. The exhibit opens on August 23rd. "Evolution and Influences: The HS/HSL at 200" is our own internal exhibit charting both our history and some significant advances in medical information and technology that have affected our profession. And finally, we are in negotiations with the Holocaust Museum to bring "Deadly Medicine" to the Library. This exhibit focuses on Nazi medical experiments in WW2 concentration camps.

I hope something in this list piques your interest. If you have any questions or ideas for partnerships or programs, please feel to contact me.

Wishing you much success during this academic year!

Mark your calendars for the upcoming HS/HSL 200th anniversary event, Embracing mHealth: Mobilizing Healthcare, on Tuesday, October 22 at the SMC Campus Center.

Mobile technologies are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in public and global health, clinical settings, and in personal health monitoring and assessment. This free half-day symposium promises to present exciting trends in mHealth and explore projects that are integrating mobile technologies into the diagnosis and management of disease and wellness promotion. Speakers include Susannah Fox from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, Alain Labrique of Johns Hopkins University’s Global mHealth Initiative, Kathleen Murphy from text4baby, and the curator of The Smartphone Physical, Shiv Gaglani. Don’t miss it!

For more information, contact Katherine Downton, or Ryan Harris.

During the Library’s latest round of improvements, we realized there was a need for more video conferencing rooms on campus. As the need for distance collaboration grows, our users require new technology-enabled communication tools. In September we will open a second video conference room in the Boughman-Alpern Family Conference Room on the main floor of the HS/HSL as the first facility in the Balis Conference Room on the fifth floor proved to be popular and a great benefit to the campus. That room has been used for faculty interviews, NIH virtual site visits, student meetings with Governor O’Malley, collaborative meetings with the USM, and many other types of virtual meetings.

Both rooms are equipped with the most current updates of popular web conferencing products such as Skype, Google Groups, Polycom, Adobe Connect, GoToMeeting, Blackboard Collaborate, and WebEx. The rooms are designed for ease of use and have standard PCs installed as well as connections for users’ laptops or tablet devices. All you need is a room reservation and a login or URL to connect to the system of your choice. For more information about these rooms, call 410.706.7545 or contact Aphrodite Bodycomb.

NLM Mobile is a new app provided by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) that provides an authoritative guide to NLM mobile websites and apps. You can now find the PubMed for Handhelds app, the MedlinePlus mobile website, and other NLM mobile resources in one convenient location.

Artist and former journalist Eliette Markhbein has first-hand experience of what it’s like to suffer a traumatic brain injury. Eliette uses her art to recreate the healing framework she experienced during her recovery after being hit by a car while riding her bike. Through her work she highlights famous people who have suffered traumatic brain injury. She translates what she has experienced by deconstructing the healing process and dividing it into three artistic stages: being fractured, reassembled, and becoming whole again.

We invite you to visit the exhibit which will be on display August 26 – October 9, 2014. There will be an accompanying lecture and lunch reception on September 23. For more information, contact Aphrodite Bodycomb at 410.706.8853 or by email. This exhibit was brought to the Health Sciences and Human Services Library through a partnership with the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

Over the summer we switched providers of the database PsycINFO. It is now available through EBSCO. Although the database may look different, the contents have not changed.

EBSCO allows you to create a personal account and save searches performed in PsycINFO. Our EBSCO video tutorials on creating an account, saving a search, and retrieving a saved search can help you get started.

If you have any questions, please contact the Reference Desk at 410.706.7996.

For decades in academia, the impact of research has been measured by how many publications a researcher has authored and how often that research has been cited. This has expanded over the years to judging individual researchers based on the impact factor of the journals in which they have published. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), initiated by the American Society for Cell Biology together with a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals publicly discouraged this practice in a widely circulated declaration in May of 2013.

Altmetrics has arisen in response to both the over-reliance on metrics like impact factor and to the shift from print-based publishing to electronic and web-native scholarly output. Altmetrics seek to expand our view of research impact, focusing not only on traditional citation counts but also on activity on the web that tracks impact in real time, rather than at the pace of traditional publishing. Altmetrics also seeks to consider the impact of research beyond academia, which could indicate the impact on practitioners in a field or on the public. Altmetrics’ tools track metrics ranging from the number of downloads or views an article gets online; to mentions on social networking sites, blogs, and other media; to bookmarks in online reference managers and comments by readers.

You can learn more about altmetrics by trying out any of these tools: Altmetric, PLoS Article-Level Metrics, ImpactStory, or PlumX.

Earlier this month, the U.S. government unveiled a redesign of the Data.gov website in an effort to increase transparency and make data on the site more accessible to researchers, application developers, and the public. A version of the new site, which is in a very early beta stage, is now available for preview. The redesign follows President Obama’s Open Data Executive Order requiring agencies to ensure public access to and machine-readability of government data.

Launched in 2009, Data.gov is a growing portal to approximately 75,000 datasets generated by federal government agencies. The site allows anyone to search for and download data on a broad range of topics, including health care. All data is openly available and comments and recommendations from the public are encouraged.

On the surface, the enhanced site includes more powerful searching, social networking elements that allow researchers to see how data is being used, and data visualization capabilities. Behind the scenes, the improved site makes extensive use of open source software for data and content management. The design team is seeking input, so take some time to explore the beta site and share your opinions!

The HS/HSL’s Presentation Practice Studio is a great space to perfect your presentation. The sound-proof studio is available for individual or group use and is furnished with a podium, camera, netbook, digital display, and an editing bay equipped with Sony Suite and Adobe’s Full Productions Suite. Whether you want to record and produce a full presentation, do professional-level editing, or have the advantage of seeing and hearing a recording of yourself before making a live presentation, the Presentation Practice Studio will suit your needs. The Presentation Practice Studio is available for all University of Maryland, Baltimore faculty, students, and staff via reservation. Library staff members are available to assist you with the studio during most regular library hours of operation.

Each semester, the HS/HSL offers a series of free workshops to UM faculty, students, and staff, UMMC staff, and Corporate Members. The workshops address a wide variety of topics. You can learn how to store and manage citations with RefWorks; get an overview of effective communication techniques in Communicating with Patients; discover the links between oral and systemic conditions in Oral Health Literacy; or learn how to search and use tools more effectively in PubMed, Discover Embase, or CINAHL in 30. These are just a few of the workshops that the Library provides. For registration and full course descriptions, visit our Fall 2013 Workshops webpage.

Can’t make one of our regularly scheduled workshops? If you request an On Demand Workshop, a librarian will cover the same material with you one-on-one, or with your group.

PJ Grier, Outreach/Access Coordinator for the National Networks of Libraries of Medicine, Southeastern/Atlantic Region, starts a one-year term as Chair of the DC Area Health Sciences Libraries (DCAHSL) in January 2014.

Publications

Na Lin, Head, Resource Sharing and Digital Archive, and Patricia Hinegardner, Associate Director for Resources, published "Discovering the Present, Preserving the Past: The Development of a Digital Archive at the University of Maryland" in the Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries (JERML), 9(4), October 2012.

Maria Pinkas, Metadata Management Librarian, along with co-authors Abra Schnur, Megan Wolff, Sarah Hovde, and Carol Harling-Henry, published "University of Maryland Early Dissertations for Doctor of Medicine (1813-1889): Challenges and Rewards of a Digitization Project" in JERML 9(4), October 2012.