WISER (Wireless Information System for Emergency Responders) version 4.0 is now available for download at http://wiser.nlm.nih.gov/choose_platform.html or via WebWISER.

New features in version 4.0 include:

• “Category A” biological agents radiation unit converter
• WMD Response Guidebook
• automatic update check capability
• a refresh/update of the data

For more information about WISER see: http://wiser.nlm.nih.gov/

Funding is available from the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation for community partners to build programs to help families and caregivers of older adults.

Most frail older adults are cared for by family, friends and other nonprofessionals. With this funding initiative, the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation will help community partnerships develop innovative ways to support these devoted caregivers.

AVAILABLE GRANTS

Up to $9 million over three years through the Family and Informal Caregiver Support Program will support from 12 to 20 community-based Projects with grants ranging from $100,000 to $300,000 per year (for a total of $300,000 to $900,000 for each grant recipient from March 2009 through February 2012).

ELIGIBLE APPLICANTS

The Foundation encourages non-profit 501(c)(3) organizations, including aging and human service agencies, faith-based and other community-based organizations, tribal organizations, and units of local government to participate.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION

http://www.hjweinbergfoundation.org/subPages/grantmaking/rfp.htm
CaregivingRFP@theweinbergfoundation.org

The course described below, originally announced on Blogadillo March 18, 2008, has been approved by the Medical Library Association for the Consumer Health Information Specialization (CHIS) program, Level II. For more information on the CHIS program, please go to http://mlanet.org/education/chc/

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The Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) free online course: “Unified Health Communication 101: Addressing Health Literacy, Cultural Competency, and Limited English Proficiency” has now been approved for 5 Medical Library Association (MLA) Continuing Education Contact Hours.

This free online course will help to improve your communication skills with patients and increase your awareness of health literacy and cultural compentency. Additional information about the course can be found at:

http://www.hrsa.gov/healthliteracy/training.htm

The Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF) recently announced that they are collaborating with the American Library Association (ALA) to provide libraries across the country with reference materials to better serve those seeking health-related information, specifically cancer. Recently, the LAF began shipping LIVESTRONG Survivorship Notebooks to more than 14,200 libraries across the United States.

The LAF created the LIVESTRONG Survivorship Notebook to give cancer information access to everyone, especially low-income or uninsured citizens who do not have access to a computer or are denied follow-up care after completing cancer treatment. (more…)

Tox Town: Nuevo recurso en español de la Biblioteca Nacional de Medicina

Tox Town is now available in both English, http://toxtown.nlm.nih.gov and en español, http://toxtown.nlm.nih.gov/espanol. Visitors can learn in English or in Spanish about environmental health concerns and over 30 toxic chemicals in these imaginary neighborhoods: a City, Farm, Town, US-Mexico Border, and Port.

In either language, Tox Town uses neighborhood scenes along with color, graphics, sounds, and animation to add interest to learning about connections between chemicals, the environment, and the public’s health. Tox Town’s target audience is high school, college and graduate students, educators, and the interested public.

Tox Town en español identifies Spanish-language information in a subject area – environmental health and toxicology – that currently has few Web resources. To supplement the limited Web resources in Spanish, nearly 100 pages of background information describing environmental health concerns were translated and reviewed by a team of bilingual health information specialists.

Tox Town is ideal for supplementing classes in environmental science, earth science, forensics, and health. Also, students learning to read either English or Spanish may use Tox Town to improve language skills as they toggle back and forth between the Spanish and English text.

Tox Town joins three other Spanish-language Web resources from the National Library of Medicine. ToxMystery, for grades 2–6, features a bilingual talking cat that teaches about possible chemical hazards around the home, http://toxmystery.nlm.nih.gov. MedlinePlus (en español at http://medlineplus.gov/spanish) directs users to hundreds of Spanish-language resources on health including drug information, news stories and interactive tutorials that read aloud in Spanish or in English. The AIDSinfo Web site, home for treatment guidelines, drug information and clinical trials related to HIV/AIDS, also has a Spanish version, infoSIDA, available at http://aidsinfo.nih.gov/infoSIDA.

Tox Town® is a project of the Specialized Information Services Division of the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. Promotional materials and Tox Town images for Web sites and publications are listed at http://toxtown.nlm.nih.gov/clipart.html. Please send your comments or questions on Tox Town to tehip@teh.nlm.nih.gov.

