In addition to the many librarians on the National Library of Medicine staff, NLM relies heavily on the work of medical librarians associated with the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, made up of more than 5,800 member organizations. In recognition of National Medical Librarians Month, October 2007, NLM’s Web site is currently featuring links to some great representative projects recently carried out by network members around the country. (more…)

Health Literacy Month, celebrated each October, is a time when health literacy advocates around the world promote the importance of understandable health information. Started by Helen Osborne in 1999, this month is a time for all health literacy advocates to let the world know why health literacy matters. There is no right or wrong way to participate. (more…)

Reprinted from “Government Health IT“
BY Ben Bain
Published on Aug. 10, 2007

A virtual world where millions of beautiful, eternally young people with designer bodies fly from island to island seems more like a setting for a beer commercial than a place where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would put its money.

But CDC’s decision to purchase its own island in the virtual world of Second Life makes real-world sense, said John Anderton, an associate director of communications science at CDC. His Second Life avatar, Hygeia Philo, is an attractive woman inspired by Hygeia, the ancient Greek goddess of health.

“Avatars have the good fortune of being sort of eternally youthful and healthy, but each of those avatars is connected to a person and those people do have real health needs,” he said. “It’s people’s health CDC is interested in, and people are using different tools to access [health] information.” (more…)

NLM has joined the Digital Library Federation http://diglib.org (DLF), as its thirty-sixth Strategic Member. DLF members include the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the British Library, Oxford University, and major U. S. research libraries.

The membership is engaged in collaborative initiatives to identify strategies for building sustainable digital collections and services for cultural, scholarly and educational resources through work on policies, standards, best practices, prototypes and technology. NLM’s membership in the DLF complements and supports the Library’s digital collection and preservation efforts in its ongoing mission to collect, preserve and make accessible the biomedical information.

From 5/11/07 Library Journal Academic Newswire:

A coalition of scholarly publishing groups this week released a “position paper” on balancing author and publisher rights in scholarly journals. The paper Author and Publisher Rights for Academic Use: An Appropriate Balance, was assembled by the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM), along with the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing division (AAP PSP), and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). The paper suggests that the needs of scholarly authors and the need for publishers to obtain copyright transfers or exclusive licenses can be balanced, and need not conflict. (more…)

The release of DOCLINE 3.1 on April 26 brings a change to Delivery Methods: “Mail” will no longer be a default. This means that libraries can now indicate that they will not provide or accept delivery by mail. See the images below for the “before” and “after” views of DOCLINE Delivery Methods and instructions on how to check the Delivery Methods in your DOCLINE account. (more…)