The HS/HSL has just completed its two-year 200th anniversary celebration. The two-year celebration commemorated the purchase of Dr. John Crawford’s collection to establish the Library in 1813 and the collection being made available for student use in 1815. The two years have flown by.

Looking back, here are some highlights.

• Dr. Phillip Mackowiak kicked off our celebration in May 2013 with a great talk on Dr. Crawford’s contribution to medicine. Afterwards, we walked to Westminster Graveyard to lay flowers on Dr. Crawford’s grave.
• We hosted excellent programs and exhibits. To name a few:
  • Evolution and Influences: The Health Sciences and Human Services Library at 200. The exhibit is now permanently mounted on the wall in the fifth floor hall.
  • WHACK’ed…and then everything was different. Artist Eliette Markhbein, a traumatic brain injured patient herself, traced her journey and exhibited her portraits of famous people with TBIs.
  • Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. This amazing exhibit created by the U.S. Holocaust Museum explored eugenics and Nazi abuse in their search to create a “master race.”
• We hosted visitors from Nairobi, Kenya, and Shanghai, China. Library faculty, Alexa Mayo and Ryan Harris also traveled to Nairobi as part of our exchange session with colleagues there.
• We celebrated the “Sweet Sixteen” birthday of our building.
• We introduced “Research Connection,” a suite of services to support research success at UMB through programs such as impact analysis, systematic reviews, and support for the NIH Biosketch.
• We launched a new HS/HSL strategic planning initiative that helped us learn a tremendous amount about our community’s needs, perceptions, and the value placed on the Library’s expertise, resources, and place. The plan will be published in Fall 2015.
• We launched our Innovation Space with 3D printers, a 3D scanner, and plans to expand.
• Our symposia series explored diverse topics such as scholarly communication, research impact, mHealth. We also launched “What’s Next?” our new series to explore the edges of health, healthcare, and the human condition.

What lies ahead?
In these fast moving times, it is hard to predict our “next big things.” However, solid guesses would include:

• A reduction in resources – With a flat resources budget, our ability to sustain our collections will be impossible. We will need to be creative in other areas such as interlibrary loan and document delivery to meet user needs quickly and conveniently.
• The completion of our strategic plan in fall 2015.
• E-publication of the history of the HS/HSL.
• Monitoring and adoption of new and emerging knowledge technologies.
• Physical changes to the library building, including expansion of the Innovation Space, a move to one service desk, changes in hours of operations, new furniture and perhaps some new uses for library spaces.
• An increasing focus on pedagogy and instructional design, data management, scholarly communication, and collaborative efforts, both at UMB and across the USM.

Thank You!
First, thanks to all who attended our programs, visited our exhibits, and supported our harebrained schemes. Thanks to all our private funders. The majority of our programming was provided gratis or funded by generous donors to the HS/HSL. And finally, very special thanks to the HS/HSL team who put together programs, edited copy, kept me from going over the edge, and served on a VERY effective Task Force 200, which planned all the events during our celebration.

Thank you…and onto our next 200 years!

As we brought our 200th Anniversary Celebration to a close, we began a new speaker series that looks to the future. The purpose of “What’s Next…?” is to invite speakers to UMB to discuss exciting new developments shaping the future of health, health science, and the human condition.

On April 15, the HS/HSL hosted its first “What’s Next…?” lecture, featuring Dr. Ellen Jorgensen. Dr. Jorgensen is the co-founder and Executive Director of Genspace, a non-profit community lab. Her lecture entitled “Biohacking, You Can Do it Too” discussed the biohacker movement, the development of Genspace, and the importance of community labs in education and research. If you were unable to attend the lecture, click here to view the recording.

Be on the lookout for future announcements from the HS/HSL about upcoming lectures in our “What’s Next…?” series.

After listening to your suggestions at our Student Town Hall and through our Library Genie survey, we understand that you want more library hours. We are happy to announce that we can now offer early morning study from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., Monday through Friday. For access to the HS/HSL before 8:00 a.m., simply enter through the SMC Campus Center with your UMB ID badge. Library services and access to classrooms begin at 8:00 a.m., when the HS/HSL’s front doors open. Occasionally, computers and printers will not be available during early morning study hours due to routine network updates.

Summer Hours

May 17 – May 31

Monday – Thursday	6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.
Friday	6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Saturday	8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Sunday	10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
May 23-25	CLOSED

 

June 1 – Aug 16

Monday – Thursday	6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Friday	6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Saturday	8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Sunday	CLOSED
July 3-5	CLOSED

 

Each April, Library Journal releases a study outlining the cost of journals indexed in the Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI) citation indexes and predicating price increases for the following year. Librarians at the HS/HSL use this information to help guide the addition and cancellation of journals to keep us within our resources budget. Library Journal‘s pricing information also includes a breakdown by discipline. According to the study, the price of Health Sciences journals increased 7% in both 2014 and 2015, with the average price rising from $1,488 in 2013 to $1,694 in 2015. The report predicts that this trend will continue, with journal prices increasing between 6% and 7% in 2015.

One way that many libraries, including the HS/HSL, have extended their budgets is by participating in publishers’ offers of subscription bundles called “big deals.” Under this model, libraries commit to maintaining their current subscriptions with a publisher. In exchange for this commitment, the publisher allows the library to access many more of its titles for a relatively modest fee. HS/HSL currently participates in big deals with Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, Sage, and Taylor & Francis, giving the UMB community access to considerably more journals than single subscriptions would allow. However, with steady increases in journal prices and a library resources budget that remains flat, our continued participation is unsustainable. Preliminary analysis indicates that if the Library is forced to discontinue big deals in favor of single subscriptions to only the most highly used journals, UMB researchers will have access to approximately one-fourth of the in-scope journals that are currently available.

