OHSU Library What’s New

The National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) today announced that the OHSU Library will join Harvard University on the eagle-i project. Together with nine partner institutions, the OHSU Library will build a web site to help researchers find the tools and materials they need to accelerate biomedical research and enhance interdisciplinary collaborations. The $15 million two-year project was awarded as part of the NIH Recovery Act (ARRA) with $1.79 million designated for OHSU Library participation.

“This award will fund eight new researchers working in Oregon on the eagle-i project,” said Chris Shaffer, University Librarian. The OHSU Library will lead the Data Curation Team to build the ontologies and vocabularies used to describe research resources and make them easier to find. Resource Navigators and Data Entry Technologists will work with researchers to identify unique reagents, animal models, core facilities and other tools that can be shared across the OHSU campus and the country. “Libraries have a long history of organizing research information and publications. Through this project, we are extending library expertise into the research enterprise in new and exciting ways.”

To meet the new OHSU Library staff, please visit http://www.ohsu.edu/xd/education/library/about/departments/eagleistaffroster.cfm. The institutions in the eagle-i consortium are Dartmouth College, Harvard Medical School, Jackson State University, Morehouse School of Medicine, Montana State University, Oregon Health & Science University, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the University of Puerto Rico. More information about the award can be found at http://www.nih.gov/news/health/nov2009/ncrr-02.htm.

OHSU Historical Collections & Archives announces the opening of its latest exhibit, “Music of the Heart: Rhythms and Murmurs,” now on display in the main lobby of the OHSU Library.

Celebrating the important advances in cardiology made here at OHSU, this exhibit showcases artifacts, photographs, books, and manuscripts from the Medical Museum, Historical Image, and History of Medicine collections, as well as the papers of Howard J. Stroud and Melvin P. Judkins.

Focusing on the study and repair of the rhythm of the heart, the display features early works by R.T.H. Laennec and James Mackenzie, binaural and monaural stethoscopes, heart casts and models, artificial valves and pacemakers, and cardiology research conducted at OHSU in the 1950s and 1960s.

Materials will be on display through January 2010.  Questions about the exhibit or the collections can be addressed to Sara Piasecki, Head, (503-418-2287, piasecki@ohsu.edu) or Karen Peterson, Archivist (503-494-3239 or peterska@ohsu.edu).

Access Alert! Journals and ebooks through ScienceDirect will be unavailable from approximately 6:00 PM on Saturday, October 31st to 2:00 AM, Sunday, November 1st PST due to planned downtime for scheduled maintenance.

Alan Ruttenberg
The Neurocommons Project: Integrating Data to Support Translational Research on Neurologic Diseases
Wednesday, November 4th, BICC 124 3pm

Alan Ruttenberg, scientist at Science Commons, will be speaking on Wednesday, November 4 at 3 p.m. (BICC 124) on the Neurocommons project, from making multi-modal multi-scale neuroimaging data interoperable, to enhancing queries for candidate genes involved in Alzheimer’s disease.

At Science Commons, Mr. Ruttenberg works on structuring and using biological and clinical knowledge to answer questions and computationally interpret experimental data. Alan is currently involved in a number of open biomedical ontology efforts such as the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) and the Program on Ontologies of Neural Structures (PONS). He is also chair of the OWL Working Group specifying OWL 2, a coordinating editor of the Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry, and a contributor to W3C Semantic Web activities. His most recent project is the Neurocommons, which is a large scale Semantic Web knowledge base of biological information aimed at supporting the neurosciences.

More information about Alan and the Science Commons is available at: http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/ruttenberg.

The PubMed homepage has been streamlined, requiring less effort to find resources. The new homepage includes an NCBI Header, Search Bar, and Footer that are common to all PubMed pages.

The NCBI Header includes an NCBI Resources pull-down menu categorized by topic, a How To menu, and the Sign In for My NCBI.

The Search Bar retains the database selection menu, and includes a link to Advanced search and Help. Additional Search bar selections, RSS and Save search, display after running a PubMed search.  The Go button is now the Search button. Access to the popular tools and resources previously found on the PubMed homepage sidebar may be found under PubMed Tools (e.g., the Single Citation Matcher and Clinical Queries) and More Resources (e.g., New and Noteworthy and the PubMed Tutorials).

The Footer includes links to many NCBI resources.

The Limits, Preview/Index, History and Details tabs’ features have been consolidated in Advanced search.

For more information, go to http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so09/so09_pm_redesign.html & http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so09/so09_pm_now_redesign.html.

If you have any questions about using the new PubMed page, you can call 503-494-3462 or send an email to http://www.ohsu.edu/xd/education/library/research-assistance/ask-librarian.cfm to get assistance from a Reference Librarian.

October is National Medical Librarians Month. The Medical Library Association (MLA) instituted this month to bring attention to the professionals who are the experts on providing excellent health information.

Here at OHSU we have 15 medical librarians who work at collecting materials for the library, deciding which resources to purchase, and helping practitioners, faculty, students, staff, and the public find the best health information. The OHSU Library has a close connection with the National Library of Medicine as the Oregon resource library for the Regional Medical Library at the University of Washington. OHSU librarians also work cooperatively with the 21 hospital librarians in Oregon, and librarians at the other health sciences schools in Oregon.

A free, self-service color scanner is now available in the Main Library for OHSU faculty, students and staff.

The scanner is located on the 3rd floor in the copier area, and requires an OHSU network ID.

Scans can be saved to a USB flash drive, network drive or emailed.  Please feel free to call the Main Library’s Circulation Desk

at 503-494-3460 with any questions.

OHSU Historical Collections & Archives is pleased to announce that a first edition of Wolfgang von Kempelen’s monumental work on speech synthesis, Wolfgangs von Kempelen Mechanismus der menschlichen Sprache nebst Beschreibung seiner sprechenden Maschine (or, Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Mechanism of Human Speech with a Description of his Speaking Machine) is now available to researchers for consultation. This pioneering study of artificial speech and phonetics has been placed on long-term loan by Richard Sproat, PhD, computational linguist and professor at OHSU’s Center for Spoken Language Understanding.

The book includes detailed diagrams of the machine constructed by Kempelen and of the human vocal apparatus. A working copy of Kempelen’s voice synthesizer has been reproduced using the text, and is on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

The first edition of Kempelen’s work is extremely scarce, as are later reprints, and the text is not available digitally. Dr. Sproat and the OHSU Library will investigate the possibility of digitizing this item while it is on loan. Of note: This particular copy is from the collection of Andras Gedeon, author of Science and technology in medicine: an illustrated account based on ninety-nine landmark publications from five centuries (2006).

We extend our great thanks to Dr. Sproat for sharing his Kempelen with the OHSU community and researchers throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Check out the library’s new Handheld and PDA Resources web page.

From this page you can find resources that you can use on your iPhone, SmartPhone, BlackBerry, Palm and other devices. Listed resources include those to which the OHSU Library subscribes such as DynaMed, and AccessMedicine. Free resources and those that you can purchase individually are also listed. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to Ask a Librarian.

Image by William Hook:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/williamhook/2830319467/

In support of Open Access Week (October 19-23), the OHSU Library is offering a Brownbag session on Thursday, October 22nd. This session will focus on the responsibilities that the NIH Public Access Policy places on researchers who seek and receive funding through the NIH and how you can comply with the current NIH mandate to make your NIH funded research publically available via PubMed Central.

This session is scheduled to be held at 12:00-1:00pm in Room 429 of the BICC (enter the Main Library via the 3rd floor entrance).