The NN/LM offers many resources you can use when showing healthcare professionals or the public how to access good health information. Recently some of the brochures have been revised. Below is information on how to access three updated resources. By the way, a new feature: you can customize many of the trifold brochures by adding your organization’s information in the space provided on the back! Be sure and go to http://nnlm.gov/training/pamphlets.html to see all of the pamphlets and brochures available. (more…)

All Pacific Northwest librarians, catalogers, information architects, user
experience designers, usability engineers, information scientists, technical
writers and all professionals and students interested in user-centered
information and design issues are invited to InfoCamp 2007!

What: InfoCamp Seattle 2007
When: October 13-14, 2007, 9am-6pm
Where: Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, 4408 Delridge Way SW, Seattle
Web: http://asistpnw.org/infocamp2007
Cost: Free for ASIS&T or IAI members and students. $20 for all others.

InfoCamp Seattle 2007 will be a collaborative BarCamp-style unconference,
organized by the Pacific Northwest Chapter and the UW Student Chapter of the
American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).

Join us at the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center on October 13 & 14, 2007, for
two days of workshops, roundtable discussions, technology demos, and social
networking sessions. This is the Web 2.0 of conferences — the session
content will be decided entirely by YOU, so bring a topic of debate, a
project to show off, a design for feedback, or any other idea to share with
your professional community!

Registration is now open: http://asistpnw.org/infocamp2007

NLM and the National Training Center and Clearinghouse recently conducted an hour-long clinic that covered how the MeSH vocabulary is used to describe substance concepts and how to search PubMed for relevant articles. The webcast of this August 23rd clinic was recorded and is available, along with a transcript and copies of the presenter’s slides, at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/clinics/chem.html. Questions posted by participants and NLM’s responses will be added soon.

Important “take home” messages from the clinic:

1. In general, use unqualified substance names for the most comprehensive results. If you must qualify, use the [NM] search tag to find your substance as either a MeSH term or a supplementary concept or substance name.

2. Check MeSH for previous indexing to capture the literaturre indexed prior to when the specific substance term was added to MeSH.

3. Use pharmacological action terms for precision. To combine with a substance term, search the pharmacological action term as a MeSH heading [MH] so as not to explode and include all of the substances with that pharmacological action.

4. Ignore stereoisomerism (identified as the letters D, L, DL, R, or S, or the symbols plus or minus before a substance name) when identifying substance names.

5. If you can’t find a salt, try the general compound.

6. Search by CAS registry number [RN] only after checking MeSH, as recently added substances do not have an RN.

7. In chemical or molecular names, include all commas and hyphens, but delete parentheses or square brackets (which would be confused as nesting or qualifier symbols by PubMed).

8. If you cannot find the chemical in MeSH, try searching by fragments of the chemical name in the MeSH database.

9. Try the PubChem Substance database to find substances, especially if you have only the molecular name, structure, or weight.

The Western States and Territories Preservation Assistance Service (WESTPAS) is offering a series of disaster planning workshops in Oregon and Washington.

The “Protecting Library & Archive Collections” workshops are presented in a 2-part sequence to produce the following outcomes for disaster preparedness activities:

* Complete a disaster plan by the end of Part 2.
* Learn how to train staff to implement your plan effectively.
* Set pre- and post-disaster action priorities for your collections.
* Learn how to use practical decision-making skills during an
emergency.
* Experience salvage procedures for books, documents, and non-print
media.

Currently scheduled workshops include: (more…)

TechSoup.org, “The Technology Place for Non-Profits” has released a free guide with practical tips and stories from small and rural libraries about keeping public computers available.

According to Chris Peters on the Washington State Library Updates Mailing List, “The Joy of Computing is an eighty page cookbook on the ins and outs of providing computing resources for patrons in small and rural libraries. Concise and easy-to-read (lots of lists and headings and links to further resources), the cookbook discusses fundraising and budgeting, IT planning, training for staff and patrons, and how to recruit and supervise technology volunteers. Furthermore, there’s a wealth of information on computer maintenance and security. The Joy of Computing is available for free download.”

Sample Tips from “The Joy of Computing”:

Short on space? Build a mobile computer lab.
The Colorado River Indian Tribes Library, located in Parker, AZ, currently has five public-access computers that are networked and equipped with a high speed DSL Internet connection. The library hopes to expand its lab by adding new machines, but its facilities are too small to accommodate any extra computers. To help solve this lack-of-space problem, Gil Harper — The Colorado River Indian
Tribes Library’s Computer Technology Specialist — devised the idea of a mobile computer lab, which would house nine wireless laptop computers. According to Harper, a mobile computer lab would not only give the library more room for computers, but would also bring technology to community residents who can’t travel to the library …

Convert your old computers into thin clients to squeeze life out of them.
Your library’s old computers may not be able to run the latest version of Windows, but they’re not junk! In fact, Kinney County Public Library in Brackettville, Texas, with the help of IT consultant Rodney Greensage was able to add eight computers to its lab using systems that would have been destined for the junkyard. By converting your computer network into what’s called a thin client (a network computer without a hard drive that runs its programs from a server), the libraries were able to squeeze life out of old computers and save money at the same time …

The NW Center for Public Heath Practice presents “Hot Topics in Preparedness“, a monthly online hour-long forum on topics of crucial importance to the public health practice community.

The upcoming topic for June 19 is The Art of Dialogue: Collaboration in Public Health Preparedness. The Regional Medical Library will host a site for this webcast, in the University of Washington Health Sciences Library, Room T319, from 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m.

Description

Preparedness means developing the readiness to respond to emergencies with creativity and flexibility, the way all living things respond to challenges in their environment. The more complex the challenge, the more creative the response needs to be. But how can we develop this kind of readiness? What kinds of things would we need to do to achieve this kind of preparedness?

Daniel Martin is proposing that Dialogue is the glue that holds the elements of preparedness together. In fact, it is often the missing link in a process where connection and collaboration are critical. (more…)