Branching Out: The MeSH Vocabulary is an introduction to the development, structure and use of the MeSH vocabulary. The video may be of particular interest to searchers of MEDLINE/PubMed, and is used in the PubMed search classes offered by NLM and the National Training Center and Clearinghouse. This 11-minute video has been updated to include new 2012 screenshots of PubMed and MeSH. Branching Out is also available in m4v format for iOS devices and as a text transcript.

MLA has posted information about the two Disaster Information Specialist classes that are being offered after the MLA conference on Thursday May 24th.

Here is the link to the information: http://www.mlanet.org/education/dis/.

Course title: U.S. Response to Disaster and Public Health Emergencies
Instructors: Mary Moore and Kimberly Loper
Host: NN/LM PNR
Date: Thursday, May 24, 2012, 8:00 a.m.–11:30 a.m.
Location: University of Washington, Seattle
Registration: To register, contact Kathleen Combs

Course title: Information Roles in Disaster Management
Instructor: Robin Featherstone
Host: NN/LM PNR
Date: Thursday, May 24, 2012, 1:00 p.m.–4:30 p.m.
Location: University of Washington, Seattle
Registration: To register, contact Kathleen Combs

There is no charge for these classes. If you are attending MLA and are interested in extending your stay in order to take these courses, the RML may be able to assist. Please contact Kay Deeney for more information.

Some other Disaster Information Specialization courses will be offered in Illinois, Pennsylvania and Texas this summer.

Disaster Health Information Sources: The Basics is available for 1.5 MLA CE contact hours. Indivduals can now register to view the program “On-demand.”

The Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association (MLA) will be held May 18-23, 2012, at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, WA. Attendees are invited to visit the NLM exhibit booth #321 (May 19-22) to meet NLM staff and see NLM Web products and services. The NLM Theater at the booth will feature demonstrations and tutorials on a wide variety of topics.

Mark Your MLA Calendars!

Monday, May 21 (7:00 am – 8:15 am)
NLM Online Users’ Meeting “Sunrise Seminar”
Location: Rm. 602-603, Convention Center
NLM staff will highlight recent accomplishments and indicate new developments in a variety of online systems including MEDLINE/PubMed, MedlinePlus, MedlinePlus Connect and other NLM products.

Tuesday, May 22 (10:30 am – 11:30 am)
NLM Update
Location: Ballroom 6ABC, Convention Center
Speakers:
Betsy Humphreys, Deputy Director
Sheldon Kotzin, Associate Director, Library Operations
Jeff Reznick, Chief, History of Medicine Division

Informal Meetings
Sunday, May 20 (3:30 pm – 4:30 pm)
DOCLINE Users Group Meeting
Location: Rm. 601, Convention Center

The following free training in the Los Angeles area on April 20^th may be of interest to you or your library staff.

E-Resources in Health/US Census Report Mining: Two Half-day Workshops as a Daylong Training for Healthy Communities Partners

The intended audience includes community organizations, hospital and public library staff, and any others who would like an introduction to consumer health services and using U.S. Census data to help determine appropriate health programming and health information needs of the community.

The two sessions are an introduction to a series of self-paced tutorials that is currently being developed as a partnership between Infopeople, UC Davis, and NN/LM PSR.  The tutorials are based in part on the core competencies from “Finding Health and Wellness @ the Library: A Consumer Health Toolkit for Library Staff” and materials from the online class “Health and Wellness @ the Library: The Essentials of Providing Consumer Health Services.”

If you have any questions about the training sessions, please contact Kelli Ham at kkham@library.ucla.edu.

Here is the announcement from the CALIX list today:

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Space is still available in the LA area (Pio Pico branch of LAPL, Koreatown) and Bay Area (Fremont Public Library) sessions of E-Resources in Health/US Census Report Mining: Two Half-day Workshops as a Daylong Training for Healthy Communities Partners

Instructor: Francisca Goldsmith

Fee: Free for those in the California library community. *

• What pressing consumer health issues face your community?

