The presentation for the DOCLINE Users Group Meeting, given at the 2013 MLA Annual Meeting, is now available to view from the NLM DOCLINE presentations page. The presentation includes speaker notes. The “MLA 2013 DOCLINE Update” presents data highlights and preliminary analysis from the recent national survey of DOCLINE libraries, as part of the NLM strategic planning initiative exploring the future of resource sharing. The goal of the initiative was to better understand the resource sharing needs of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, given the declining use of DOCLINE for ILL and Loansome Doc for document delivery. The results showed that DOCLINE is still a vital service! The presentation also gave a brief overview of recent and upcoming DOCLINE releases.

Libraries are invited to share their thoughts on the results presented, and any further insights into future needs regarding obtaining biomedical literature for health professionals. Comments may be sent to NLM by using the Contact Us feature of DOCLINE, or by discussing with NN/LM PSR staff.

The National Library of Medicine’s WISER for Android 2.0 is now available and can be installed directly from the Google Play Store. New features in this release include: 

• Emergency Response Guidebook data is now updated to the ERG 2012; WISER for Android includes a custom ERG 2012 tool; and
• WISER now fully integrates content from the Chemical Hazards Emergency Medical Management (CHEMM) website.

This integration includes:

• New hospital provider and preparedness planner profiles;
• Acute care guidelines for six known mass casualty agents/agent classes;
• The addition of a wealth of CHEMM reference material; and
• CHEMM Intelligent Syndrome Tool (CHEMM-IST); a new help identify tool designed to diagnose the type of chemical exposure after a mass casualty incident.

These exciting additions are coming soon:

• Updates to the Windows and WebWISER platforms to include CHEMM integration, ERG 2012 data, and more;
• Data updates for all WISER platforms; and
• WISER for Android 3.1, which adds Help Identify Chemical and protective distance mapping to this popular platform.

WISER is a system designed to assist first responders in hazardous material incidents. WISER provides a wide range of information on hazardous substances, including substance identification support, physical characteristics, human health information, and containment and suppression advice.

The National Library of Medicine has launched an online adaptation of the traveling banner exhibition, A Voyage to Health, an exploration of how the revival of Native Hawaiian sea voyaging traditions helped heal the soul of the community. The launch of the web site celebrates the 19-year anniversary of the May 9, 1994 return of Kanaloa Kaho‘olawe island to the Hawaiian people by the United States Navy. This online project begins with the migration of voyagers from the South Pacific who settled on the Hawaiian island of Kanaloa Kaho‘olawe, and details the loss of sovereignty and suppression of culture Native Hawaiians experienced by the US annexation of Hawai‘i. It highlights the contemporary movement to reclaim and protect Kanaloa Kaho‘olawe, and the restoration of traditional sea voyaging, which have served as unexpected catalysts of a Native Hawaiian cultural renaissance; a reconnection to ancient sources of pride and wellness.

The web site is augmented by education resources that explore the exhibition content: two lesson plans for grades 4-8; a six-class higher education module developed by noted Native Hawaiian scholar Davianna Pōmaika‘i McGregor, PhD; two online activities; and a collection of other online resources. A Voyage to Health was curated by Davianna Pōmaika‘i McGregor, PhD (University of Hawai‘i), Hardy Spoehr (Papa Ola Lokahi), and Maile Taualii, PhD, MPH (Papa Ola Lokahi), in cooperation with NLM Exhibition Program curator Manon Parry, PhD. The traveling banner exhibition A Voyage to Health has traveled to 17 locations in the continental United States and nine locations around the world!

The NLM exhibit booth at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association in Boston featured theater presentations to bring users up-to-date on several NLM products and services. The presentation recordings are captioned and accessible from the NLM Distance Education Program Resources page. The presentations include:

• (BYOD) Bring Your Own Device: NLM Apps and Social Media (19 min.)
• ClinicalTrials.gov: A New Look (20 min.)
• History of Medicine Division: Exhibitions, Programs, and Resources (17 min.)
• Implementing RDA: the NLM Perspective (25 min.)
• Managing NIH Public Access Compliance using My NCBI (25 min.)
• MedlinePlus & MedlinePlus Connect (16 min.)
• NLM Terminology Resources and Meaningful Use (22 min.)
• PubMed Central International Overview (18 min.)
• PubMed Update (24 min.)
• Resources for Health Services Research & Public Health (17 min.)
• Resources for a Multi-Cultural World (14 min.)
• What’s New @ PubMed Health (13 min.)

Note: To listen to the voice recordings and view the captions you may need the latest version of Flash® Player (download for free from the Adobe Web site). To zoom in to detailed screens, use the scroll button. For more information, go to the NLM Technical Bulletin page.

