Some of the most difficult issues related to the management of electronic resources revolve around licensing. To help ease the pain, many are calling for a new set of industry standards to express license terms more clearly and simply. More details at:

http://www.cni.org/tfms/2006a.spring/abstracts/PB-farb-standardised.html

The First Annual University Research Symposium for Understanding Fundamental Disparities in Health will be held on Monday, April 24, from 8:45 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in the Low Library Rotunda at Columbia University.

Keynote Speakers will be Antonia C. Novello, MD, MPH, DrPH, New York State Health Commissioner and 14th Surgeon General of the United
The purpose of the symposium is to stimulate thinking about the underlying themes or fundamental social causes of health disparities and to initiate the development of cross-disciplinary Working Groups that could coalesce and continue after the Symposium.

Advance registration is required. To register, please visit:
http://www.columbiacchp.org/cchp-home/rsvp

Please register early, as space is limited.

The MCH Library released a new knowledge path edition that offers a selection of current, high-quality resources about caring for children and adolescents with special health care needs. This knowledge path for health professionals, policymakers, program administrators, and families includes information on (and links to) Web sites, electronic and print publications, databases, and online discussion groups. Separate sections list resources on specific aspects of care and development such as adolescent transition, advocacy, financing, and screening. This knowledge path is available at

http://www.mchlibrary.info/KnowledgePaths/kp_CSHCN.html

Knowledge paths on other maternal and child health topics are available (See http://mchlibrary.info/KnowledgePaths/index.html).

The New York Academy of Medicine / National Library of Medicine Resource Guide for Public Health Preparedness provides access to more than 1600 electronic publications related to public health preparedness.

The Current Awareness Update for March 2006, listing newly added resources to the database, is now available at: http://www.phpreparedness.info/update.php

For full database records, including annotations or to search this content by subject area, see: http://www.phpreparedness.info

The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), US, has commissioned a study to ascertain the major factors contributing to journal subscription cancellations by libraries. The study is projected to provide data for a current debate on whether author self-archiving of preprint and/or postprint versions of journal articles has a significant impact on journal subscription numbers.

The study revealed that librarians do not view open access (OA) repositories as a substitute for properly managed journal holdings. A large majority of librarians do not even know whether the content of archives overlaps with their holdings, and most do not plan to introduce systems to measure this. Availability via OA archives was ranked a long way behind the needs of faculty, usage and price in determining cancellations. Three times as many respondents thought repositories would have no impact on holdings as they thought they would.

The study consisted of an online questionnaire. The report is an A4 paperback of 72 pages. In addition to the priced printed report and combined PDF, ALPSP has also made available the data from the survey, including the ‘free-text’ answers from the respondents, at http://www.surveymonkey.com/Report.asp?U=161585570142

The original press release can be found at http://www.alpsp.org/news/librarians_press.pdf

A new Web site being developed by researchers at Syracuse University and the University of Washington (UW) will provide users with tools and tips for separating good online information from the vast amounts of unreliable material. R. David Lankes, associate professor of information studies at Syracuse, and Michael Eisenberg, professor in the Information School at UW, are codirectors of the Credibility Commons, which is funded by a $250,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Lankes said that many users assess the credibility of online information based on what a site looks like or whether it tells users what they want to hear. The Credibility Commons will gather computer programs–written by others and by the organizers of the new site–that can help users find credible information on the Web. The site will also solicit feedback from users for how best to locate reliable, accurate information. The tools developed by the Credibility Commons will be available as open source applications, which users may download and modify provided they share those changes with the site.Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 March 2006 (sub. req’d)

http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/03/2006032901t.htm

see:

http://www.pdfzone.com/article2/0,1895,1937092,00.asp

Notable quotation: “In versions 6 and previous, Adobe allowed a certain tolerance for font errors that engineers tightened up in version 7.”

The NLM Technical Bulletin is now offering RSS 2.0 (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. RSS is a Web standard for sharing and distributing news and other frequently updated content provided by Web sites. With the Technical Bulletin feed you will be notified when a new article or Technical Note is published on our Web site.

An RSS reader, also called an aggregator, is required to use this service on your computer. There are many RSS readers from which to choose and many are available to download free from the Web. They give you a variety of functions and each has its own advantages. Instructions for adding the Technical Bulletin RSS feed to your reader are available at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/rss.html.

For information on hospitals and health facilities in the United States (US), consult this FAQ:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/services/hospital.html

You may be interested in a new flyer from SIS, “Resources for Science Teachers: Classroom Resources from the National Library of Medicine”. This flyer is a color, one-page, two-sided handout available in pdf from http://sis.nlm.nih.gov/enviro/resources_science_teachers.pdf