MIDDLE ATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE
Newsletter of the
National Network of Libraries of Medicine
Middle Atlantic Region
New York New Jersey Pennsylvania Delaware
| The New York Academy of Medicine - 1216 Fifth Avenue - New York, NY 10029 |
| Volume 11 Number 2 | March - April 2001 |
In This Issue...
Making Docuser Work for You
Federal Commons - Online Grant Access
Success with Outreach
Library Lobby Day
Internet Security Issues
MEDLINEplus Consumer Health Library Links
Finding and Using Health Statistics: A Self-Study Course
Invitation - Sign On to MARL
New Library Formed of Merger
NLM Technical Bulletin
The following suggestions will help everyone to get more out of DOCLINE, DOCUSER and SERHOLD. Please take a few moments to see which of these apply to your library's records.
Charges
Please, please fill in your charges. In DOCLINE, select DOCUSER, and then "Update" to retrieve your record. Select the Interlibrary Loan tab. The screen opens on Charges.
Copies: If you charge for copies, please indicate how much. If you do not charge anyone for copies, leave the charges at $0.00. If you extend free reciprocity to consortia members only, indicate that in the comments field on the copy line, e.g., free to BHSL, FreeShare, DEVIC, etc., and type in the amount you charge non-reciprocal/non-consortia members in the appropriate charges boxes.
Fax: Unless you just charge $11.00 for a fax, it appears that some librarians are simply putting in how much additional a fax delivery will cost, e.g., $11.00, while others are totaling the copy charge plus the additional amount for fax delivery, e.g., $22.00. It's unclear and confusing to potential borrowers how much fax deliveries actually cost and some have complained of nasty surprises. The charges shown should be the total charges for the transactions. Please make the necessary corrections, again indicating in the space for comments any reciprocity agreements. If you have never updated your charges, perhaps now is the time to do so.
Updating SERHOLD: The First Step
In order for DOCLINE requests to route appropriately, it is important to keep your SERHOLD information up-to-date. If the holdings information for your library is current, please update the information in the SERHOLD "Last Date Reviewed" field in your library's DOCUSER record.
In DOCLINE, select DOCUSER and then "Update" to retrieve your record. Select the Interlibrary Loan tab. The screen opens on Charges; from the drop-down menu labeled "Select ILL Information Category," select SERHOLD. The top of the screen is labeled "Display only" and lists the number of serials titles held by your library. The bottom third of the screen, "Update," contains a fill-in box, "Last Reviewed on." Enter the date you reviewed your library's holdings following the format listed and then click on "save" at the bottom of the screen.
If you have not updated your holdings in SERHOLD, now is the time! The first step is to order a report so you can see what you have and how complete the information is. Go to DOCLINE > SERHOLD > Reports. When the screen opens, on the left-hand side of the frame you will see a listing headed "SERHOLD Reports," a subheading, "Submit Reports and "Holdings by Library." Click on "Holdings by Library" to bring up your institution's LIBID on the right-hand side of the frame. Under Report Format Type, the default is Standard. Click on the "Submit Report" button at the bottom of the screen. The report should be available the following day. For more complete information on the SERHOLD reports, see http://www.nlm.nih.gov/docline/docline_manual/serhold/report_overview.htm and http://www.nlm.nih.gov/docline/docline_manual/serhold/report_holdings_by_library.htm in the DOCLINE Manual.
When the report is ready, you will see a SERHOLD Report Ready message in the message area on your DOCLINE home page. You can print your report by selecting the print icon on your browser's tool bar. Please note that any SERHOLD report requested will be deleted from the DOCLINE system one week after creation even if the report has not been viewed.
Once you have your report in hand you will be able to go into SERHOLD and make corrections to your holdings. We shall go into that in more detail in the next issue. If you have any questions in the meantime, please feel free to call me at (212) 822-7352 or email me at jjahr@nyam.org.
