In January, due to a flat resources budget, the HS/HSL was forced to cancel 1,600 journals. A flat budget translates into a 6-7 percent cut due to journal price inflation (illustration 1). This is the fourth year in a row that cuts have been made. Over the four years, the cuts have been in the obvious areas, such as print copies, duplicates, and little used journals and databases. Additionally, the purchase of books has been severely curtailed. Now we only purchase or license reference tools, reserve materials, or demand-driven acquisitions (e-books which after a certain number of uses “trigger” a purchase). For 2016, we cut well into the “bone” and broke one of our bundles, meaning that instead of getting a large number of journals in a package for one price, we had to license journals individually, resulting in substantially fewer subscriptions.

What will be the effect on our user community?

1. Resources will not be available instantaneously on your desktop in support of research, education, or care.
2. While we have improved our interlibrary loan service through new systems and consortial alliances, and our 24 hour or less turnaround time is excellent, there are still costs involved.
3. These costs have escalated and can no longer be sustained without requiring the schools to support the service through cost recovery (illustration 2).
4. No new resources will be acquired, and it will be hard to sustain others. An additional $50,000 reduction to the library budget is expected for FY 2017.

During this time, UMB’s peer institutions have increased library budgets in support of their programs (illustration 3), while the HS/HSL’s have continued to decline.

Within the next five to ten years, this may not be significant as the public and open-access movements continue to grow, new access models emerge, and we essentially move into a post-journal container era, where articles and research are reviewed and conveyed directly to users. However, we are not there yet, and the current reality is grim.

The Project Share Curriculum, developed at the HS/HSL and funded by a grant from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), is being used and tested by five Area Health Education Center (AHEC) members:  Boston AHEC, Brooklyn-Queens-Long Island AHEC, Centennial/Southwestern Colorado AHECs, Eastern Connecticut AHEC, and the state of Montana AHEC program.

This year-long health information literacy project, also funded by the NLM, focusses on teaching skills to diverse populations early in life when personal habits and life-long skills are being developed.  The project recognizes the ability to find, interpret, and use reliable sources of health information can have a direct impact on one’s health. By building skills early in life, health outcomes across the life-span are improved.

The Project SHARE curriculum will be used in the field in urban settings and frontier regions, with Native American tribes and in multi-center AHEC partnerships. The sites will share best practices and implementation experiences with each other, with future sites, and with HS/HSL’s Project SHARE Curriculum development team.

Cybersecurity is everyone’s concern whether at the research bench, in the classroom, or in your own personal email and social media accounts. Join us on April 8 for “Cybersecurity and You: Issues in Higher Education and Beyond.”

Our morning and afternoon keynote speakers, Joe St Sauver, Ph.D., and Alessandro Acquisti, Ph.D., will explore the subject from two different perspectives. For the morning keynote, Joe St Sauver, a scientist at a data driven security company, with previous work in higher education and Internet2/InCommon, will offer his keynote, “Cybersecurity and You: Successfully Operating in Denied Areas.” Our afternoon keynote, Alessandro Acquisti, a Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University, and Member, Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine will share his thoughts in his talk entitled, “Why Online Privacy Matters in the Face of Heightened Surveillance Measures.”

In between, panels will explore:

• how UMB meets challenges in sharing and securing research data;
• cybersecurity trends and their impacts on the legal industry;
• collaborative efforts to safeguard the UMB community’s infrastructure, data and networks;
• massive data collection practices by the government under the Fourth Amendment and their implications for libraries and current legislative efforts potentially detrimental to library users’ privacy; and
• how your information on social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn is gathered and used

Organized by HS/HSL, the Thurgood Marshall Law Library and CITS, this conference is free and open to the public, however registration is required. It will take place on Fri. April 8, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Southern Management Corporation (SMC) Campus Center at UMB. A light lunch will be served. The keynotes and parts of the program will be live-streamed at the time of the event, and the video recording will also be available. Check out the conference program and RSVP online today!

The project has been funded with Federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. HHS-N-276-2011-00004-C with the University of Maryland Baltimore. This program was made possible by a grant from the AALL/Bloomberg BNA Continuing Education Grant Program.

When the HS/HSL’s Library Genie asked for your top three library wishes last October, dozens of you let him know. We are happy to tell you that the Library has granted several of your wishes.

1. You asked for water bottle fountains – The Library will be installing them on every floor.
2. You asked for a charging station for your devices – A charging station will be arriving soon.
3. You asked for more comfortable furniture – We will be ordering new comfy chairs that you can roll around to your favorite spot.
4. Bonus wishes – Additional rolling white boards are being ordered, and Wi-Fi will be boosted throughout the building.

Thank you for all of your suggestions to the Library Genie. We appreciate your input and support.

Funding for the Library Genie wishes comes from one-time unexpended annual and fund-balance allocations.

