OHSU Library What’s New

PORTLAND, Ore. – Oregon College of Oriental Medicine (OCOM) was recently awarded a $58,362 Library Services & Technology Act (LSTA) grant to enhance the OCOM Library. OCOM’s College Librarian, Lana Thelen, MSLIS, wrote and submitted a preliminary grant proposal in April and a full grant proposal in August in order to be considered.

The OCOM Library will be using the funds to migrate their current stand-alone bibliographic catalog to the shared Portland Health Libraries Consortium Catalog. This catalog currently consists of holdings from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), National College of Natural Medicine (NCNM) and Western States Chiropractic College (WSCC).

This project will allow seamless access for all borrowers in the system to materials housed at the four participating institutions. This increased access to consortium holdings will further encourage interactive, cross-disciplinary scholarship. The grant includes funds for a .5 FTE Systems Librarian for the grant’s one-year duration and funds for all the contractual purchases and data conversion and transfer.

“Lana’s efforts in developing a really compelling grant application have borne fruit,” says OCOM’s Vice President for Academic Affairs, Tim Chapman, PhD. “The result will be a major improvement in the services and systems offered by the OCOM Library.”

Each year, the Oregon State Library makes approximately $800,000 in competitive grants in the state to legally established libraries, or nonprofit entities serving libraries. Public, academic and special libraries are eligible. Projects may be funded for up to three years by a series of competitive one-year grants.

For more information, visit the LSTA Competitive Grants Web site.

About Oregon College Oriental Medicine (OCOM)
OCOM trains master’s and doctoral students, conducts research, and treats patients at clinics on campus and in the community. OCOM’s academic programs are among the most comprehensive in the country, providing students with a solid foundation in acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, therapeutic massage, and qi cultivation, as well as a focus on collaboration between Chinese medicine and Western biomedicine. Founded in Portland, Oregon in 1983, OCOM is one of the oldest Chinese medicine colleges in the United States. For more information about Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, visit www.ocom.edu.

Check out the latest Oregon Health Go Local E-Newsletter, which features information about MedlinePlus speech enhancement and H1N1 video, new community health education center at Salem Hospital, and a tribute to Go Local production assistant Anne Hepburn, who has recently left to become a librarian at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

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.

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/

As you may be aware, the OHSU Library shares a catalog with the Western States Chiropractic College (WSCC) and the National College of Natural Medicine (NCNM). The Oregon College of Oriental Medicine (OCOM) plans to join soon. Why is this a good thing?

Use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is on the rise. According to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, about 38 percent of adult Americans and about 12 percent of American children aged 17 and under are using CAM. Many OHSU researchers are studying CAM topics and OHSU clinicians are integrating CAM into their practice. Including the collections of Portland area health sciences libraries in our catalog increases access to a wide variety of CAM books, journals and audiovisuals.

The four libraries have a cooperative agreement allowing faculty, staff and students to check out materials. When you find a book in the OHSU Library catalog, if it belongs to WSCC or NCNM, you can request it online using the handy Request button at the top of the screen. You may also visit the WSCC, NCNM and OCOM libraries to use and check out materials.

Licensed electronic resources are the flies in the ointment. When one of the libraries buys an electronic journal, e-book or database, it is not automatically available to faculty, staff and students at the other institutions. This can cause confusion when you find the perfect journal article online, only to realize that the journal publisher’s license restricts access to a single library. In this case, you can order the item through our Interlibrary Loan and Photocopy Service for a small fee. We are working to find ways to reduce confusion regarding this issue.

Please let us know if you need any assistance accessing materials you find in the catalog. We will do our best to help you figure out the best way to get the literature you need.

Donald A. B. Lindberg, M.D., Director of the National Library of Medicine, spoke on May 12, 2009 on ”Some Ideas About the Electronic Health Record”. Dr. Lindberg was visiting OHSU to help celebrate the launch of Oregon Health Go Local.

Streaming video of Dr. Lindberg’s talk is now available at: http://media.ohsu.edu/ramgen/sch/histmed/hom051209.rm .

The library’s older collections are located at an off-site storage facility. The collections include books published between 1901 and 1984 and journals published before 1954. Starting Monday, June 15, all items will be moved to a new storage site on West Campus in the Wilson Clark Center. This move will provide faster turnaround for our users, and better environmental control for our older materials. 

We regret that during the move, we will be unable to retrieve requested items, except in the case of clinical emergencies.

We urge users to request older materials before June 5.  We will waive any overdue fines for storage items through June 30.

We apologize for any inconvenience the move may cause.  Please feel free to contact Judith Norton, norton@ohsu.edu, with any questions or concerns.