Pictures from Congressional staff visits are on our Facebook page. There’s an easy link from http://nnlm.gov/mcr/ under News and Events.

Staff members from our local congressional offices came to visit recently. We have one more scheduled for next week. Jean Shipman, Director, Claire Hamasu, Associate Director of the NN/LM MCR, and Sharon Dennis, Assistant Director of the National Library of Medicine Training Center, shared the importance of our programs and the importance of the National Library of Medicine. This proved to be an awareness building activity since none of the visitors were aware of our programs or of the National Library of Medicine! Our visitors were very appreciative of the time we spent with them and of the work that we do. Consider inviting your legislators or other local government officials to your library and raising their awareness. It’s an uplifting exercise to prepare a presentation about all the great work we do. /ch

This Spotlight! session focusing on National Library of Medicine Diabetes Resources, will be presented by Marty Magee.  Taking the one-hour class and completing the exercises and class evaluation makes you eligible to receive 1 Medical Library Association Continuing Education credit. This online training is FREE. Register online at http://tinyurl.com/mcrclasses (registration is not required but is appreciated).

URL: https://webmeeting.nih.gov/mcr/ Equipment: connection to the Internet and a phone, Login: as a guest with your first and last name. Instructions to connect to the audio will show up once you’ve logged in. Captioning will be provided.  Questions to mmagee@unmc.edu. (mm)

Two topics:  1)  “The art of communication is the language of leadership.”  This is a quote by James Humes a presidential speech writer. The RML strives to be a leader within the MidContinental Region and in April of this year completed a communication audit to improve the language of our leadership.  Join Claire Hamasu for a sharing session on what the NN/LM MCR learned and how we plan to improve our communication with you. We’d like your feedback on our plans. and 2)  Join Dana Abbey for an interview with Dr. Kurt Beam, a professor and researcher in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Dr. Beam will talk about his own data intensive research, thoughts on sharing data,  and provide a perspective on e-Science data wrangling.

URL: https://webmeeting.nih.gov/mcr/ Equipment: connection to the Internet and a phone, Login: as a guest with your first and last name. Instructions to connect to the audio will show up once you’ve logged in. Captioning will be provided a few minutes before the hour. Questions to mmagee@unmc.edu. (mm)

October is National Medical Librarians Month. Your excellent work deserves to be featured on the NLM page for the MidContinental Region in October!

Send me a description of a health information library  project  that’s worthy of notice, that occurred during the past year and your library will be recognized! Logos and carefully cropped, clear photos can be also be submitted. The deadline is almost here for submissions. Send your submission by September 15, 2011 to Claire Hamasu: chamasu@RML4.utah.edu.

National Medical Librarians Month projects for past years can be viewed at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/lo/profiles10/ .

Each submission should provide:  Name of the project, Institution where the project is located, City and state, URL for the project, Paragraph description of the project, Name and title of project director, Names of key staff for the project. /ch

The Health Data Tools and Statistics page on the PHPartners.org website has been reorganized to make public health data and statistics easier to find and use. [da]

New Public Health Data Tools and Statistics Categories:

• County and Local Health Data
• State Health Data
• Individual State Data
• National Health Data
• Global Health Data
• Statistical Reports
• Demographic Data
• Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
• Training and Education
• Health Information Technology and Standards
• Tools for Data Collection and Planning

The September 2011 issue of NIH News in Health is now available online. In this issue learn about teen development, postpartum depression, and frontotemporal disorders. [da]