The monthly lunchtime event, Technology Brown Bag, explores new and emerging technologies that support research and education. Recent events include the applications of 3D printing in the medical sciences, meeting research funding requirements for data management plans with the DMP Tool, and a look at the breadth of use for wearable computing across the health sciences. Our next brown bag will survey the innovative ways that virtual and augmented reality are being used in health care delivery and research. This event will take place on Thursday, March 31, in the Health Sciences and Human Services Library Distance Education Room from noon to 12:45 p.m. Each event is free and open to the public. No reservation is required.

An exhibition developed and produced by the Exhibition Program at the National Library of Medicine and the Folger Shakespeare Library will be displayed in the HS/HSL Weise Gallery from April 4 through May 14, 2016.

“And there’s the humor of it”: Shakespeare and the Four Humors explores the role played by the four humors in several of Shakespeare’s most beloved plays through beautiful imagery and rare books from both the National Library of Medicine and the Folger Shakespeare Library, and examines more modern interpretations of the four humors in contemporary medicine.

William Shakespeare (1564 to 1616) created characters that are among the richest and most humanly recognizable in all of literature. Yet Shakespeare understood human personality in the terms available to his age, including the now-discarded theory of the four bodily humors: blood, bile, melancholy, and phlegm. These four humors were understood to define people’s physical and mental health, and to determine their personalities as well.

The language of the four humors pervades Shakespeare’s plays, and their influence is felt above all in a belief that emotional states are physically determined. Carried by the bloodstream, the four humors bred the core passions of anger, grief, hope, and fear—the emotions conveyed so powerfully in Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies. Curator Gail Kern Paster explains, “The four humors were an early typology for human personality. Shakespeare uses them, even as he transcends them, to create the vivid characters whose emotions continue to fascinate and delight us.”

For more information about this exhibition, visit the Weise Gallery web page.

The HS/HSL Innovation Space recently added two new tools to its suite of resources available to patrons. The NextEngine 3D scanner is a state-of-the-art laser scanner capable of producing high definition digital models of physical objects. The scanner can be used on the desktop to capture smaller objects or mounted onto a tripod for scanning larger objects. Our NextEngine guide provides step-by-step scanning instructions and links to further resources.

The Lulzbot Taz 5 is our most robust 3D printer yet. The Taz 5 offers the largest printing volume of our three printers. It’s also able to print various types of filament, from the conventional plastics (ABS and PLA) to hybrid filaments that contain wood, bamboo, bronze, and more. Our Taz 5 guide provides step-by-step printing instructions and links to further resources.

Stop by the Innovation Space on your next library visit to check out our new equipment!

Cybersecurity is an interesting and important topic, one closely connected to those of digital privacy and online surveillance. Many of us know that it is difficult to keep things private on the Internet. The Internet was invented to share things with others quickly, and it excels at that job. Businesses that process transactions with customers and store the information online are responsible for keeping that information private. No one wants social security numbers, credit card information, medical history, or personal e-mails shared with the world. We expect and trust banks, online stores, and our doctor’s offices to keep our information secure and safe.

Keeping private information safe and secure is, however, a challenging task. We have all heard of security breaches at Target, Sony, the Office of Personnel Management of the U.S. federal government, and even University of Maryland at College Park. Sometimes, a data breach takes place when an institution fails to patch a hole in its network systems. Sometimes, people fall for a phishing scam, or a virus in a user’s computer infects the target system. Other times, online companies compile customer data into personal profiles. The profiles are then sold to data brokers and on into the hands of malicious hackers and criminals.

To prevent such a data breach, institutional IT staff are trained to protect their systems against vulnerabilities and intrusion attempts. Employees and end users are educated to be careful about dealing with institutional or customers’ data. There are systematic measures that organizations can implement such as two-factor authentication, stringent password requirements, and locking accounts after a certain number of failed login attempts.

While these measures strengthen an institution’s defense against cyberattacks, they may negatively affect the usability of the system, lowering users’ productivity. Security is important, but users also want to be able to do their job without being bogged down by unwieldy cybersecurity measures. The more user-friendly and the simpler the cybersecurity guidelines are to follow, the more users will observe them, thereby resulting in a secure system. Users who encounter cumbersome and complicated security measures, may ignore or try to bypass them, increasing security risks.

Usability and productivity may be a small issue, however, compared to the risk of mass surveillance resulting from aggressive security measures. In 2013, the Guardian reported that the communication records of millions of people were being collected by the National Security Agency (NSA) in bulk, regardless of suspicion of wrongdoing. A secret court order prohibited Verizon from disclosing the NSA’s information request. After a cyberattack against the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of California system installed a device that is capable of capturing, analyzing, and storing all network traffic to and from the campus for over 30 days. This security monitoring was implemented secretly without consulting or notifying the faculty and those who would be subject to the monitoring. The San Francisco Chronicle reported the IT staff who installed the system were given strict instructions not to reveal it was taking place. Selected committee members on the campus were told to keep this information to themselves.

The invasion of privacy and the lack of transparency in these network monitoring programs has caused great controversy. Such wide and indiscriminate monitoring programs must have a very good justification and offer clear answers to vital questions regarding what exactly will be collected, who will have access to the information, when and how the information will be used, what controls will be put in place to prevent information from being used for unrelated purposes, and how the information will be disposed of.

