The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Utilities Service (RUS) has announced it is accepting applications for grants to provide broadband access in rural communities currently without broadband service. Making broadband service available to rural communities can help make a tremendous difference in the quality of life for citizens. Funding is provided through the Community Connect Grant program. Grants are available to communities in the most rural, economically challenged areas where loans would not be sustainable. Funds may be used to construct, acquire or lease facilities to deploy broadband to residents, businesses and essential community facilities such as police and fire stations, libraries, schools, and health care clinics.

Applications for the 2011 Fiscal Year are currently being accepted. All applications must be submitted to RUS by May 3, 2011.

To apply: http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/utp_commconnect.html

National Training Center and Clearinghouse (NTCC) classes are coming to Chicago April 13-15, 2011. Attend these FREE hands-on classes on PubMed® (April 13), TOXNET® (April 14) and Gateway (April 15) offered through the National Library of Medicine. The University of Illinois at Chicago Library of the Health Sciences will host these sessions taught by the staff of the NTCC. They will be held in Room 303 of the Library of the Health Sciences at 1750 W. Polk St., Chicago, IL. Register here or read on for details. (more…)

To the fair readers of The Cornflower: you now have the option to read our blog in a traditional web browser on a desktop computer (as you are undoubtedly doing right now) or on your smartphone using a mobile browser.  The blogs of the NN/LM were built with WordPress, an open-source content management system that is often used as a blog publishing tool.  The architecture allows for plug-ins (little add-on programs to hopefully enhance functionality) and custom templates (the design).  The blog editor turned on a plug-in called WPtouch.  WPtouch “…formats your site with a mobile theme for visitors on Apple iPhone, iPod Touch, Google Android, Blackberry Storm and Torch, Palm Pre and other touch-based smartphones.”  Some members have told us that our blog is blocked in their hospitals even though it comes from a .gov domain.  It will be interesting to see if this still happens when viewed on a mobile device.

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What’s your favorite web browser? If you work in a hospital library, most likely it is Internet Explorer 6.  Oh wait – I said FAVORITE web browser.  According to Net Applications, Internet Explorer is still the top dog at 59.26% of market share as of October 2010.  Firefox came in second with 22.82% and Chrome is third with 8.47%.

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The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is pleased to announce that it will be hosting NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) Discovery Workshops focusing on biomedical and genomic databases this December. This free two-day series of workshops on NCBI tools will be held at UIC on December 15-16, 2010.  Register at: http://tinyurl.com/NCBIWorkshops

Program Overview
The Discovery Workshops consist of four 2.5-hour hands-on sessions emphasizing a different set of NCBI resources. Each session uses specific examples to highlight important features of the resources and tools under study and to demonstrate how to accomplish common tasks.

The four sessions of the Discovery Workshop will focus on the following areas:
1. Sequences, Genomes and Maps
2. Proteins, Domains and Structures
3. NCBI BLAST Services
4. Human Variation and Disease Genes

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Gartner Research, a world leading information technology research and advisory company, comes out with annual predictions on strategic technologies that will have an impact on organizations in the coming year.  Gartner defines a strategic technology as “one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.”

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By Kate Saylor
Outreach Librarian
University of Michigan
Taubman Health Sciences Library

The Plain Language Medical Dictionary Widget is a project of the University of Michigan Taubman Health Sciences Library (THL) as part of the Michigan Health Literacy Awareness Training Program (http://guides.lib.umich.edu/healthliteracy).

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I wrote about some ARRA funding that has come to our region in July. As of early August, some more ARRA Broadband funding has come to our region!  ARRA is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This funding will help to transform health care by enabling better outcomes and lowering costs.  Many rural clinics and small physician offices have to pay for Internet service that is out-dated and over-priced.  The National Broadband Plan recommends changes to broadband services to ensure access to reasonable and affordable Internet access for all.

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More ARRA Broadband funding has come to our region!  ARRA is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This funding will help to transform health care by enabling better outcomes and lowering costs.  Many rural clinics and small physician offices have to pay for Internet service that is out-dated and over-priced.  The National Broadband Plan recommends changes to broadband services to ensure access to reasonable and affordable Internet access for all.  Read more about the National Broadband Plan and how it will affect health care from the National Broadband Plan site.

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As we begin Year 5 of this contract, I thought I would like to take a moment to point out some interesting tech projects that the GMR has funded in Year 4.  You can see all of the recipients of the Technology Improvement Awards and do not hesitate to contact them (or our office) if you have questions about funding or future project ideas.  In these times of financial  and job uncertainty, I’m so pleased to see what our members have accomplished.  It is always interesting to review applications for these awards.  You tend to get a really good idea of what our member libraries need and the projects they are working on – and this information not only helps the library applying for the award but others thinking about applying for an award.

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