Citizens, community groups, researchers, universities, State and Local governments and non-profit organizations now have one-stop on-line access to grant information. Visit the Federal Commons at http://www.cfda.gov/federalcommons/
The Federal government awards roughly $300 billion in grants annually to 30,000 different organizations across the United States. These grantees deal with grant systems and grant applications that vary from agency to agency.
There is now one place where Federal grant applicants can access all of the information they need to act on Federal government grant opportunities. Federal Commons, an Internet grants management portal serving the grantee organization community, has joined with the General Services Administration's Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance to offer online access to information about Federal Grant Programs.
"A standard electronic grants system will be a great benefit for state and local governments applying for Federal grants. More importantly it will help the small non-profits," said Eric Brenner of the Illinois Governor's Office Federal Clearinghouse. "The Inter-Agency Electronic Grants Committee has bent over backwards to gather the ideas of State grant offices as they develop a government-wide electronic grants system. A consistent Federal grant system will help States standardize their own e-grant systems."
The Federal Commons site is in its early stages of development and this is the first of many functions that will soon be offered to the grants community on the Federal Commons web site. A pilot is underway offering the capability to search for grant funding opportunities across the Federal government, and, in the future, to apply for and report on Federal grants.
Federal Commons, when fully developed, will, at a single web site, accept online applications from universities, States, tribal and local governments, non-profit and research organizations. Moving this business online will save time and money, and will bring more Americans into the process by offering them the opportunity to compete for these funds using the Internet.
The GSA Office of Governmentwide Policy's Office of Electronic Government sponsors the Inter-Agency Electronic Grants Committee (IAEGC), made up of 23 grant-making agencies working to automate the grants process. The IAEGC endorses the Federal Commons initiative.
Federal agencies have major responsibilities under the 1999 Federal Financial Assistance Management Improvement Act (Public Law 106-107) to streamline grants processes. The legislation, passed and signed into law in November of 1999, requires Federal agencies to offer electronic access to Federal grants. Federal agencies have requested the community of grant recipients to provide guidance for streamlining the Federal financial assistance process. The Federal Financial Assistance Management Improvement Act of 1999 (P.L. 106-107) directs federal agencies to improve the effectiveness and performance of Federal grant programs. It also mandates simplifying application and reporting requirements and improving the delivery of services to the public.
The law directs agencies to seek public comment and consultation. A notice, published in the Federal Register on January 17, 2001, seeks comment on the government's grant forms and common applications, Internet access to grant information, uniformity of rules, and payment systems. Comments will be used to formulate an implementation plan for Public Law 106-107, to be submitted to Congress in May 2001. The nine-page notice is available at http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fedreg/a010117c.html.
"Outreach" covers a very broad area - we hear it every day in many contexts. But any outreach effort has a number of common features. We are pleased to reprint the following article from the NN/LM Pacific Northwest Region, which provides valuable guidelines for anyone planning an outreach program.
by Catherine Burroughs, Network Librarian, Evaluation, NN/LM Pacific Northwest Region
Deciding to develop a library program is a creative opportunity. You may be starting a new type of program or finally getting to something for which you've seen a need for a long time. Either way, you have a fresh slate and the chance to think about the program's goals and what will be done to achieve them.
When setting goals, remember they should be relevant to the audience or community you want to reach. Goals that only serve an agency or organizational agenda are too one-sided. A program's success will rest, in part, on whether you have buy-in from key stakeholders. Planning for goals they find important will make your project relevant, help to ensure sustainability, and encourage participation and partnerships.
To set relevant goals and objectives, go back to the data gathered during the community assessment phase, as described in the previous article of this series, "Success with Outreach: The Community Assessment," (http://www.nnlm.nlm.nih.gov/pnr/news/200007/success-2.html) Research conducted in the community assessment phase helped to understand the need and priorities for your program or service—such as who will be targeted, what problems will be addressed, and what results or outcomes are intended. The goals and objectives you develop will help envision how these needs and problems will be addressed.
