More than Two Years in the Making, with a Cast of Millions – The HS/HSL Strategic Plan!

I am pleased to share the new strategic plan for the Health Sciences and Human Services Library. When we began our planning over two years ago, we knew we were heading into uncharted territory and needed a plan to bring us into our third century of service (2013) to the University of Maryland, Baltimore community and beyond.

We live in a world of dramatic changes:

• the digital revolution in scholarly publishing
• open access to the literature
• a desire for both face-to-face and social networking collaboration
• resources that are born digital and may not be print-based
• the evolution of devices for the delivery of information

Although our former strategic plan had served us well for more than a decade, we committed ourselves to developing a flexible and agile plan supportive of whatever we could throw at it! With deceptively simple language, we strove to achieve those goals leaving no doubt as to our intentions and aspirations. We wrote the plan twice, throwing out our first version. The plan has been worked on and vetted by library staff, our Board of Visitors and the Library Advisory Committee. This final version will be put into place on July 1.

Our vision is aspirational in nature ? we will be the leading provider of quality health and human services information.

Our mission is service driven ? we bring our information and expertise to advance discovery, learning and service.

Our six strategic initiatives are flexible enough to encompass all we can imagine.

Along the way we discovered our plan had underpinnings of our core values that we felt were important for us to express and share ? excellence, accessibility, innovation, collaboration, adaptability and integrity.

We are eager to hear what you think about the plan so contact me at mjtooey@hshsl.umaryland.edu and let me know what you think. When you are planning for a third century, there is always room for improvement!

FREE Subscription Offer

Cell Press is offering a free print subscription to Cell. As a benefit of the HS/HSL online subscription to Cell, any UMB student, faculty or staff member is entitled to receive a free print subscription ? normally a $179 value. To sign up for the offer, go to www.Cell.com/freesub

For more information about this Cell Affiliated Subscription Program, please visit the FAQ.

Copyright Myth #3
If a work does not have a © symbol then it does not have a copyright and it can be freely used.

Works created after April 1, 1989 no longer need a copyright symbol or notice to appear on the work. In fact, newer works are no longer required (although it is highly recommended) to be registered with the Copyright Office. Instead, according to the United States Copyright Law, a work is considered copyrighted the moment it is "created and fixed in a tangible form." A scholarly article, for example, becomes copyright protected the moment the author saves it on a computer?s hard drive or prints it out on paper. With this in mind, the safest thing to do when you find a resource you want to use is to ask the author or publisher for permission even if the material looks like it is in the public domain.

Check out the next installment of this series written by Julie Nanavati, one of our Liaison and Outreach Services Librarians, in our next issue.

The library now offers access to the PILOTS (Published International Literature On Traumatic Stress) database.

PILOTS is the largest interdisciplinary electronic resource to the international literature on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental-health consequences of exposure to traumatic events. PILOTS also provides information on many assessment instruments used to measure trauma exposure and PTSD. It is produced by the National Center for PTSD and contains over 31,000 references to PTSD literature.

PILOTS can be used to find information on the following topics: post-traumatic stress disorder, the assessment and treatment of psychiatric conditions, mental health services after traumatic events and ethical and policy issues for traumatized populations. Find It! links will help you connect to electronic journals to which HS/HSL has access and you can import citations from PILOTS directly into RefWorks.

In our continuing effort to help users learn about RefWorks and all that it can offer, we are now offering weekly drop-in sessions on Tuesdays from Noon-1pm for troubleshooting and individual assistance.

In addition, Introduction to RefWorks classes have been scheduled at the HS/HSL for May 17, June 1 and June 5.

Don’t be left behind ? come learn about this powerful web based software that helps you organize your research, manage your citations and create bibliographies in hundreds of output styles!

Register now.

HS/HSL provides UMB access to a large number of subscription resources and journals. However, you may want to also check out these useful websites with FREE content.

Free journal content:

• BioMed Central
• DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals
• E-Medicine
• FindArticles
• Free Access Journals
• FreeFullText.com
• Free Medical Journals.com
• Geneva Foundation Free Medical Journals
• Highwire Press
• Medscape
• Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
• Oxford Open Access Journals
• PLoS – Public Library of Science
• Pubmed Central

Free medical images and multimedia:

• Health Education Assets Library
• Karolinska Institutet (not all free)
• Medlineplus surgery videos
• Public Health Image Library

Try out the new and improved version of MD Consult which now has recommended results and search refinements. The recommended results pages organize the results based on how physicians think about information – not by books and journals, but by Signs and Symptoms, Etiology, Diagnosis, Treatment and Prognosis. You will also find a new streamlined and simpler user interface and experience better access to clinical medical reference information. This interface looks much simpler and cleaner, is easier to access and read, and provides an overall improved user experience.

More information regarding these changes

We subscribe to over 4,400 electronic books as an individual library and through our consortial agreement with the University System of Maryland and Affiliates (USMAI) and the Maryland Digital Library Program . The current E-Book listing is going away since it no longer reflects all of the E-Books to which you have access. You can now find the full listing of our E-Book titles in our Library Catalog.

The catalog provides the complete and up-to-date listing of our E-Book Collection.

Check it out:

1. Go to Catalog found on the left side of the HS/HSL homepage
2. Click on Advanced Search (on the yellow bar at the top of the page)
3. Use Format dropdown menu to select E-Books
4. Click the yellow search button
5. Use the yellow Find It buttons to link to the full text of the book.

Using the Catalog, you can search by subject, author and year. It offers more functionally then the current alphabetical list of titles.

Access Information

Recommend a Book, Journal or Digital Resource

Questions about E-Books? Contact the Reference Desk at hshsl@umaryland.edu or 410.706.7996

On March 28th the HS/HSL participated in Job Shadow Day, coordinated by Brian Sturvidant, UMB’s community affairs coordinator. Four students from Vivian T. Thomas Medical Arts Academy visited the library. The students were very eager as library staff gave them a tour of the library, demonstrated valuable biomedical resources and taught them how to effectively evaluate health information websites. They also spent time in the Circulation Department, Interlibrary Loan Department and with the Technology Coordinator for our Regional Medical Library. The students had thoughtful questions and insights. For all involved, it was an enjoyable and valuable experience.