On April 25, 2003, the National Library of Medicine launched Genetics Home Reference (GHR), a free online resource about human genetics created for patients, families, and the general public. The Web site provides a bridge between the public’s questions about human genetics and the rich technical data that has emerged from the Human Genome Project (observing the 10th anniversary of its completion on April 25th) and other genomic research.

GHR provides consumer-friendly summaries of genetic conditions and their associated genes, gene families, and chromosomes. The site also features a primer called “Help Me Understand Genetics,” an illustrated introduction to fundamental topics in human genetics; including mutations, inheritance, genetic testing, gene therapy, and genomic research. Additionally, GHR offers helpful background information, including a glossary of genetic and medical terms and links to numerous other quality resources. A “Spotlight” feature on the GHR home page highlights important observances and discoveries in the field of human genetics, and draws attention to useful learning tools and clinical resources.

When it was launched a decade ago, Genetics Home Reference featured 19 condition summaries and 16 gene descriptions. Today, GHR offers easy-to-read summaries of about 850 genetic conditions, more than 1,060 genes, more than 80 gene families, all of the human chromosomes, and mitochondrial DNA. New summaries are added regularly. GHR currently receives about 43,000 visitors per day and 39 million hits per month, suggesting that it continues to be an important and useful health resource!

NLM’s TOXNET TRI and TOXMAP now include the 2011 Toxics Release Inventory data, the most current US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data available. The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), a resource of the EPA, is a set of publicly available databases containing information on releases of specific toxic chemicals and their management as waste, as reported annually by U.S. industrial and federal facilities. This inventory was established under the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act of 1986 (EPCRA). TRI’s data, beginning with the 1987 reporting year, covers air, water, land, and underground injection releases, as well as transfers to waste sites. In agreement with the Pollution Prevention Act of 1990, source reduction and recycling data is also included in TRI. 20,927 facilities reported to the EPA TRI program in 2011, with almost 80,000 submissions. A complete list of TRI chemicals required to be reported can be found on the EPA web site. TOXMAP maps the TRI chemicals reported to the EPA as required by EPCRA. TOXMAP covers on-site TRI releases only, and also includes EPA Superfund data.

The National Library of Medicine has announced that Extensible Markup Language (XML) data from the IndexCat™ database is now available for free download. Released with a Document Type Definition (DTD) that allows researchers to validate the data, this new XML release includes the digitized content of more than 3.7 million bibliographic items from the printed, 61-volume Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General’s Office, originally published from 1880 to 1961. The XML describes items spanning five centuries, including millions of journal and newspaper articles, obituaries, and letters; hundreds of thousands of monographs and dissertations; and thousands of portraits. Together, these items cover a wide range of subjects such as the basic sciences, scientific research, civilian and military medicine, public health, and hospital administration.

The NLM release of the Index-Catalogue in XML format opens this key resource in the history of medicine and science to new uses and users. It is one of the monuments of the Library’s longstanding, systematic indexing of the medical literature, an effort which William Henry Welch (1850-1934), the great pathologist and bibliophile, considered to be “America’s greatest contribution to medical knowledge.” This indexing, begun by John Shaw Billings in the nineteenth century at the Library of the Surgeon-General’s Office, United States Army (known today as the NLM), eventually created two distinct products: the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General’s Office, United States Army, and the Index Medicus, forerunner of MEDLINE®, and now the largest component of PubMed.®

Released alongside the IndexCatalogue XML are an integrated XML file and associated DTD for two collections developed from the electronic database of A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (rev.), by Lynn Thorndike and Pearl Kibre (eTK), and the updated and expanded version of Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference (eVK2), edited by Linda Ehrsam Voigts and Patricia Deery Kurtz. Also available via the online IndexCat, these resources encompass over 42,000 records of incipits, or the beginning words of a medieval manuscript or early printed book, covering various medical and scientific writings on topics as diverse as astronomy, astrology, geometry, agriculture, household skills, book production, occult science, natural science, and mathematics, as these disciplines and others were largely intermingled in the medieval period of European history. The NLM release of these resources in XML format joins many other freely downloadable resources, including the XML for MEDLINE®/PubMed® data, which includes over 22 million references to biomedical and life sciences journal articles back to 1946, and, for some journals, much earlier.

