Due to the heavy use of public access computers in the Library, we will soon add seven additional public access computers on the first floor near the staircase. We hope to add a few more computers on the 2nd and 3rd floors in the near future as well.
We will also replace the regular monitors on the public computers throughout the Library with flat screen monitors. We did a lot of research before deciding to spend the additional funds per monitor to get the flat screens, but our research convinced us that the extra cost was worth it. Below is what we found in comparing regular and flat screen monitors:
We are happy to be able to provide additional computers and better monitors for our Library users.
Mary L. Ryan
A recent donation to the Center Collection came from Dr. C. Winston Brown, faculty at UAMS in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
The item was a small handwritten notebook belonging to a family member who was a physician in Clark County Arkansas during the 1800s. The notebook contains directions for pills and concoctions that would have been used then by practicing physicians. It provides documentation of the methods of medical practice in Arkansas during that period of time. Such donations help to preserve the history of the health sciences in Arkansas.
The Center provides a repository for these items so that present and future historians can have access to them. If you have any items you would like to donate to the Center contact Margaret Johnson in the Historical Research Center in the UAMS Library. She can be contacted by phone, 501-686-6733, or via e-mail at JohnsonMargaretA@uams.edu.
Margaret Johnson,
Head, Historical Research Center
The second lecture in the History of Medicine Associates' lecture series on the History of the Medical Sciences will be at 4:00 PM on April 25 in the Pauly Auditorium (G219) in Ed III. Dr. Barry Brenner, MD., Ph.D. will speak on the history of acute asthma. Dr. Brenner is the Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at UAMS. He wrote his first paper on asthma severity while completing a residency in emergency medicine at the University of Chicago. He has published many papers on acute asthma and his text, Emergency Asthma, was recently published by Marcel Dekker, Inc.
The Associates are a support group for the Historical Research Center in the UAMS Library.
Margaret Johnson,
Head, Historical Research Center
One of the Library's goals for the last two years has been to move our journal collection from print to an electronic format. We are making good progress in this direction. For 2002 we changed 110 journal subscriptions from print to online. As we add new journals to the collection we subscribe to the online format whenever the cost is reasonable and online access is allowed for the whole campus. Twenty-three of our new subscriptions for 2002 are online. Among them are Nature and the Nature Reviews journals and BioMedNet's popular "Current Opinion in …" and "Trends in …" journals. We have also taken advantage of online journal packages offered by associations like the American Heart Association, the American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc., and the American Society for Microbiology.
The Library's participation in consortial purchases with other libraries has increased our access to online journals considerably. Our most recent acquisition has been through the Greater Western Libraries Alliance for the Wiley Interscience collection of journals. We have added 250 new Wiley journals to our online journals. Another new group of online journals is the ProQuest nursing journals bought through ArkLink, a consortium of Arkansas academic libraries. This acquisition added 87 online nursing journals to our collection. Last year the Library bought the Blackwell Science collection of about 190 online journals through SCAMeL, a consortium of academic health science libraries in five southwest states. Currently the Library's catalog has records for more than 2000 online journals.
Mary Hawks,
Collection Management Librarian
The Library's book sale each year proves to us that people still love books. This year the sale was better attended than ever before. We made almost $900 that will be used for the general support of the Library. Thanks to all of you who helped us find a new home for our treasures!
Do you use PubMed? Many clinicians and researchers use the National Library of Medicine's [NLM] PubMed database to search MEDLINE and databases from the National Center for Biotechnology Information [NCBI].
However, many PubMed users are not taking full advantage of the system's more powerful attributes.
Do you use the MeSH Browser?
Do you know how to utilize subheadings and subset limits?
Do you what the Cubby feature is or how to use it?
Do you know how and when to use the Journal Browser?
Are you familiar with the LinkOut and Clinical Queries features?
If you answered no to any of these questions and would like to learn more about PubMed, you may want to sign up for a free PubMed class.
Regularly scheduled classes are listed below and customized classes are also available.
By Susan Steelman, MLIS
These classes are open to any practicing health care professional in Arkansas. Off campus classes are available for groups of 5 or more.
CME credit for physicians is available if requested at time of registration.
Please note that free PubMed classes are being offered each month. These classes are open to any practicing health care professional in Arkansas. If you would like to register for one of these classes or schedule an individual, customized class, please contact Susan Steelman, M.L.I.S. at 501-686-6737 or SteelmanSusanC@uams.edu.
April 30th Tuesday 2:00 - 4:00 pm
May 15th Wednesday 9:00 - 11:00 am
The UAMS Library will be exhibiting and/or making presentations at the following events during April.
A continuing goal that the VA Library shares with the UAMS Library and others is to make accessing its resources as easy as possible. To that end, we have instituted two enhancements to our service this year:
Over the last few years, a number of journal publishers have established a presence on the Internet. Quite a few of them have offered various versions of their print journals in electronic format. Recently, the majority have decided to allow libraries which subscribe to the print version access to at least the current year full-text online. Many of them also offer access to several years of the journals backfiles. Two formats are usually available: full text or pdf. The pdf version is basically an image file of the original article. The full text contains the printed material and, usually, any figures or illustrations, but the layout is different from the published version. In other words, the pagination is not the same and the way it appears on the screen or as a printout differs from the article in the print version.
UAMS has offered access to these electronic versions for a while but the VA has not. This has now changed. I am in the process of preparing a hyperlinked journal holdings list for the VA so that anyone who wishes to view an article in a recent issue of a journal can check the VA's holdings list and can click on the title and usually go directly to the journal. Usernames and passwords are sometimes required. If so, I have tried to list them on the holdings list. The holdings list will be available on the Learning Resources web site http://vaww.learnres.little-rock.med.va.gov.
Another enhancement we now offer to our users is the electronic delivery of interlibrary loan articles, which they have requested. The libraries at Little Rock and at North Little Rock have each acquired a scanner and can scan interlibrary loans obtained from other libraries and deliver them as pdf attachments to Outlook messages. All the user has to do is have a valid e-mail address and request that his interlibrary loans be delivered that way.
For further information about these improvements to our service, please don't hesitate to give us a call. Our goal is to be as near to you as your personal computer!
George M. Zumwalt,
Chief, Learning Resources Service
UAMS Library: Editor,
Amanda Saar
Soundwords: Editor, Fred Bassett
Contributors: Fred Bassett, Margaret Johnson, Mary Ryan, Susan Steelman, and
George M. Zumwalt
Published by the UAMS
Library
4301 W. Markham, Slot 586
Little Rock, AR 72205-7186
(501) 686-5980
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