President's Page
Welcome to the New Year! We waved good-bye to 2008 and look forward to good things happening in 2009.
The Holiday Party was both familiar and unique. The Lindner Park/McCullough Estate was familiar as a location we had used in the past and yet the microwave worked nicely along with the antique cast iron stove. The food contributed by members was exceptional and plentiful (even if there were no forks) and the wine flowed as freely as the laughter. We played games and sang carols. As a special treat we were delighted by the piano accompaniment of OVID rep, Chris Meidell with Nonnie Klein on the bells. She played her earrings!
In a few days we will have an opportunity to improve our lit searching skills on the Ebsco CINAHL database. Hosted by Regina Hartman at
As evidenced by both the holiday party and the Ebsco training, you can see that these are meetings you won’t want to miss. So, keep your calendar clear and join us in 2009!
CAHSLA Holiday Party
A very merry time was had by all who attended the annual holiday party at the McCormick House in Norwood. We entertained ourselves with food, conversation, music and games. We can't duplicate the food, conversation or music for those who weren't in attendance, but here are some great word games brought to us by Emily Kean. We've given you the first one to help you get the idea and there are also links to all the answers, but don't give up too easily!
Christmas Song Word Teasers
Answer to #1: Nutcracker Suite All the answers
Christmas Song Picture Game
Answer to #1: Jingle Bells All the answers
EBSCO Training Rescheduled
The hands-on training scheduled for January 27 has been rescheduled for March 6, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m. at The Christ Hospital. Please RSVP to Regina Hartman (regina.hartman@thechristhospital.com) by March 4.
For those who need more immediate instruction, a shorter online training session has been arranged for February 5, 1:00 - 2:00 p.m. Here are your instructions for joining the meeting (0 to 10 minutes prior to the scheduled start time). AT&T Connect will not allow you to join any earlier:
1. Enter the following URL in your browser address bar: http://ebsco.interwise.com/ebsco/meet
2. When prompted, enter your First Name, Last Name, and Email Address. This is for identification purposes only during the training session.
3. Enter the following Event ID#: 761518
4. Select the button, Join Now.
5. Next, decide whether you'd like to participate as a "Participant" or a "Web Participant":
Participant Application (Recommended) - must download software. You can use either your computer/microphone or a telephone for the program's audio. As mentioned above, to download the necessary software in advance, please use this link http://www.interwise.com/support/downloadsoftware.html
Web Participant (Frequently experiences page loading delays) - do not have to download software, but must use a telephone to hear the audio portion of the program. For North America and parts of Europe, a toll free number is provided.
In either case, if you are using your telephone for audio, we ask that you please use your Mute button in consideration of other participants.
6. A 'Dial-In Instructions' Box will appear. Select your audio choice and follow the prompts.
7. You will now be logged into the event.
For a full list of Frequently Asked Questions about EBSCO's online training, click here: http://support.ebsco.com/knowledge_base/search.php?page_function=search&topic=971
CAHSLA
Financial Report Year-To-Date
Checking
Balance as of 6/20/2008 $ 704.03
Deposits
Membership dues (27) $405.00
Withdrawals
Sep meeting – food & supplies $162.65
Donation to the LAM Foundation $ 75.00
Donation to
Balance as of 1/14/2009 $ 738.64
Saving
Balance as of 6/20/2008 $2850.71
Deposits
Interest (7 months) $ 12.58
Balance as of 1/14/2009 $2863.29
Cash on hand
Balance as of 6/20/2008 $ 46.26
Stamps, postage $10.74
Balance as of 1/14/2009 $ 35.52
Total Assets $3637.45
Membership
Full 27
Life 8
Total 35
Submitted by: Cathy Constance, Treasurer 1/14/2009
FREE National Library of Medicine Database Training in Columbus, Ohio
NLM Gateway/ClinicalTrials.gov, PubMed®, and TOXNET®
State Library of Ohio Training Room April 27-29, 2009
Please distribute this notice to all interested parties. A download flyer for posting can be found at: http://www.library.ohio.gov/infoflyers.html
The NLM Gateway and ClinicalTrials.gov (3.5 MLA CE Hours)
Monday, April 27, 2009
1:00pm to 4:30pm
The NLM Gateway allows users of NLM services to initiate searches from one Web interface, providing "one-stop searching" for many of NLM's information resources or databases, including: PubMed®, MedlinePLUS, TOXNET®, Meeting Abstracts, and many more. It will be of particular interest to public and consumer health medical librarians, as well as consumers.
