By Sandi L. Bates MLIS
Harley E. French Library of the Health Sciences
University of North Dakota

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.

The National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM) Pacific Northwest Region (PNR) and Greater Midwest Region (GMR) invite you to join a free 90 minute webcast, Biomedical Publishing 101, to be held on Thursday, December 8, 2011 beginning at 9:30 am Pacific/11:30 am Central/12:30 pm Eastern time. It was created by the Chicago Collaborative, a joint partnership of librarians, publishers and editors. Read the rest of this entry »

Congratulations to the following sites who have received GMR funding for
the Friday, November 18, 2011, MLA Webcast:
Connecting E-science and Team Science: The Changing Nature of Research
For information on the webcast and a list of additional sites, visit:
http://www.mlanet.org/education/distance_ed/escience/escience_webinar.html
Note:  there will be no DVD available for this webinar. Read the rest of this entry »

This year, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) had a contest that challenged people to create apps that could use NLM’s vast collection of biomedical data.  The winners have been announced!  Thank you to all of the Entrants that participated in NLM’s first software challengeHere are the winners and honorable mentions.

The GMR is offering to sponsor a number of sites for the upcoming MLA Webinar: Connecting E-science and Team Science: The Changing Nature of Research to be held on Friday, November 18, 2011, from 1:00 p.m.–2:30 p.m., CST.

Visit: http://nnlm.gov/gmr/funding/mlawebcast/ for detailed information on how to become a sponsored site.

The GMR will cover the registration costs for up to two (2) sites per state in the region for this webcast. Because of the limited number of sites we can sponsor, we encourage you to work with your state and local librarian groups to identify centralized locations. Sites will be selected based on geographical location, accessibility, and potential number of attendees.

The deadline to email/fax your registration and email additional information to the GMR is NOON, Wednesday, October 26, 2011.

Contact Holly Burt at the GMR, if you have any questions and for more information on this webcast, visit:
http://www.mlanet.org/education/distance_ed/escience/escience_webinar.html

Each year the National Library of Medicine highlights projects from across the country on their webpage.  The web pages of featured projects for National Medical Librarians Month 2011 are available at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/lo/profiles11/. This year the GMR included five projects from among recent subcontracts and awards.  Congratulations to these selected programs: Munson Digital Archive Project, Touch Technology Multilingual Health Information, Assessing Mental Health Information Needs of Clergy of Portage, Health-E Public: Improving Access to Health Information Resources for Public Health Professionals in Southeastern Wisconsin County, and Building the Future with Community Health Information.  Read about them at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/lo/profiles11/gmr.html.

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

By Kevin O’Brien
UIC Library of the Health Sciences
Special Collections Department

The Chicago Area Medical Archivists (CAMA) will host the Ninth Medical History Symposium on October 28, 2011, at the Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology, located in the headquarters of the American Society of Anesthesiologists in Park Ridge, IL.  As part of Archives Week in Chicago, please join CAMA for a day of presentations, discussion, and networking.

Registration begins at 9:00 A.M.  The program begins at 9:30. Read the rest of this entry »

USA.gov is hosting a National Dialogue on Improving Federal Websites from September 19-30. This two-week, online dialogue is your chance to submit, vote, and comment on ideas for improving various aspects of federal websites, such as: content, search, usability, accessibility, social media, multilingual content, and online services. Future changes based on these ideas could directly impact the work government agencies like the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health do every day. You can join the conversation at http://bit.ly/qCJxnQ. To learn more about the overall .gov reform effort, go to http://1.usa.gov/qzfHUd.

One of my biggest issues with the Internet is how there are still a lot of silos.  What do I mean by silo? Programs or applications that work ‘alone’ and don’t share well with other applications.  I am still a big user of RSS despite rumors of it’s demise.  I tend to star items in Google Reader so that I can read them later.  What if I also wanted to read it later and send it to Twitter – or maybe send it to Instapaper? Especially with Instapaper, I would have to go through the trouble of copying the url and then opening up Instapaper and pasting it in there so I could read it later.  It would be nice to have this kind of thing automated.  I’m not a programmer so I end up waiting and relying on much smarter and clever people to create a tool that can do this for me.

Read the rest of this entry »

“U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced today over $40 million in grant funding, partly supported by the Affordable Care Act, to state, tribal, local and territorial health departments and several schools of public health to enhance the nation’s public health infrastructure and strengthen the public health workforce. Awarded in nearly every state, this funding will improve the delivery of necessary public health services in communities, cities and states across the country.” Read more about it here: http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2011pres/08/20110831a.html.

Some of the CDC/HRSA grantees are right here in our region:

Congratulations to the organizations!