Goals are long-range statements describing a desired condition or future. An example of a project goal might be: Residents of Moran County will have access to and use credible, convenient health information resources for personal health decisions. This goal reflects the mutual priorities of the target audience and outreach staff. For residents, convenient access to health information is key to its actual use. From the perspectives of the outreach staff, getting people to evaluate and select credible resources is an equally important goal.
Goals are far-reaching, and provide an ideal, but they do not specify how they will be achieved. This is where objectives are helpful. Objectives help to define goals by specifying what will be done (the process) and what changes are intended (the outcomes). By constructing measurable objectives, you have defined targets to work toward and ways to measure whether you reach them.
There are two types of measurable objectives: process and outcomes-based. Process objectives list what activities you think will have an impact on your hoped-for outcome. For example: The Moran County outreach project will increase awareness of electronic health information resources by conducting a six-month promotion campaign via printed materials, electronic media, and demonstrations.
An outcomes-based objective states a criterion to measure the hoped-for result. For example, an outcomes-based objective might be: At least 50% of community center visitors in the last month of the project will have heard about MEDLINEplus, as measured by an exit survey. Asking community center visitors if they have heard about MEDLINEplus is a way to measure the targeted outcome to "increase awareness of an electronic health information resource." The objective also lists a criterion of success: 50% of community center visitors.
Thus, by setting a few measurable process and outcome-based objectives, your program has a solid direction for use in planning and evaluation. Keep in mind that goals and objectives can be overwhelming or burdensome if they are not realistic or too numerous. Develop goals as a tool to help prioritize what you most want to achieve. Construct measurable objectives that set selective and realistic targets for what you will do (the process) and accomplish (the outcomes).
A brief note about outcomes: The example provided here is only one of the many outcomes that may result from outreach. Measurable outcomes resulting from outreach could also be gained knowledge, changed attitudes, changed beliefs, developed skill, increased use of health information resources, or increased organizational or community support.
Readers are referred to a newly published guide on outreach planning and evaluation for a fuller discussion of various outcomes and ways to reach and measure them. "Measuring the Difference: Guide to Planning and Evaluating Health Information Outreach" is available in spiral bound print from the Pacific Northwest Regional Medical Library (also available online at http://www.nnlm.nlm.nih.gov/evaluation/guide/). Free copies can be obtained by emailing nnlm@u.washington.edu with "evaluation guide" in the subject line, and your name, mailing address, and number of copies needed in the body.
[for the first article in this series, "Success with Outreach: Introduction to Planning and Evaluation," see http://www.nnlm.nlm.nih.gov/pnr/news/200007/success-1.html]
Reprinted from "Dragonfly," the newsletter of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Pacific Northwest Region.
Note: This is a newsletter. The Links and information are up-to-date when published and are not updated after the published date.
by Erica Burnham, Consumer Health Information Coordinator
On March 19, 2001, representatives from the Metropolitan New York Library Council's Special Interest Group on Consumer Health traveled to Albany to meet with legislators about New York State's budget allocation for libraries. I was accompanied by Catherine Chanse, project coordinator from Libraries for the Future, a founding partner with Brooklyn Public Library of the Brooklyn Health Information Access Coalition. Marilyn White, from the Arthur Ashe Institute, joined us for two meetings to discuss the Institute's collaborative efforts with the Brooklyn Public Library.
The focus of the day was a document commissioned by the Board of Regents entitled “Meeting the Needs of All New Yorkers: Library Service in the New Century," or New Century Libraries, as it has come to be called. New Century Libraries calls for an unprecedented amount of money for improved library services, from public library construction projects, to a specific mention of "enhanced access to the specialized resources held by New York's academic, special, and research libraries to improve ... health care for all New Yorkers."
The evening before Lobby Day, the New York Library Association held a dinner at the venerable Jack's Oyster House, home of countless political deals over the years. Many were described in a talk given by veteran political journalist Peter Slocum, who, along with the political cartoonist Hy Rosen, recently published the book "From Rocky to Pataki: Character and Caricatures in New York Politics."