PubMed® (7.5 MLA CE Hours)
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
8:30am to 5:00pm
This full-day class is designed to teach students how to use PubMed® which includes MEDLINE citations. The class also includes an overview of the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) and its importance as a tool to both searchers and indexers.
TOXNET® and Beyond (6 MLA CE Hours)
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
9:00am to 4:00pm
This full-day class is designed to convey the basics of searching NLM's TOXNET®, a Web-based system of databases in the areas of toxicology, environmental health, and related subjects. Students learn the content and structure of files covering toxicology data, toxicology literature, toxic releases, and chemical searching and nomenclature. Among the databases highlighted will be TOXLINE®, the Hazardous Substances Data Bank, the Integrated Risk Information System, the Toxic Release Inventory, and ChemIDplus.
All classes will be HANDS ON and will be taught by the National Training Center and Clearinghouse (NTCC) in conjunction with the National Network of Libraries of Medicine Greater Midwest Region (NN/LM GMR) and the State Library of Ohio.
Health sciences library staff, public librarians, health professionals, and anyone interested in using these free National Library of Medicine (NLM) databases may attend.
To REGISTER for any or all of these classes, or to look for other class locations, simply click on this registration form link (http://nnlm.gov/ntcc/classes/register.html).
For further information about the site location, please contact:
Missy Lodge
MLODGE@sloma.state.oh.us
(614) 644-6914
Missy Lodge
Head, Library Programs and Development
614.644.6914
800.686.1532 (Ohio only)
614.466.3584 (fax)
We invite you to Seek, Explore, Discover at the Midwest Chapter’s annual meeting in Columbus, OH, October 3-6, 2009 at the Hyatt on Capitol Square. Plans are well underway to provide you with a memorable event including enlightening CE classes, thought-provoking speakers, and lots of social time to network and meet new colleagues. The conference web site at http://midwestmla.org/conference2009/ has details and will be updated as plans are finalized.
Some early program details include the following:
- Featured speaker Clifford Stoll, astronomer, computer expert, and author of Silicon Snake Oil, High Tech Heretic, and The Cuckoo’s Egg – check out a video on YouTube, 18 Minutes with an Agile Mind
- Featured speaker Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC Vice President and Chief Strategist -- a librarian who has worked for library and educational organizations in Ireland, England and the US and has consulted for the EU and national policy and service organizations in several countries
- Panel discussion, What Administrators Want
- Potential CE class topics:
- Can You Hear Me Now?: How to Make a Podcast
- Super Searcher
- Measuring Your Impact: Using Evaluation for Library Advocacy
- Communicating with Physicians: For Librarians
- Distance Education: Supporting Anywhere Anytime Learning
- Understanding Health Care Literature: A Primer for Working with Evidence-based Health Care Principles
- Understanding Health Care Literature: Advanced Critical Appraisal
- Cheap, Fast and Decent Strategic Planning for Medical Libraries
- Emerging Technologies for Librarians
- Can You Hear Me Now?: How to Make a Podcast
As always, the regional meeting is a real bargain, too. You’ll get nationally-known speakers and CE instructors at reasonable prices. Travel costs, too, are usually lower. So start now to lobby your administrator if that’s what you need to do; consider submitting an abstract for a paper or a poster session; or plan to attend just to soak up new ideas and foster professional relationships.
Medical Opinion on the Financial Bail Out Package
The Allergists voted to scratch it, and the Dermatologists advised not to make any rash moves.
The Gastroenterologists had sort of a gut feeling about it, but the Neurologists thought the Administration had a lot of nerve, and the Obstetricians felt they were all laboring under a misconception.
The Ophthalmologists considered the idea shortsighted; the Pathologists yelled, 'Over my dead body!' while the Pediatricians said, 'Oh, Grow up!'
The Psychiatrists thought the whole idea was madness, the Radiologists could see right through it, and the Surgeons decided to wash their hands of the whole thing.
The Internists thought it was a bitter pill to swallow, and the Plastic Surgeons said, 'This puts a whole new face
on the matter.'
The Podiatrists thought it was a step forward, but the Urologists felt the scheme wouldn't hold water.