• Are you confident in your knowledge of up-to-date, quality health resources that are most appropriate for library users with health questions?

• Are you faced with the challenges of finding quality health information in other languages or at understandable reading levels?

• Are you comfortable handling sensitive health reference questions?

• How can you mine Census information to help lead and support health reference and health programming at your library?

Build your awareness of the competencies and skills you need to plan and provide health-related library services. Upon completion of this course, you will be ready to pursue further health and wellness information via companion self-paced online modules.

Workshop Description: This day-long, on-ground training includes a morning session intended to increase your awareness of, and comfort with, accessing reliable and accessible health information on the Internet, and and an afternoon session aimed at exploiting the potential of the US Census website and other demographic resources to enhance your knowledge of local demographics. This is a hands-on training during which you will explore online, under the guidance of the instructor, who will provide individual and group exercises.  The instructor will supply sample evaluation templates, cheat sheets, and practical and useful tips for immediate application in your work.

To register and get more info about this workshop can be found here: http://infopeople.org/training/eresources-health-census

*Note about the Fee: Made possible by funding through the University of California Davis under award No. 06-43-B10584 from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), U.S. Department of Commerce, and offered at no charge to participants.  The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of NIST or the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Travel costs will be reimbursed using the UC Davis Travel Reimbursement Requirements. An expense sheet will be provided to all attendees on the day of the workshop. For questions regarding reimbursements, please contact Kate Marie at kate.marie@ucdmc.ucdavis.edu.

Check-in is 8:30 to 9:00 AM; instruction is 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM.

A new funding announcement offering support for informationists to work on NIH-funded research grants was published on the NIH Guide web site today. These supplements provide funds to researchers who have existing research grants from any of the Institutes listed in the announcement (NLM, NCI, NEI, NIA, NIAAA, NIBIB, NIDCD, NIDCR), to pay for adding an informationist to the project. The principal investigator of the grant must apply for this funding, so librarian/informationist colleagues in academic settings might want to identify partners of interest and reach out to them to suggest that they apply, or alert people with whom they already work. An easy way to find potential partners would be to use the NIH RePORTER resource to search by state and funding agency. Applications must be submitted electronically by the deadline of June 5, 2012. The earliest funding start date is September, 2012.

The purposes of the administrative supplement program are (1) to enhance collaborative, multi-disciplinary basic and clinical research by integrating an information specialist, also known as in-context information specialist, into the research team in order to improve the capture, storage, organization, management, integration, presentation, and dissemination of biomedical research data; and (2) to assess and document the value and impact of the informationist’s participation.

We are changing the date of Midday in April to shake things up. Actually, the MLA webinar is April 18th, our usual day for the event. Here is the information:

When: Monday, April 23, 2012
1-2PM (Pacific) | 10-11AM (Hawaii) | 1-2PM (Arizona) | 9-10AM (American Samoa) | 6-7AM Tuesday (Guam)
Presentation Title: PubMed Health and MedlinePlus – A Tale of Two Sites
Presenter: Kelli Ham, Consumer Health & Technology Coordinator

Description: PubMed Health is relatively new offering from the National Library of Medicine and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Searching for health topics on a site like Google often brings up a result from PubMed Health, but a result from MedlinePlus may or may not appear. What is the difference between the two sites? This webinar will provide a closer look at PubMed Health and how it compares with MedlinePlus. We will discuss the site’s relevance for medical libraries, health professionals and consumers, and situations when MedlinePlus would be a more appropriate resource.

To register for the session, please go to the Midday at the Oasis registration page. We hope you can join us!

During the month of April, 2012, we are introducing the new webinar training series Navigating the Health Information Maze, developed for community college librarians wishing to hone their skills in medical research, consumer health, mobile technology, and outreach to special populations. One-hour sessions will be conducted every Tuesday in April, 12-1pm PDT, beginning April 3. Instructors include Kay Deeney, Kelli Ham, Stephen Kiyoi, and Lori Tagawa. The sessions will be recorded and made available on the PSR web site for anyone unable to attend. Details about each weekly session, along with a registration link, are available through the webinar web site listed above.