As several legislators and their aides attested, Tuesday is one of the busiest days of the week. On March 20th, we shared the crowded elevators and hallways with representatives from many groups, including a boisterous bunch of war vets, students looking to "Save Summer Jobs," and a delegation from "Drop the Rock" campaigning to repeal the stiff Rockefeller drug sentencing laws.
We made appointments with four legislators: Assembly member Richard Gottfried, a Manhattan representative and chair of the Assembly Health Committee; Assembly member Deborah Glick, another Manhattan native, an active social service advocate and a member of the Ways and Means Committee; Assembly member Robert Sweeney, an old friend of the Brooklyn Public Library's Health Coalition and initiator of Breast Cancer and Women's Health Awareness Day in Albany; and Senator Kemp Hannon, chair of the Senate Health Committee. We also showed up unannounced to drop off packets, ‘Libraries are Key Providers of Health Information,' with our local representatives.
The New York State Assembly has been very receptive to the New Century initiative and the legislative aides, as well as the few Assembly members we met with, were very enthusiastic about library funding. They were particularly interested in the link we made between a proposed bill that would expand access to mammograms and cervical cytology screenings and the need for up-to-date health information in lay language. We will be interested to see how the State Senate will respond to a $95 million proposal like New Century Libraries. The proposal will be most likely implemented in phases.
For more information on the New Century Libraries, please visit the New York State Library web site and its section on the initiative at http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/libdev/lib2k/ The full text and bill summaries are available, as well as a variety of press materials.
If you would like to propose topics you feel should be covered in the Middle Atlantic Perspective, or, if you would like to write an article, please contact Joanne Jahr at jjahr@nyam.org. Your comments, suggestions and criticisms are welcome.
Ports, ports everywhere. Here a port, there a port...
There are 65,535 TCP/IP ports on your computer. Do you know which ports are open? Ports are like little doors that are used by programs to allow data to move back and forth between your computer and the Internet or local network. Examples of frequently used ports include port 21, used for downloading software by ftp. If you looked at a web page, Web traffic or Hypertext transmission protocol (HTTP) use port 80. Checked your email today? POP (post office protocol) email uses port 110 to download the messages and report back that they are to be deleted or saved. Most of the other 65,535 ports are not used, but in most network configurations they remain open.
Are the doors open?
There is a web site, Shields Up, https://grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2 that will scan the major ports that are used to compromise computers running Microsoft products. The web site has two tests that you may want to run: "Test My Shields" and "Probe My Ports." When you select "Test My Shields," it checks your computer's Internet connection security. Select "Probe My Ports," and the server will send requests to see if the following commonly used ports are open: 21, 23, 25, 79, 80, 110, 113, 139, 143, and 443. The results of the port scan will show that the named port is in one of three states: stealth, closed, or open.
Stealth is the best status as "for all intents and purposes your computer doesn't exist to scanners on the Internet."
Closed is "the best you can hope for without a stealth firewall in place."
Open is when "you have servers running" or "you do not have servers running." These messages mean that you either have a server running on this port or that someone else has one running without your knowledge.
Why would I need to know this?
There can be some serious effects of having open ports on your computer. They leave you vulnerable to detection and later attack from outside sources as vulnerabilities are discovered and distributed via hacker networks. Ever heard of a denial of service attack (DOS)? Hackers use this attack to disable a server, usually a web server, by flooding it with lots of simultaneous requests. In effect, the attacker overloads the server and makes it unavailable to legitimate users, i.e., denies them the services of that server. How would you be involved in this DOS? If your computer is vulnerable, it could be used as a "zombie" to send out requests to some site again and again. Your computer would be taken over and a program started that would send out requests for web pages again and again without your knowledge!
How do I close these ports?
There are products that can close the ports or block a casual scan. See http://grc.com/su-firewalls.htm Also remember that when the computer is powered down it is not connected to the Internet.
