Congratulations are due to the following people in the Pacific Southwest Region, who will be honored at the 2012 MLA Annual Meeting in Seattle, WA, during the Awards Ceremony and Luncheon, on Monday, May 21! Read more »

This one-day symposium was held on March 2, 2012, at the newly renovated UCLA Library Conference Center, at the Charles E. Young Research Library. Funded by NN/LM PSR to enhance the role of librarians in supporting evidence-based medicine education and practice for health care practitioners, the symposium was organized by the Medical Library Group of Southern California and Arizona (MLGSCA), in cooperation with the Northern California and Nevada Medical Library Group (NCNMLG) and the Hawaii Pacific Chapter, Medical Library Association (HPCMLA). The symposium planning committee was chaired by Lisa Marks, Library Services Supervisor, Providence St. Joseph Medical Center, Burbank. Roughly sixty enthusiastic attendees came to hear featured speaker Connie Schardt’s presentation highlighting the key types of clinical study designs, along with their strengths and weaknesses. She also thoroughly explained the terminology used to describe the results of clinical trials, as well as the criteria for judging the validity of therapy studies and systematic reviews. Ms. Schardt, who holds the position of Associate Director for Public Services at the Medical Center Library at Duke University, is a nationally recognized expert in the field. Other invited speakers included Cheryl Bartel, former UCLA librarian and current nurse for the Lake Elsinore School District, and Robert Johnson, clinical services librarian at the USC Norris Medical Library. Read more »

by Yamila El-Khayat, MALS
Outreach Services Librarian, Arizona Health Sciences Library
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ

Love of Reading Week, occurring February 13-17, 2012, was a national celebration promoting an appreciation of literature among students and adults through author readings, special presentations, and other literary activities. During this time, students had the opportunity to interact with different professionals in various fields, to hear about the importance of reading in career development, and to share reading a book that will leave a lasting memory. This has truly become a wonderful experience for grade school children in helping to explore new career fields and inspiring them to continue their education. Read more »

Continuing education in a Disaster Information Specialization program is available from the Medical Library Association (MLA), through a project funded by the Disaster Information Management Research Center at the National Library of Medicine. An overview of the program is available at http://www.mlanet.org/education/dis. The curriculum outlines five required courses (15 continuing education contact hours total) at the Basic level and an additional 12 hours for Advanced. Read more »

by Stephen Kiyoi, Second Year NLM Associate Fellow
NN/LM Pacific Southwest Region
UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library

On February 3, 2012, the UCLA Library proudly hosted the inaugural event introducing the much anticipated ARL Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries. This code, created by the academic library community and reviewed by an outside panel of distinguished copyright experts, provides a guide to academic librarians as they manage risks and make important decisions for their institutions. The UCLA event featured Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law, at American University’s Center for Social Media, and Brandon Butler, Director of Public Policy Initiatives, at the Association of Research Libraries. Following is a summary of the main points of copyright, fair use, and the code. The complete code document is availalbe on the ARL web site. Read more »

We hope that all network members who responded to the membership renewal project have received their certificates in the mail.  Last December, we published a Latitudes article announcing several membership changes.  We’ve added a few more changes to that list. Read more »

Data collection for reportable diseases and epidemics has always been a focus for local, state, and federal health agencies in the US, and of great interest to health science librarians. In recent years, a key government initiative has been to “put public health data to work” and make it as transparently available as possible to any interested entity or individual, with the larger goal of free and easy access to the vast reservoir of data, in order to improve the nation’s health. Following this trend, on February 9, 2012, the Public Health Practice Committee of the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) hosted the webinar Public Health Surveillance in the Internet Cloud: The BioSense 2.0 Experience, featuring two key presenters. The inital segment of the webinar, with speaker Jeff Barr from Amazon, introduced basic principles of cloud computing and related security issues. The second speaker, Mike Alletto, a member of the BioSense 2.0 Redesign Team, provided a schematic of the BioSense 2.0 environment, including details regarding data storage and transmission. The presentation, including the electronic slides, was recorded and archived for viewing. Read more »

by Stephen Kiyoi, Second Year NLM Associate Fellow
NN/LM Pacific Southwest Region
UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library

On January 18, 2012, the UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library hosted Carly Strasser, Ph.D., for an enlightening talk on data management in scientific research. Carly’s work at DataONE and the California Digital Library (CDL), as well as her doctoral education in Biological Oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, give her a unique perspective on challenges of scientific data management. In addition to explaining her own work, Carly gave an excellent background on the cultural and technical issues in data archiving, sharing, and publication. The following is a detailed summary of Carly’s talk. Her presentation is also accessible on SlideShare. Read more »

E-Science Day, a day-long program organized by the University of California, Davis, and funded by the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Pacific Southwest Region, was held on Tuesday, December 6, 2011, at the Medical Education Building of the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, California. The event was conducted in a blended format—available both in-person and via web conference, featuring a keynote address and panel presentation; lightning rounds, and afternoon break-out sessions. The aim of the event planners was to educate regional librarians in the subject of e-science, why librarians should care about it, and how they can begin supporting it at their own libraries and institutions. Over 100 attendees participated in the event either virtually or in-person. Read more »

On December 16, 2011, in celebration of the end of NLM’s 175th anniversary, Clifford Lynch, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, gave the presentation Biomedical Libraries in the Next Decades: Open, Diffuse, and Very Personal, at the National Library of Medicine. Overriding themes of his presentation included the implications surrounding the convergence of the increasingly data intensive nature of the biological sciences with traditional journal publications, and the possibilities for large scale computational scholarship. Another key topic was how developments in the broader economic, social, and regulatory climate will affect the evolution of medical knowledgebases. He emphasized the importance to the life sciences community of having an institution such as NLM, as a focal point for aggregating the staggering amount of information and data generated in the life sciences. There’s nothing analogous to NLM in other areas of scholarship. Read more »