Older Adults and Health Information

Do you provide consumer health services and resources in your library? Specifically, are you providing health information to seniors? Many older adults are interested in finding health information on their own, but they may lack the necessary computer or Internet searching skills. If you have ever wanted to provide training to this user group, read on for some exciting news! Read more »

An emergency can be as wide-scale as an earthquake or flash flood or as local as a burst pipe in the book stacks. Do you know how to ensure the continuation of your primary services and access to your primary resources in the event of an emergency at your library? Read more »

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Welcome to our new EFTS members! There are now 195 EFTS members in the Pacific Southwest, representing 48.4% of our DOCLINE libraries! In addition, our region now has the second largest number of EFTS libraries; only the Middle Atlantic Region has more. Read more »

Now that so many libraries are joining EFTS, it’s time to rethink your routing table! Here’s how you can add EFTS libraries to it. Read more »

In addition to its work on emergency preparedness and response with the NN/LM program, the National Library of Medicine has embarked on the following initiatives: Read more »

Submitted by Alice E. Hadley, Librarian
U.S. Naval Hospital, Guam
Condensed and edited for publication in Latitudes

On the tiny island of Yap in the far western Pacific, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, working together with Guam’s Ayuda Foundation, funded a project to establish the new Yap State Hospital Medical Library to replace the one destroyed in Typhoon Sudal in 2004. Read more »

The purpose of the NN/LM Emergency Preparedness and Response Plan is to help mitigate the impact of disasters on healthcare providers and their patients by helping Network member libraries maintain their information services in the event of a disaster. We can only know to what degree the Plan will have been successfully implemented in the Network by assessing the current level of and barriers to preparedness. Also, by identifying what kind of NN/LM support might be helpful, we can then provide that support to increase a library’s preparedness and ability to respond to emergencies. Read more »

It will be two years next month that Arizona was struck by storms and flooding severe enough for the President to declare a major disaster. As June comes to a close, firefighters continue to battle hundreds of wildfires throughout California, the result of lightning storms and dry conditions throughout the state. A little over a year ago, Hawaii experience severe storms, high surf, flooding, and mudslides in Hawaii, Kauai, and Maui counties. This past February, northeastern Nevada experienced a magnitude 6.0 earthquake that was felt across much of the West, from northern Idaho and Utah to Southern California. And the Pacific Basin is regularly affected by almost every hazard you can imagine!

So what can WE do?

On June 20, 2008, regional Network office staff and Medical Library Association chapter representatives Irene Lovas and Peggy Tahir met with Dan Wilson and Susan Yowell to facilitate the regional adoption of the National Emergency Preparedness and Response Plan, an important step in helping libraries respond to emergency situations like those described above. Read more »

Recently, PubMed has undergone a flurry of enhancements and modifications. And that trend is very likely to continue! The latest changes include the way that Automatic Term Mapping (ATM) works and the introduction of a new Citation Sensor feature. These changes, along with the beta version of an advanced search mode for PubMed, were the highlights of a “PubMed Review” theater presentation from the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association (MLA). A detailed description of the new features is included in Boost for PubMed Search Results: New ATM and Citation Sensor Introduced, published in the NLM Technical Bulletin. Read more »