No doubt many medical librarians throughout the Greater Midwest Region (GMR) are dreaming of beaches and beautiful sunsets thanks to this year’s Medical Library Association (MLA) conference being held in Hawaii (May 15-20, 2009). Others may be dreaming of the recently announced funding opportunities in the GMR (http://nnlm.gov/gmr/funding/). Some may be dreaming of both.

If you are in the “both” category, perhaps you missed a great MLA News article from March 2009 entitled Seeking Grant Funding for Consumer Health Projects. Although the GMR does not fund grants per se (our subcontracts and awards work on a cost-reimbursement basis), the information in the article available online to MLA members after signing in to the MLA News website has some great pointers that are useful to anyone looking to secure funding for a great consumer health or other project. (more…)

Eileen Severson
MLIS Supervisor
Library and Health Information Services
Health Sciences Library
Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center
La Crosse, WI

At the WHSLA 2009 Annual Meeting in La Crosse, WI, the board was honored to award the Librarian of the Year award to Barbara Benisch Sisolak, Senior Special Librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Department of Surgery Library.

Barb has demonstrated many times her qualifications for this award.  Since becoming the Senior Special Librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Department of Surgery, she has been an active participant in our many library professional organizations.  She has participated in WHSLA as member of the Communications Committee, President-Elect, and subsequently President and Past-President.  Barb is a participant in surgery society conferences as well.  In all of her roles in library and health-related organizations, Barb is the consummate professional and serves as a mentor to others new to the organization, the profession, or outside the profession.

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I would like to personally thank the recipients of the Technology Improvement Awards for Year 3 for their hard work, determination in offering services to their users.  It is always interesting to review applications for these awards.  You tend to get a really good idea of what our member libraries need and the projects they are working on - and this information not only helps the library applying for the award but others thinking about applying for an award.

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We are pleased to announced our funding opportunities for Year 4 (May 1, 2009 - April 30, 2010). Please see the summary of awards and subcontracts at: http://nnlm.gov/gmr/funding/

A table outlining the number of each type of award and subcontract and the funding amounts for each can be found at: http://nnlm.gov/gmr/funding/current.html

Two new awards are being offered in Year 4, so check out the Calls for Applications for these awards:

EFTS Award: http://nnlm.gov/gmr/funding/efts/eftsrfp.html

Planning and Assessment Award: http://nnlm.gov/gmr/funding/planning/planningrfp.html

Please contact me, Ruth Holst, or one of the GMR Coordinators (http://nnlm.gov/gmr/about/staff.html) if you have questions about funding. For more information about Year 4’s Outreach Programs, please see the Outreach Program Summary May 1, 2009 - April 30, 2010 at: http://nnlm.gov/gmr/about/04outreachsum.html.

-Ruth

The creators of the Second Life, Linden Lab announced their 1st Linden Prize winners last week (http://lindenlab.com/lindenprize). Among the two winners was “Virtual Ability Island”; the virtual island that was created as a part of the Alliance Virtual Library. This is a group of virtual islands use by people with chronic health and disabilities.

The Alliance Library System (ALS) in Illinois, a member of the GMR, worked with the Virtual Ability Organization to plan and build this award winning orientation center. Virtual Ability Island was partially funded by the NN/LM consumer health subcontract - “Share the Health”. The ALS will have the distinction of being the first NN/LM supported project that has received this prestigious virtual award. ALS and Virtual Ability continue to partner on health information services in Second Life.

Prestigious Linden Prize was given to two winners chosen out of 230 applications and 10 finalists. The winners were awarded $10,000 each. Here is the announcement from the Linden Lab: https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2009/04/30/the-linden-prize-goes-to-studio-wikitecture-and-virtual-ability

Please contact Lori Bell (lbell927@gmail.com), if you would like to know more about this award winning virtual island or the partnership! Congratulations!!

There have been 100’s of news reports lately about the Swine Flu Outbreak that is now a worldwide situation and is responsible for 91 cases (at this writing) and one death in the United States.  For those who are not satisfied getting your news via traditional news sources, here are some options:

• The CDC is using Twitter to deliver Swine Flu information.  You can follow the  CDC’s @emergency account on Twitter
  

  CDC on Twitter

• Swine Flu Tweets allows you to track tweets (posts on Twitter) from Twitter about the outbreak on a Google map.
• Another way via Twitter to follow trends and conversations is to keep an eye on tweets tagged with the keyword #swineflu.
• Facebook, the social networking utility has also been instrumental in delivering Swine Flu information.  (How accurate the information is, can be debated!) They have a tool called Lexicon which analyzes how fast conversations about Swine Flu traveled on their site.  Between April 20 and April 27, their maps of data show the most conversations show up in Texas and California.

As you hear of any additional methods of communicating this outbreak, let us know about them!

Update - Here’s a one more place to look:

• Swine Flu Volunteer Network via Ning (thanks for Siobhan Champ-Blackwell)

Anna Ercoli Schnitzer
InfoPoint Librarian
Health Sciences Libraries
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI

The University of Michigan Health Sciences Libraries’ outreach program promoted MedlinePlus in a multitude of venues this year.  In some cases, there were repeat performances-at the U of M’s Dental School’s Give Kids a Smile (U of M Health Science Libraries Cooperate with Give Kids a Smile) and at the Asian-American Health Fair (Asian American Outreach at U of M) for example.  Other situations were first-time events, like the Ann Arbor Art Fair (After the Ann Arbor Art Fair) and the Ann Arbor Bookfest. And at some times, we found ourselves in a very special place with very special people, as in the instance of our appearance at the Washtenaw County Library for the Blind and Physically Disabled (Going Beyond: A Workshop for the Blind and Physically Disabled) or the Ann Arbor Center for Independent Living.  We also mixed and mingled with a nice cross-section of the public when presenting reliable online health information at the Ann Arbor District Library. Occasionally during our outreach events, we ran into people who remembered us from previous encounters and even seemed rather pleased to meet us again. (more…)

Kathryn Carpenter, Director, University of Illinois at Chicago Library of the Health Sciences, the Regional Medical Library for the GMR, has turned her Spring 2009 blog message into a podcast. The audio file is 5:03 minutes long and is an MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 file, commonly referred to as mp3. Here is a chance to hear Kate in a new format: (.mp3 file). The text of this message is available in pdf: A Message from the RML Director Spring 2009 .

The podcast was recorded using the free software Audacity and then encoded to an mp3, playable on a variety of media players including an iPod, with such software as QuickTime, iTunes or Media Player. Listen to this podcast and use the Comments section let us know your thoughts on what you hear.

If you would like to learn how to make your own podcast, consider taking the podcasting class taught by GMR Technology Coordinator, Max Anderson. To find out more about this class, see: Can You Hear Me Now? How to Make a Podcast.

Could we be any happier that today is the first day of spring? I think not!

The light, the warmth, the promise of new growth and new ideas are irresistible.  Anything seems possible, and everything seems likely. At the same time, we also celebrate the accomplishments of the past during Black History Month and Women’s History Month.  At the Library of the Health Sciences (LHS), we were proud to host Changing the Face of Medicine: Celebrating America’s Women Physicians, an interactive, multimedia traveling exhibit developed by the National Library of Medicine’s History of Medicine Division in collaboration with the American Library Association’s Public Programs Office.  The display and accompanying Web site (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine) present a rich, inspiring resource of biographical, curricular, visual, and anecdotal information about women physicians in every aspect of medicine. The exhibit is on display here at LHS until March 26, 2009. (more…)

Congratulations to the Library Journal Movers & Shakers for 2009! We are fortunate to have a few GMR members (and perhaps future GMR members?) among the bunch this year.
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