Contents

• Library News
  
  • Grey Literature Report Wins Darling Award
  • Conference Attendance

• NETSL Spring Conference
• LACUNY Bibliographic Instruction Conference
• Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences (ALHHS) and the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM)

• Class Announcement
• New Books in the Library
• Database News: OvidSP
• Notes from Historical Collections

Library News

Darling Award

Some of you may know by now that the Medical Library Association has awarded the Library's Grey Literature Report the 2008 Louise Darling Medal for Distinguished Achievement in Collection Development in the Health Sciences. Lisa Genoese will attend the annual meeting in Chicago in May and accept this award on behalf of the Grey Literature Report team.
Pictured below are the Grey Literature Report team members, from left to right are Janie Kaplan, Israel Diaz, Lea Myohanen, Ying Jia, Lisa Genoese, Trina Keith and Elizabeth Taylor.

NETSL Spring Conference

On Friday, April 4 Ying Jia attended the 2008 New England Technical Services Librarians (NETSL) Spring Conference, Cohabiting and Colliding: Print and Electronic Resources. The theme of the conference dealt with the increasing presence of digital resources and new modes of access and how that is driving changes in technical services—specifically, changes in standards, in workflow, organizational structure, and staff allocation. Janet Swan Hill, Associate Director for Technical Services of the University of Colorado Libraries, was one of the keynote speakers. Her talk, entitled “Entering an Alternate Universe”, discussed five pervasive themes in the recommendations of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control and how these recommendations may call for cultural changes in librarianship.

Also of note was a session on integrating online and print recourses, which focused on Yale University’s Cushing/Whitney Medical Library as a case study.

On Friday March 21, Winifred King attended the Second Annual Library Association of the City of New York (LACUNY) Bibliographic Instruction Program. The theme of the conference was information literacy—more specifically, how to integrate information literacy into all education disciplines so it is not a stand alone class, but a part of any academic undertaking. The keynote speaker was Tom Eland, the Chair of Information Studies at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. Panel respondents were Deborah Richman, Vice President, Collarity; Ann Grafstein, Coordinator of Library Instruction, Hofstra University; and Juff Gutkin, Director of Academic Computing, Wagner College.

Eland’s talk, entitled “Rethinking Relevance - Technology and Pedagogical Points of View” was wide-ranging and had a few interesting points. One: “All sources of information must be critically evaluated. The lack of editorial oversight on the part of many web 2.0 technologies simply means that users must employ their critical evaluation skills even more.” Two: “Social search engines offer the hope of enhanced database usability and retrieval by learning from prior users’ searches, but this only works well if the prior users are knowledgeable searchers.” Three: “Students need information literacy skills to be successful citizens of a democracy; critical and informed economic actors; and thoughtful and responsible members of the global community and the natural environment.”

Patricia Gallagher, and Arlene Shaner attended the annual meetings of the ALHHS and the AAHM.

The annual meeting of Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences (ALHHS) held in conjunction with the meeting of the American Association of the History of Medicine (AAHM) was held in Rochester, NY this past week. The program for ALHHS, Blame It on the History Channel: Sharing Our Resources with Varied Audiences, featured presentations from 6 librarians and archivists on new outreach programs their historical collections have developed to acquaint scholars, employees, and visitors with the vast resources of their collections. The meeting was followed with a tour of the George Eastman House and Library. Eastman House, noted for its work in film preservation and its vast photographic collection, includes in its holdings a number of medically related photographs, and the librarians set up a display of important photographs held by the library.

The AAHM’s Garrison lecture continued this photographic theme, with John Harley Warner’s paper “The Aesthetic Grounding of Modern Medicine” which, among other things, examined the proliferation of autopsy room photographs, images which included medical students posing with their cadavers. Among the many papers presented at the meeting were two moderated by Dr. Christian Warren, which examined the work of two important health associations, the American Diabetes Associated and the American Cancer Society, and their efforts to promote disease prevention and disease awareness.

On May 7th the Library is offering its Health Research on the Internet class to NYAM staff and family members. The class will be taught in Spanish and will focus on Spanish language health resources. The purpose of the class is to learn how to find and evaluate medical information on the Internet. The class will be held in the Hartwell Room on the third floor on May 7 from 4-6 pm. All staff as well as their family members are welcome. Staff should email Winifred King if they or their family members plan on attending. Space is limited.