NN/LM Member Maps tool is now in production on the nnlm.gov site!

This tool provides a positional location of a library based on its primary address listed in DOCLINE through the help of Google geocoding and mapping services. It is meant to be used in conjunction with the NN/LM Members Directory (http://nnlm.gov/members/).

Now when you run a search, you will be able to view the results on the Members Maps. The maximum display capacity is 500 at once.

For example, if I want to display where all DOCLINE libraries in Texas are located, I do an advanced search (http://nnlm.gov/members/adv.html) and get the following results:

Then I click on the “NN/LM MAPS” button (this button also appears on the individual library’s profile page) on the top right of the page, and let the Google Map load (see below). Note that the map is color-coded. The Resource Libraries are shown as green markers and Primary Access Libraries are shown as yellow. A dark blue marker is for a Regional Medical Library and light gray markers are for members of some “other” type. You can use the “Center and Zoom” button to zoom in on one specific library. If a library’s address cannot be identified by Google, then a “No Map Location Available” would be displayed.

Note that using this tool in the context of a profile page shows you a map of that one library, while using it in the context of the results page shows you a map of all the results in your set.

If your library is a Network member but there is no marker for it or the marker is in the wrong location, that means there might be some error in your DOCLINE address. Call or email our office and we can help you fix that!

Phone: 713-799-7880 or 800-338-7657
Email: nnlm-scr@exch.library.tmc.edu

The Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) free online course: “Unified Health Communication 101: Addressing Health Literacy, Cultural Competency, and Limited English Proficiency” has now been approved for 5 Medical Library Association (MLA) Continuing Education Contact Hours.

This free online course will help to improve your communication skills with patients and increase your awareness of health literacy and cultural compentency. Additional information about the course can be found at:

http://www.hrsa.gov/healthliteracy/training.htm

From the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Technical Bulletin:

NLM now provides an e-mail notification service, PubMed Alerts, that will notify subscribers of major system problems with PubMed; its two companion databases, MeSH and Journals; and the NLM Catalog. If these databases have a significant service disruption affecting all or most users for a considerable amount of time, an alert will be issued. Alerts providing update and resolution information about a problem will be sent if warranted. This is an announcement-only e-mail notification service that will be most useful for heavy users of PubMed. (It does not include other services/databases, e.g., LinkOut, PubMed Central.) Alerts will be sent out by NLM Monday through Friday, 8:30 am to 5:00 pm Eastern Time (except Federal holidays).

To subscribe, send an e-mail to listserv@list.nih.gov. Leave the subject line blank and enter SUBSCRIBE pubmed-alerts your name in the body of the message, e.g., SUBSCRIBE pubmed-alerts jane doe.

Central Texas counties can now access a directory to local health resources through Heart of Texas Go Local!

Heart of Texas Go Local connects health services in the heart of Texas (a twenty-two county region in central Texas including Austin, Bryan/College Station, Waco and Temple/Killeen) to health topics on MedlinePlus, the National Library of Medicine’s health information portal. Texas A&M University Medical Sciences Library is responsible for the project, under the leadership of Becky McKay. Working with Becky to make the site happen have been Cindy Sharp, Gauri Govil, Elizabeth Kaster and Mellisa Tomlin. Thanks are also due to library director Esther Carrigan, and Chris Foster.

Heart of Texas Go Local is a joint project between the Texas A&M University Medical Sciences Library and the National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Check out http://www.medlineplus.gov/hot

Congratulations to Texas A&M University Medical Sciences Library!

Thinking about real-time communication with your visitors who go to your library’s blog? What about providing answers to a patron who has a quick question on a class posted on your website? Google Talk just launched a new chatback feature that allows visitors to your website to chat with you.

Chatback uses the web-based Google Talk Gadget, and your visitors don’t need to download or install any software. They will see a badge on your website or blog showing your online status, and can start chatting with you by clicking on the badge. It’s easy, it’s simple, and it’s free.

To get started, you need to copy the provided HTML code from http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New and insert it to your website or blog.

The only thing required is a Google Talk account from your end (if you’ve had a Google account or Gmail account, you automatically became a Google Talk user), and nothing is needed from your visitors’ end.

Here is the original post from Google Talk blog: http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2008/02/google-talk-chatback.html