Please share this information widely with any community college librarians who may be interested in attending! Registration is required for participation, and priority will be given to community college librarians located in the Pacific Southwest Region. Stephen Kiyoi will be happy to answer any questions regarding the series.

In partnership with librarians at the University of Minnesota, the University of Oregon, and Cornell University, the Purdue University Libraries received nearly $250,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to develop training programs for the next generation of scientists, to enable them to find, organize, use, and share data efficiently and effectively. This training will be vital to scientists as they look to secure research funding. In 2007, the National Science Foundation issued a report on the need to build public collections of research data and since 2011 has required scientists to include data management plans in their grant applications.

The Data Information Literacy research project will be carried out over a two-year period by five project teams, to develop and implement a data information literacy curriculum. Two of the teams, consisting of a data librarian, a subject librarian and a disciplinary faculty researcher, are based at Purdue, with one team each at the other institutions. The program is intended for graduate students in engineering and science disciplines who are working toward careers as research scientists. With the continued evolution of technology driven research or e-science impacting the skills necessary for effective data management and curation, a curriculum designed to effectively prepare the next generation of scientists for the dynamic nature of research is essential.

The teams are constructed to represent a variety of subject areas, from electrical and computer engineering to landscape architecture, so that commonalities and differences in data curation needs across disciplines can be explored. Each team will conduct an assessment of data needs of their discipline, including interviewing and observing researchers. The teams will then develop and implement targeted instruction and assess the impact of that instruction in developing the data information literacy skills of graduate students.

The results of this first ever effort at articulating and addressing data information literacy skills will help future scientists and engineers contribute to and take full advantage of the potentials that cyberinfrastructure and information technologies provide. The collaboration between librarians and faculty will identify the educational needs of future e-scientists in organizing, describing, disseminating and preserving their data, and teach them these skills in ways that can be applied in their day-to-day research activities.

The National Library of Medicine has announced a new resource, And There’s the Humor of it: Shakespeare and the Four Humors. This unique project, featuring items from NLM’s historical collection as well as the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, will take several forms:

• A special display open to the public at the National Library of Medicine in Maryland, during January 30-August 17, 2012;
• A traveling banner exhibition, which will tour the nation and perhaps travel abroad; and
• An online exhibition with additional resources for educators and students, developed and produced by NLM, which can be viewed by people around the globe.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) understood human personality in the terms available to his age, that of the now discarded theory of the four bodily humors: blood, bile, melancholy, and phlegm. These four humors were thought to define people’s physical and mental health, and determined their personalities, as well. The language of the four humors pervades Shakespeare’s plays, and their influence is felt above all in a belief that emotional states are physically determined. Carried by the bloodstream, the four humors bred the core passions of anger, grief, hope, and fear — the emotions conveyed so powerfully in Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies.

And There’s the Humor of it: Shakespeare and the Four Humors explores these themes in a special display featuring rare books and incunables from the collection of the National Library of Medicine and the Folger Shakespeare Library. The display was translated into a traveling banner exhibition, which is available to libraries across America free of charge. With an open itinerary tour, it is very easy for a library to book the show. NLM hopes to have show bookings in as many states as possible.

And There’s the Humor of it: Shakespeare and the Four Humors marks the first formal collaboration between NLM and the Folger Shakespeare Library, home to the world’s largest and finest collection of Shakespeare materials. The exhibition was curated by former Folger Director Gail Kern Paster, PhD, and Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Rochester Medical Center and Theodore Brown, PhD. The exhibition and website were designed by Riggs Ward Design.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) National Training Center (NTC) is creating web based, self-paced tutorials related to the PubMed®, TOXNET®, and NCBI databases. Your input is needed regarding topics, length, and format of these tutorials! Please visit this survey to complete a short (10-15 minutes) questionnaire by close of business on Friday, February 17, 2012. The first 50 people to do so will receive a $10 Amazon.com gift certificate!