Five preeminent medical libraries, including the HS/HSL, are collaborating on a project to digitize state medical journals. The Medical Heritage Library (MHL), is a digital resource on the history of medicine and health developed by an international consortium of cultural heritage repositories. The MHL has received funding in the amount of $275,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for its proposal, “Medicine at Ground Level: State Medical Societies, State Medical Journals, and the Development of American Medicine and Society.” Additional funding has been provided by the Harvard Library.

This project will create a substantial digital collection of American state medical society journals, digitizing 117 titles from 46 states, from 1900 to 2000. The HS/HSL holds close to 95 of the titles.

State medical society journals document the transformation of American medicine in the twentieth century at both the local and national level. The journals have served as sites not only for scientific articles, but also for medical talks (and, often, accounts of discussions following the talks), local news regarding sites of medical care and the medical profession, advertisements, and unexpurgated musings on medicine and society throughout the twentieth century. Once digitized and searchable as a single, comprehensive body of material, this collection will be a known universe, able to support a limitless array of historical queries, including those framed geographically and/or temporally, and offering new ways to examine and depict the evolution of medicine and the relationship between medicine and society.

The other four participants are: The College of Physicians of Philadelphia; the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University; the Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health at The New York Academy of Medicine; and the Library and Center for Knowledge Management at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF).

The HS/HSL opened its Innovation Space on Tuesday, April 21. We welcome all UMB students, faculty, and researchers who are interested in experimenting with 3D printing and 3D scanning. The HS/HSL will be developing the Innovation Space as a vibrant and collaborative hands-on learning space on campus and will be offering workshops and hosting talks in the future. The Innovation Space is equipped with two 3D printers (MakerBot Replicator 2X and Afinia H480), a 3D Systems Sense 3D scanner, Lynda.com video tutorials, a large DNA model, two molecule kits, and a button maker. The cost for 3D printing is $3.00 for up to an hour of 3D printing and $1.00 for each additional hour.

The Innovation space is open Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Reservations can be made online. More information about the Innovation Space and detailed information on how to use the equipment for 3D printing and 3D scanning is available in our online guide. Never seen a 3D printer in action? Check out our 3D printer live video stream. Please contact ispace@hshsl.umaryland.edu or 410-706-7996 if you have any questions.

At the HS/HSL Innovation Space, faculty can create instructional tools, such as 3D models of molecules or of human anatomy in order to improve classroom instruction and expedite a student’s learning process. Researchers can strengthen their grant proposals by including the HS/HSL Innovation Space facility, equipment, service, and staff-expertise. They can also quickly prototype a physical model of a medical or healthcare-related invention to test out the feasibility of further entrepreneurial pursuit, commercialization, and mass production. Students can explore novel technology that has a significant impact on health sciences, benefit from interdisciplinary learning and collaboration opportunities, and prototype physical models for their ideas and concepts for study, research, and experimentation. Below are some examples of what is currently taking place in the Maker Movement and 3D printing technology. We look forward to meeting many UMB students, faculty, and researchers in this new space.

• The National Institutes of Health recently launched NIH 3D Print Exchange in 2014, so that researchers can share 3D print files, thereby acknowledging the important role of 3D modeling and printing technology in biomedical and scientific research. Scientists are already bio-printing human tissues and attempting to 3D print a human organ itself.
• A Baltimore-based startup company, Verve, launched a Kickstarter campaign for their 3D printed device for posture and pain relief called ARC and raised over $7,000 in less than 24 hours. The company includes Dr. Gene Shirokobrod, a UMB faculty member in the School of Medicine.
• A surgeon in Sinai Hospital of Baltimore performed a total knee replacement surgery using 3D printing technology to cast an implant and manufacture the jigs – plastic cutting guides – that direct incisions.
• Pharmacists are exploring a way to use 3D printing to produce medicine to make it more affordable and customizable to the needs of individual patients.
• A man in Massachusetts created a prosthetic hand for his son who was born without fingers using a 3D printer at only a fraction of the cost for a commercial prosthetic hand.

Modernization projects such as the Innovation Space initiative are made possible by the generosity of donors through the UMB Foundation. If you would like to support projects such as these please visit https://umaryland.givecorps.com/causes/714-hshl or contact us at (410) 706-7545.

María M. Pinkas, MLS, has been re-appointed for a second term as Chair of the Continuing Education Committee of the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), a Division of the American Library Association (ALA).

Presentations & Publications

Richard J. Behles, MLS, co-authored “Eugene Fauntleroy Cordell: Alumnus and Medical Historian for the Ages,” in the spring University of Maryland Medicine Bulletin.

Bohyun Kim, MA, MSLIS, was the closing keynote speaker for the 2015 Library Technology Conference at St. Paul, MN. Her keynote address was “Libraries Meet the Second Machine Age.” Slides are available here.

Emilie Ludeman, MSLIS, Katherine Downton, MSLIS, and Andrea Goldstein Shipper, MSLIS, co-authored “Developing a Library Systematic Review Service: A Case Study” in Medical Reference Service Quarterly. 34 (2), 2015.

C. Andrew Youngkin, MLA, AHIP, authored “Hangout at the Library: Video Conferencing and More with Google+” in Library High Tech News. 32 (3), 2015.