The most stunning event of The Midwest Chapter, Medical Library Association this year is our annual meeting in Rochester, Minnesota from October 6 through 9, 2012: http://midwestmla.org/conference2012/. We call this event, Growing Opportunities, a program planned especially for medical librarians to view themselves and medical librarianship, as through a kaleidoscope, viewing change and growth as new opportunities.

Rochester is host to thousands of people each year. Home of the IBM Corporation and the Mayo Clinic, Rochester is positioned as a hub of innovative research both clinical and technological.

Our keynote speaker is the famous e-Patient Dave, a successful speaker, cancer survivor, and blogger noted for activism for healthcare transformation through participatory medicine. An engaging speaker and accomplished writer in his professional life, he is an advocate for Participatory Medicine as it evolves in which patients become strong agents in managing their own health care in partnership with physicians. You can find more information about e-Patient Dave (David deBronkhart) on his website http://epatientdave.com.

We welcome you to grow your opportunities, network with colleagues through papers and posters, and continuing education classes (to be announced shortly). Please join us in Rochester! More details to come.

The Taubman Health Sciences Library at the University of Michigan will host the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s traveling exhibition, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. The exhibition illustrates how Nazi leadership enlisted people in professions traditionally charged with healing and the public good, to legitimize persecution, murder and, ultimately, genocide. Deadly Medicine, which is cosponsored by the University of Michigan’s Center for the History of Medicine, will premiere on February 3, 2012 on the 4th floor of the Taubman Health Sciences Library and runs through April 13, 2012.

Accompanying the exhibition will be an opening reception and closing reflections panel discussion. Event details will be announced at a later date.

“Deadly Medicine explores the Holocaust’s roots in then-contemporary scientific and pseudo-scientific thought,” explains exhibition curator Susan Bachrach. “At the same time, it touches on complex ethical issues we face today, such as how societies acquire and use scientific knowledge and how they balance the rights of the individual with the needs of the larger community.”Deadly Medicine is based on the acclaimed exhibition of the same name that opened at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in April 2004. An online version is viewable at http://www.ushmm.org/deadlymedicine.

The Nazi regime was founded upon the conviction that “inferior races” and individuals had to be eliminated from German society so that the fittest “Aryans” could thrive. By the end of World War II, six million Jews and millions of others—among them Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), people diagnosed as hereditarily ill, homosexuals, and others belonging to ethnic groups deemed inferior—had been persecuted and murdered. Join us as we explore this dark chapter in history and its legacy on the health profession today.

Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race

Location: Taubman Health Sciences Library – 1135 E. Catherine St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109 (http://www.lib.umich.edu/thl)

Dates and Times: The exhibition will be viewable February 3 – April 13, 2012 during library hours.

This display is cosponsored by the U-M Taubman Health Sciences Library and the U-M Center for the History of Medicine.Exhibition and events are free and open to the public.

For more information contact Kate Saylor at 734.936.1394 or kmacdoug@umich.edu

Earlier this year, Booth Library received a Technology Improvement Award from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Greater Midwest Region, under Contract No. N01-LM-6-3503 with the University of Illinois at Chicago. Booth Library provides services for programs in health physics, psychology, biology, health education, communication disorders, and nutrition. Booth also serves an online RN to BSN nursing program, and the library’s website is the only point of access to health information for these distance education nursing students. Along with programs directly related to heath and biomedical sciences, we serve the needs of our education students seeking information on school health and children with disabilities. We also provide general consumer health materials and reference services.

The primary goal of the project was to replace the library’s web server, which was five years old when the award application was submitted. The server purchased with award fund was built with sufficient processing power, storage space and memory s to run several ‘virtual’ servers at the same time. With virtualization, different operating systems can run as different virtual machines on the same physical server. The single machine purchased with the award currently hosts two web servers and a secured file transfer server for patron record maintenance. While the web server for the library’s main website runs Windows Server 2008, a second web server runs in the Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) environment. The first project for the new LAMP server was Map It, an open source call number mapping system designed by the Wayne State University Library System. Map It allows users to generate a customized map showing the location of an item by entering a call number. Within our building, health information is located in at least eight locations, spread over four floors in a building of 165,000 square feet. While help locating materials is available at several services desks, those who may be embarrassed to ask for help can find materials independently with Map It.
Map It is linked to the Online Catalog and the “Map of the Library” page in the library’s website. Map It is also available on the library’s mobile website. The mobile version of Map It has become the third most commonly used page on the mobile site. The mobile site is also hosted on the LAMP server provided by the Technology Improvement Award.

The University of North Dakota’s Library of the Health Sciences exhibited at the Grand Forks Women’s Show Oct. 1, providing an opportunity to share NN/LM resources with more than 1,900 people.

For the second year we shared the booth with Dr. Edward Sauter’s research team. Dr. Sauter is professor of surgery at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences and does extensive breast cancer research and education. The exhibit provided both an outlet to discuss health topics with consumers and a place for women to actively participate in the research. We will be able to continue to participate in the translational research platform being built by the University of North Dakota through efforts like this exhibit.

We were able to make contacts with healthcare professionals who were interested in consumer health resources. A local senior center encouraged us to drop brochures and MedlinePlus magazines off for their clientele. Our supply of printed materials for MedlinePlus and Household Products were depleted by the end of the day.

For suggestions on Promoting Your Library this month, visit at: http://nnlm.gov/gmr/member/advocacy/.

National Library of Medicine
Bethesda, MD
The National Library of Medicine is part of the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services