The Anesthesiologists thought the whole idea was a gas, and the Cardiologists didn't have the heart to say no.
At the end, the Proctologists recommended that the the decision be left up to the a--holes in Washington.
Angela Myatt (UC-HSL) left UC with her husband to move to San Antonio where they will both be working at the University of Texas-San Antonio.
Miscellaneous
Some of you "old-timers" may remember Bob Mohrman who worked at the VA library with Judy Alfred. The Nov-Dec issue of MLA News included the following personal:
- Robert Mohrman retired on October 31, 2008, as chief librarian, Medical Library, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, DC. After completing a traineeship at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and spending a year as a circuit librarian at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, Mohrman returned to the VA as a patient and medical librarian at four hospitals in New York, Ohio, and Washington, DC. He transferred to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 1997, assuming a reference librarian position; he was promoted to chief librarian in 2001. Mohrman is a longtime member of the Federal Libraries Section of MLA and has served in various capacities for the section. He was MLA’s liaison to the Federal Library and Information Center Committee from 2003 to 2006. In addition, Mohrman was elected to the FEDLINK Advisory Council for a three-year term and was secretary of the District of Columbia Area Health Sciences Libraries group for three years. In retirement, he is moving west to Portland, OR, to enjoy the craft beers and outdoor recreational opportunities on the “left” coast.
"Thanks so much for the flowers my CAHSLA colleagues sent after the death of my mother. Mom was 97 when she died and lived a "small" life in terms of fame and fortune, but she influenced an incredible number of people and was an inspiration to me. I'll miss her."
Barbarie
Surgeon carries out amputation by text
By Sam Jones, The Guardian, December 3, 2008
A British surgeon volunteering in the Democratic Republic of Congo saved the life of a teenage boy by amputating his shoulder using instructions texted by a colleague in London.
David Nott, 52, a general and vascular surgeon at Chelsea and Westminster hospital, was working with the charity Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) in the town of Rutshuru when he came across the badly injured 16-year-old in October.
The teenager's left arm had been so badly damaged - either in an accident or as a result of the fighting between Congolese and rebel troops - that it had already had to be amputated. But the flesh and bone that remained had become badly infected and gangrenous.
"He was dying" said Nott. "He had about two or three days to live."
The doctor realised the boy's best chance of survival was a forequarter amputation which requires the surgeon to remove the collar bone and shoulder blade. The only problem was that it was an operation Nott had never performed. But he remembered that one of his colleagues at home had carried out the procedure.
Such an operation, if performed in the UK, would require careful planning with every sort of modern medical product on hand if things went wrong. But in Congo Nott had just one pint of blood and an elementary operating theatre.
By Todd Neale, Staff Writer, MedPage Today
ROCKVILLE, Md., Dec. 11 -- Faster than a speeding bullet, the FDA disapproved a tentative registration of a handgun as a medical device. An embarrassed FDA conceded the handgun was given an automatic temporary designation as a medical device via an Internet registration. But the label was immediately revoked after a review. FDA marketing approval was never issued ... According to the Palm Pistol Web site, the gun is "ideal for seniors, disabled, or others who may have dexterity limitations or difficulty sighting and controlling a traditional revolver or semi-automatic pistol." ... Additional medical indications included on the Palm Pistol Web site are "arthritis; peripheral neuropathy caused by chemotherapy, infection, traumatic injury or diabetes; phalangeal amputations-fusions-fractures; distal muscular dystrophy; multiple sclerosis, carpal tunnel syndrome, Raynaud's syndrome; ganglion cysts; side effects of certain medications; and inclusion body myositis." ... Palm Pistol said it is exploring an appeal of the FDA's decision.
****
Yearning After BooksChronicle of Higher Education, October 10, 2008
... many artists and writers remain preoccupied with the end of the bookish culture that has nurtured so many of us in academe. Everything feels almost normal; we can still find books everywhere (we never have enough shelf space). But we still have a sense of impending doom; for some, that expectation seems to culminate in an apocalyptic vision straight out of Schindler's List: An endless chain of unmarked trucks, crammed with books, wend their way beyond the uncomprehending suburbs to massive incinerators whose smokestacks belch the ashen remains of libraries — a holocaust for books: a bibliocaust. It's a term that made its last appearance in 1933, when torchlight processions carried thousands of books to bonfires in Berlin ...