MEDLINEplus contains many easily accessible resources for the consumer, including a medical encyclopedia, dictionaries, drug information, directories of health professionals, and links to various publications, organizations, and consumer health libraries (the latter can be found under “Other Resources" on the MEDLINEplus home page).
We are pleased that the following Middle Atlantic Region Health Sciences libraries are listed on the MEDLINEplus Libraries page http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/libraries.html
Delaware
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nichsr/usestats/index.htm
Health statistics can be difficult to track down. They are also difficult to use because they feature information collected from competing perspectives. This self-study course presents sources of statistics based on four broad areas: health correlates, health conditions, health care and health consequences. It puts statistics, particularly government statistics, in context by providing explanations of the rationale behind data collection, i.e., why are specific federal agencies collecting data and what purpose will this data serve, in terms of health policy and planning? Further, the course demonstrates how to identify and
find important results; assess the benefits and limitations of these results; and progress from summaries to detailed original reports. Instruction in this self-study course is reinforced by a series of 15 exercises.
The course developer and instructor, Dr. Dan Melnick, previously directed the Federal Government's Office of Applied Studies, which reports statistics for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. He also served as a Division Director for the National Science Foundation and as a Specialist in Federal Statistical Policy at the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress. The course is based on Dr. Melnick's latest book, "Portrait of Health in the United States: Major Statistical Trends and Guide to Resources," (ISBN: 0-89059-189-X.), to be published in April 2001, by Bernan Press.
by Mary Mylenki, Associate Director
This is an ardent invitation to sign onto the regional listserv MARL. We know many of you say, "Oh no, I'm on enough lists–not one more." Here's why we think it's important AND worth your while.
We don't post very many messages-in the month of February there were only nine, and thus far in March not even seven-but they do convey important current information about us and about NLM. This newsletter, Middle Atlantic Perspective, now appears only in an electronic version (pdf or html); each issue will be announced on MARL with a link to the URL. For instructions on how to subscribe, go to http://www.nnlm.nlm.nih.gov/mar/listserv.html.
In addition, every library should have at least one person subscribed to DOCLINE-L. We occasionally cross-post messages from DOCLINE-L to MARL, but not very frequently. There may be messages that are of potential importance to your institution that you have missed because you are not a DOCLINE-L subscriber. To subscribe to DOCLINE-L:
Dear Colleagues,
The Richard M. Johnston Health Sciences Library (PAUWPH) at The Western Pennsylvania Hospital is now open!
It is formed from the collections of the Medical Library and the School of Nursing Library. We will be adding some materials from our School of Respiratory Care in the coming weeks. Carol Constantine and I are the Medical Librarians, sharing the pleasure of our new space.
The phone numbers remain the same:
Main library phone: 412-578-5257.
Barbara's phone: 412-578-4708.
Carol's phone: 412-578-5556.
Library fax: 412-578-7317.
Best regards,
Barbara Brooks, Medical Librarian
The Western Pennsylvania Hospital
Richard M. Johnson Health Sciences Library
NOTE: To those of you who have the Western Pennsylvania Hospital NURSING Library (PAUWPE) in your routing tables, we suggest that you remove it.
The following articles from the current Technical Bulletin are available on the Web at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/tb.html.
2001 January-February; 318
Changes to PubMed for 2001 - e2
Internet Grateful Med to Be Retired; Reminder of
NLM Gateway Availability - e3
PubRef to be Removed from PubMed - e4
NLM Leases CATFILEplus - e5
Next Generation TOXLINE - e6
Complementary Medicine - New PubMed
Subset - e7
Technical Notes - e1:
Middle Atlantic Perspective Index | NN/LM
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NN/LM-
Middle Atlantic
Region New York Academy of Medicine 1216 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10029 Site maintained by MAR STAFF Revised: March 28, 2001 URL: http://www.nnlm.nlm.nih.gov/mar/perspec/2001/0002.html |