Because security is essential to privacy, it is ironic that certain cybersecurity measures can be used to greatly invade privacy rather than protect it. Because we do not always fully understand how the technology actually works or how it can be exploited for both good and bad purposes, we need to be careful about giving blank permission to any party to access, collect, and use our private data without clear understanding, oversight, and consent. As we share more and more information online, cyberattacks will only increase, and organizations and the government will struggle even more to balance privacy concerns with security issues.

The combined efforts of HS/HSL staff and the UMB campus community have added more than 75 children’s books to the shelves of the UMB Community Engagement Center at the BioPark.

The HS/HSL asked the campus to convey which children’s books were most loved or were simply fun to read, inspirational, encouraging, influential, or memorable. The only guideline was that recommendations be appropriate for children from infancy through middle school.

The UMB campus responded enthusiastically, providing more than 400 suggestions of favorite children’s books! After a number of campus members inquired about donating books, the Library expanded the HS/HSL Holiday Giving Project to accept book donations. Library staff also purchased children’s books based upon the UMB community’s recommendations.

Of the donation, Ashley Valis, Executive Director of Community Initiatives and Engagement, states, “We are absolutely thrilled with the generosity of the Health Sciences & Human Services Library staff and affiliates. We host a toddler playgroup at the UMB Community Engagement Center weekly and, until now, didn’t have nearly the selection of age-appropriate books to pique the children’s interest. With this donation to the UMB CEC, we will be able to offer our old books to the community free of charge for their home bookshelves, as well as offer our visitors a selection of amazing new children’s books for their enjoyment.”

The HS/HSL staff is delighted to help spark a love for reading while helping to increase the literacy skills of children visiting the new UMB Community Engagement Center.

To see the list of recommended and donated books, go here. http://www2.hshsl.umaryland.edu/hslupdates/?p=2043

Anna-Marie Epps was named UMB Employee of the Month for November 2015. She was nominated by Aphrodite Bodycomb, Associate Director for Administration and Operations. Bodycomb explained, “Anna-Marie’s talent and her level of expertise, knowledge, and persistent effort to perform to the best of her abilities are reasons that make her shine. She has excellent project management skills that she applies to every project she touches. Her unbelievably positive spirit radiates and, I believe, encourages others. For this and many other reasons Anna-Marie was awarded Employee of the Month for UMB. We are lucky to have her here with us at the Library.”

Jean-Paul Courneya, MS, has been awarded an Association of Academic Health Science Libraries (AAHSL) Data Management Training Scholarship to support coursework leading to a certificate in data science specialization.

Bohyun Kim, MA, MSLIS, was appointed to the Advisory Committee for the Office for the Information Technology Policy of the American Library Association (ALA).

Tony Nguyen, MLIS, AHIP, was selected by the Medical Library Association (MLA) as an MLA Rising Star for 2016/17. The program seeks to develop skills and knowledge to prepare future MLA leaders.

María M. Pinkas, MLS, has been accepted into the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Georgia Biomedical Informatics course.

Posters and Presentations

Bohyun Kim, co-authored “Report of the LITA User Experience Interest Group Meeting, ALA Midwinter Meeting, Chicago, January 2015” in Technical Services Quarterly, presented “Turning the IT Dept. Outward” at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting, and gave a lightning talk, “Visualizing Library Data,” at the Code4Lib Conference.

Jean-Paul Courneya

Jean-Paul Courneya joined the HS/HSL Services Division in January as our Bioinformationist. He graduated from Towson University with a Bachelors in Molecular Biology, Biochemistry and Bioinformatics, with a minor in Chemistry. He continued at Towson to graduate with a Masters in Biological Sciences with a molecular biology specialization. At the HS/HSL he will develop and grow the new Bioinformation Program. The Program’s mission is to assist researchers, clinicians, students, and staff at UMB to advance their scholarly goals by offering education, training, and consult services for biomedical research, clinical practice, and applied life science research related to cell and molecular bioscience.

Dorothy Terry

Dorothy Terry also joined the HS/HSL in January. She says, “It was the day of our great blizzard, something I’ll never forget.” She graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison with a MA in Library and Information Studies. She is Research, Education, and Outreach Librarian for the School of Social Work. As the REO for the School of Social Work, she will engage with faculty, students, and staff to assist with their research needs. She will offer information sessions, workshops, consultations, and any other assistance that my school asks of me.

Ashley Wallace

Ashley Wallace joined the Information Services Team in February. Ashley recently received a Masters in Religious Studies and is currently working on a Masters in Library Science. In her position as Library Services Specialist, Ashley will be working to help faculty, students, and staff at the Information Services desk with research and use of library resources.

Lorraine Woods

Lorraine (Lorrie) Woods recently joined the Resource Sharing team. Lorrie has worked in both academic and public libraries. In her current capacity of Library Services Specialist, Lorrie will perform tasks in both Interlibrary Loan and the Digital Archive.