The release also coincides with the NLM’s participation in “Shared Horizons: Data, Biomedicine, and the Digital Humanities,” an interdisciplinary symposium exploring the intersection of digital humanities and biomedicine, being held April 10-12, 2013, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, and Research Councils UK. Shared Horizons will create opportunities for disciplinary cross-fertilization through a mix of formal and informal presentations, combined with breakout sessions designed to promote a rich exchange of ideas about how large-scale quantitative methods can lead to new understandings of human culture. Bringing together researchers from the digital humanities and bioinformatics communities, the symposium will explore ways in which these two communities might fruitfully collaborate on projects that bridge the humanities and medicine around the topics of sequence alignment and network analysis, two modes of analysis that intersect with “big data.” All Shared Horizons sessions will be live-streamed with a monitored back channel for the public to post/tweet comments. Recordings of all talks will also be posted to the Shared Horizons website, with the ability to comment pre- and post-event.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) Outreach and Special Populations Branch has funded three innovative outreach projects in information dissemination for family and women’s health by public libraries and information centers. The NLM recognizes public libraries as strategic partners in increasing the awareness and utilization of NLM and National Institutes of Health (NIH) resources, and meeting NLM long range goals of health literacy, informing citizens, and reducing health disparities. All projects have a component on family health, and also target women as the main information gatherer and health decision influencer in the family.

Three libraries were funded, including one in the Pacific Southwest Region:

• Forsyth County Public Library, Winston-Salem, NC
• Petersburg Public Library system, Petersburg, VA
• Pima County Public Library, Tucson, AZ

The Pima County Public Library’s Heath Initiative Project aims to build capacity for women’s health literacy awareness, including self-health, family health, health care decision making, being the family health care giver; and resources, including those from the National Library of Medicine, for healthy living. The main objective is to support the library’s health literacy initiative and Health Information Literacy team in developing a toolkit that includes sustainable programming, partnerships, and resources for library community engagement.

Congratulations to all the awardees!

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) Value Set Authority Center (VSAC), in collaboration with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), has published the annual update for the 2014 Eligible Hospital Clinical Quality Measure (CQM) Value Sets. The update includes revised value sets to address deleted and remapped codes in the latest terminology versions, as well as new codes for addressing CQM logic corrections and clarifications. The NLM update of the VSAC coincides with the CMS posting of the official updated 2014 Eligible Hospital CQMs.

The value sets provide lists of the numerical values and individual names from standard vocabularies used to define the clinical concepts (e.g. diabetes, clinical visit) used in the CQMs. The content of the VSAC will gradually expand to incorporate value sets for other use cases, as well as for new measures and updates to existing measures. The VSAC offers a Downloadable Resource Table (DRT), accessible from the “Download” tab on the VSAC Web page, that provides prepackaged downloads for the most recently updated and released 2014 CQM Value Sets, as well as to previously released versions. Access to the Value Set Authority Center requires a free Unified Medical Language System® Metathesaurus License. NLM also provides the Data Element Catalog that identifies data element names (value set names) required for capture in Electronic Health Record (EHR) technology, certified under the 2014 Edition of the ONC Standards and Certification Criteria.

The following resources are available to help health care providers and vendors navigate the 2014 CQMs:

• NLM: Value Set Authority Center (VSAC) Provides downloadable access to all official versions of vocabulary value sets contained in the 2014 Clinical Quality Measures.
• AHRQ: United States Healthcare Knowledge Database (USHIK) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s website with 2014 eCQMs and other health information technology resources. This site provides a number of formats for viewing, downloading, and comparing versions of eCQMs and their value sets.
• CMS: Clinical Quality eMeasure Logic and Implementation Guidance v1.3 Guidance for understanding and using the electronically specified Eligible Professional (EP) and Eligible Hospital (EH) Clinical Quality Measures.
• ONC: Clinical Quality Measure Feedback System ONC encourages the EHR technology developer and user communities to provide feedback regarding the implementation, structure, intent, and data elements pertaining to CQMs.
• Questions? Contact NLM Value Set Authority Center Help.

The National Library of Medicine’s WISER for iOS 3.1, a universal app for Apple iOS devices, is now available. It can be downloaded and installed directly from the Apple App Store. Here’s a look at what’s new in this release:

• WISER now fully integrates content from the Chemical Hazards Emergency Medical Management (CHEMM) website. This integration includes:
  • New hospital provider and preparedness planner profiles
  • Acute care guidelines for 6 known mass casualty agents/agent classes
  • The addition of a wealth of CHEMM reference material
  • The new CHEMM Intelligent Syndrome Tool (CHEMM-IST), a help identify tool designed to diagnose the type of chemical exposure after a mass casualty incident
• Emergency Response Guidebook data is now updated to the ERG 2012; WISER for the iPhone includes a custom ERG 2012 tool

In addition, look for these exciting developments in the coming months:

• WISER for Android 1.1, which includes the same CHEMM integration and ERG 2012 updates detailed above
• Updates to the Windows and WebWISER platforms to include CHEMM integration, ERG 2012 data, and more
• WISER for Android 3.1, which adds Help Identify Chemical and protective distance mapping to this popular platform

WISER is a system designed to assist first responders in hazardous material incidents. It provides a wide range of information on hazardous substances; including substance identification support, physical characteristics, human health information, and containment and suppression advice.