New Books in the Library

Please view new items added to the general collection of the library in the last 3 months. This does not include items in the reference section, journals or the grey literature. "General collection" includes items not included in the other categories so may include gifts that the library has received or older material that has just been added to the online catalog.

Contact your library liaison to borrow these materials or to suggest other items for purchase.

To view a listing of ALL of the materials in the Library collection, please search the library catalog.

Here are some books that have been recently catalogued.

Health care reform now! : a prescription for change
Publisher: San Francisco CA: Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint, C2007
WA 540 AA1 H118h 2007

This book is written by George C. Halvorson who since 2002 has been the chairman and chief executive officer of Kaiser HealthPlan, Inc. and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals.

Jossey-Bass describes this book as offering "a sensible approach to health care reform and universal coverage that can work for all stakeholders.
Step by step, George Halvorson outlines a game plan for a truly world-class health care system that will appeal to policy makers on both ends of the political spectrum and will deliver health care with improved quality, better access, provider accountability, performance transparency, consumer choice, and individual empowerment".

Eliminating healthcare disparities in America : beyond the IOM report
Publisher: Totowa, N.J.: Humana, C2007
WA 300 E426 2007

This book, written by Dr. Richard Allen Williams, brings together scholars on healthcare disparities to raise the public consciousness of this issue. Humana says "these experts provide the benefits of their experience and expertise as a resource for helping others to make judicious determinations about how to proceed in efforts to improve the disparities in American healthcare. Arranged into discrete categories, this volume contains comprehensive coverage, both historical and current, of the healthcare disparity crisis currently plaguing our country in hopes of leading us all to a brighter future. The volume includes chapters of examples that are currently working and concludes with recommendations on how to move forward."

Making Americans healthier : social and economic policy as health policy
Publisher: New York : Russell Sage Foundation, c2008.
WA 540 AA1 M2355 2008

This book, part of the National Poverty Center Series on Poverty and Public Policy, takes a multidisciplinary approach to show how social and economic policies seemingly unrelated to medical well-being have what the Russell Sage Foundation describes as "dramatic consequences for the health of the American people." The contributors examine six critical policy areas: civil rights, education, income support, employment, welfare, and neighborhood and housing.

Database News: OvidSP

Ovid, one of the Library's database providers, supplying us with Social Work Abstracts, Medline and EBM Reviews, has recently introduced a new search interface for its suite of databases.




This is the basic search interface and here are some tips for the best use of this interface that is designed to use natural language.
Note that this is a relevancy search designed to get you some quick and relevant results.

Search all your concepts together using concise terms.
Look at the search terms used and examine the search results.
Redo your search using other terms if necessary
You can select related terms to broaden your search
Do not use quotes to force phrase searching.

If you want to use the mapping feature for subject headings, do an author search or a non-relevancy keyword search use the advanced search interface.

You can get more information about OvidSP here or by contacting your library liaison.

Notes from Historical Collections

The early spring brought many groups of visitors to the Malloch Rare Book Room this year. Several groups of Junior Fellows spent time with the curatorial staff looking at high spots from our collection and talking about the history of medicine and about the history of books and printing. After their visits to the rare book room, the students traveled to the Conservation Laboratory to see firsthand the work that goes into caring for our early books so that they can continue to be available for scholars, students, and exhibition. It is a special pleasure to be able to work with the Junior Fellows, since most of the time that they spend at NYAM focuses on projects that make use of the current collections. The time that they spend in the rare book room offers a different perspective and gives them the chance to think about how the accumulated medical and scientific knowledge we take for granted in our own lives developed over the course of centuries. From Andreas Vesalius’s great anatomical atlas of 1543, De humani corporis fabrica (On the fabric of the human body) to Benjamin Franklin’s letter to his brother John from December 8, 1752, about the invention of a silver catheter for use in dealing with the complications of bladder stones, these materials help students see the direct connection between the questions asked by early investigators and the research they are learning to do now. We look forward to sharing our collections with more groups of Junior Fellows as the spring progresses.

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