Fall is often a busy time for orienting new staff, house staff or incoming students. We have several things on our website’s Training and Educational Opportunities page to help you train others and keep up-to-date yourself.

Handouts & trifolds

We have a number of trifolds and handouts on MedlinePlus and PubMed that you can reproduce at http://nnlm.gov/psr/training/handouts.html Many of the Word versions of the trifolds are available so you can edit them in order to add your own information, too.

Training videos and distance learning

NLM has created short training videos called Search Clinics on topics such as Chemicals & Drugs in PubMed® and the PubMed® Update on Automatic Term Mapping, Citation Sensor, and Advanced Search. The links are available on our distance learning web site: http://nnlm.gov/psr/training/distance_learning/index.html.

There are also short one-to-four minute programs on using PubMed features, such MeSH and My NCBI available on NLM’s Distance Education Program Resources web site at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/dist_edu.html. These are great for you to update or review your knowledge or to refer patrons for more information or to reinforce what you have covered in your workshops.

PSR Distance Learning

Many of the online sessions that Sharon Dennis, our Technology Coordinator, has done and recorded are also available through our web site, http://nnlm.gov/psr/training/distance_learning/index.html. Here’s a sample:

• “RSS Feeds: The “New” Current Awareness Service” (1 hour session)
• Personalized Google (iGoogle) (1 hour session)
• “Microblogging” Using Twitter and FriendFeed (1 hour session)

The Distance Learning web site also links to consumer health topics from the Health e-Shows Series Kelli Ham has been doing in partnership with Infopeople, http://infopeople.org/. Here’s a list of topics:

• Webcast - A Younger Generation of Older Adults: Health Information for Boomers (October 22, 2007)
• Webcast - Communicating about Health: Empowering Patrons to Communicate with Their Health Care Providers (December 3, 2007)
• Webinar - An In-depth Look at MedlinePlus (March 4, 2008)
• Webinar - Beyond MedlinePlus: Resources That Answer Those Other Tough Health Reference Questions (May 14, 2008)
• Webinar - I Don’t Give Medical Advice; I Dispense Quality Health Information (June 19, 2008)
• Webinar - Understanding Health Literacy: Why It Is So Important and What Librarians Can Do to Help (August 14, 2008)
• Webinar - Health Information for Kids and Teens and Seniors, Oh My (October 28, 2008)
• Webinar - Finding Easy-to-Read and Multilingual Health Information for Your Patrons (December 1, 2008)

Available Classes

We have recently rearranged the web page that shows the Available Classes that we teach. The URL is http://nnlm.gov/psr/training/classes.html. Now classes are listed by subjects such as Consumer Health, Technology, or PubMed. You can make use of the materials used in the classes for your own instruction. Our staff also teaches classes and workshops highlighting NLM and NN/LM databases and services. If you would like to make arrangements or if you have any questions about our classes, please contact us at psr-nnlm@library.ucla.edu.

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! (more…)

The Medical Library Association’s educational webcast, “Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices: Discovering the Participatory Web,” was a great success! (more…)

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The Medical Library Association’s educational webcast, “Scholarly Publishing & Open Access: Straight Talk,” was a success! (more…)

In June 2007, Kay Deeney and Kelli Ham went off to the wilds of Tucson, Arizona, to teach a course in the School of Information Resources & Library Science (SIRLS) at the University of Arizona called, Consumer Health in Diverse Cultures & Communities. (more…)

PubMed is designed so that the novice user can simply type search terms in a box with automatic mapping to MeSH terms. Therefore, some ask: “Do I really need to know how articles are indexed?”

“Yes, you do!” experienced searchers generally agree. They know how often they are challenged to find the five most useful references from a database of over 17 million citations. They also intuitively recognize that a feature such as PubMed’s Related Articles is shaped not only by the occurrence of words in article titles and abstracts but by the use of MeSH headings and subheadings. (more…)

The Medical Library Association’s educational webcast, “Survival of the Fittest: Strategies to Prove Your Library’s Value,” was a success! (more…)

The PSR staff has provided a number of training sessions in Arizona and California in January and February. (more…)

The Making PubMed Work for You workshop was held on October 31st, Halloween, at the King/Drew Health Sciences Library in Los Angeles. (more…)