Lucien X. Polastron's Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries Throughout History (2007) catalogs more than 100 documented bibliocausts ... but Polastron also calls attention to the "great extermination of libraries" in our own time by the people charged with their protection, who are, apparently, disposing of books by the ton to make way for supposedly more-economical new media ...
It seems a remarkable coincidence that A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq (2008) by Fernando Baez, director of Venezuela's National Library, has been published within a year of Books on Fire. Baez's thesis — the annihilation of memory as an essential part of the working of power — affirms and complicates Polastron's reflections.
Baez's most-provocative observation is that the destroyers of books tend to be "well-educated people, cultured, sensitive, perfectionists, painstaking, with unusual intellectual gifts, depressive tendencies, incapable of tolerating criticism, egoists, mythomaniacs, members of the middle or upper classes, with minor traumas in their childhood or youth, with a tendency to belong to institutions that represent constituted power, charismatic, with religious and social hypersensitivity."
Libraries are not stormed like the Bastille; they are stripped of their holdings by Robespierres, bureaucrats convinced of their dedication to the common good ... A bibliocaust need not be so dramatic as the causal sacking in 2003 of the Iraqi National Museum and archive described in detail by Baez; all that is required is the gradual reallocation of budgets.
****
By Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus Newsletter
The latest edition of Tech Therapy covers the differences and similarities between library and IT staff, and discusses why these two groups can't get along. The differences? Start with gender: Librarians are stereotypically female, and IT staff members are stereotypically male. Libraries have a long tradition, while IT departments are relatively new. Libraries are very mission-driven, IT departments less so. But the similarities are striking. "There are three major industries that refer to their customers as 'users': IT, libraries, and illicit drugs," says Tech Therapy's co-host, Warren Arbogast. Going deeper, both IT staff members and librarians often feel like second-class citizens on campuses. Both groups inhabit a rapidly-changing work environment. Both have insecurities about the future of their professions ...
****
From MEDLIB-L, Dec. 3, 2008:
Greetings all,
In my 30+ years of librarianship, I thought I had seen it all. Today, a third-year Internal Medicine resident sets up an Osteopathic treatment table (it looks like a padded massage table), lays down on it and begins reading the latest issue of NEJM after taking six months of American Journal of Nursing to use as a pillow!
I was not amused. At least the DME made him clean the hair goo from the June issue!
Thanks for letting me vent.
Tomorrow will be a better day.
Regards,
Diana Balint
Oakwood Southshore Medical Library
5450 Fort Street
Trenton, MI 48183
Guide Tries to Help Students Decide What to Cite
By Sara Lipke, Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus Newsletter, January 13, 2009
Students don’t research like they used to. And they have a hard time evaluating the credibility of information they find, both in print and online. At least that’s what two instructors at Mesa Community College saw in their courses. So the instructors, Rochelle L. Rodrigo and Susan K. Miller-Cochran, who is now an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University, wrote The Wadsworth Guide to Research, published this year by Cengage Learning. In November they presented some of their teaching strategies at the New Media Consortium’s Rock the Academy symposium, in Second Life ...We ask students to think about the publication process for something. Was it edited prior to publication, was it peer-reviewed, or was it self-published? Then we also ask them to think about how the source might change over time based on the way that it was published. Is it a static source that is just published once and then doesn’t change at all? Is it a syndicated source, something like a magazine or a journal? Or is it a dynamic source, something that could be changing constantly over time? ...
Q. How have you seen students’ habits change when they consider those questions?
A. The most immediate difference is that my students don’t go to Wikipedia or Google first. When they come into class, that is usually their MO. Now they’re much more likely to go to a library database, for example ...
A. I realized through that discussion that if more teachers, specifically English teachers, could partner with libraries in teaching research, we’d be better off. We don’t always work with the people that are at our own institutions who would really help us to have a richer understanding of the information and resources that students are finding.
CAHSLA Calendar
Feb 5 Ebsco online training, 1:00 - 2:00 p.m.
Mar 6 Ebsco search training, The Christ Hospital, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Mar/Apr ? OHSLA spring meeting
Mar/Apr ? CAHSLA spring meeting
May 15-20 MLA annual meeting, iFusions, Honolulu, Hawaii
April 27-29 NLM database training, Columbus, OH. See full announcement above.
June ? CAHSLA picnic
