In This Issue:

Children’s &Women’s Library Celebrates Grand Opening

And those facilities are impressive. The new conference room features an electronic white board connected to a CD/DVD player, VCR and computer equipped with Microsoft Office, SmartNotebook, and Internet access. Additionally, there’s a computer lab with five PC’s, all containing Word, Internet capabilities, email, a networked laser printer and access to all the library’s electronic holdings.

The book collection consists of Pediatrics and OB/Gyn materials, as well as basic medical reference books. Journal holdings cover Pediatrics, Obstetrics, Gynecology and selected Nursing titles. The library also has a SelfCheck machine, which allows patrons to check out their own books using their library card.

Use of the library is growing as word spreads. Faculty and staff from OB/Gyn and Pediatrics, residents, medical students, and students of the College of Nursing and the College of Allied Health have begun doing research at the new facility. Thanks to the wonderful people in Nursing Education at Children’s and Women’s Hospital, the staff and supervisors are also using the library’s services, and the Pediatric nurses are recommending library resources to their patient families! The new library is quickly becoming an asset to the University and the surrounding community.

The Children’s and Women’s library is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call the library at (334) 415-8586.

-Katherine Corner

Proration: A Message from the Director

Despite the sad state of funding for education in Alabama, budget cuts and other issues caused by proration and reduced funding, we expect no major problems with serving you as we have in the past. Any cutbacks will be pretty much imperceptible to you. From the standpoint of the student, clinician, researcher, teacher, and other library users, we expect "business as usual."

However, having said that, the Biomedical Library has been hit, as have all schools and departments, with the cutbacks necessitated by proration. For the current fiscal year the cutbacks have been (thus far) minimal, but for the 2001/2002 fiscal year the cuts will be more dramatic. The largest "hit" is with journal subscriptions. We will be dropping a number of print subscriptions. The good news is that for most of these titles we will have the electronic version still available, so there will not actually be a cut in titles. As a matter of fact, when factoring in all of the "extra" titles we've acquired via our contracts with publishers for electronic access, the number of titles we have access to has gone up by several hundred - and that takes into account the projected cuts.

-Tom Williams

If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
-- Benjamin Franklin

Faculty/Staff News

•Tom Williams, Director, has been named Chair of the History Committee of the Southern Chapter of the Medical Library Association. He has also been appointed to the Medical Library Association’s Research, Development, and Demonstration Project Grant Jury. His term as Chair of the MLA Fellows and Honorary Members Jury ends in May.

•Judy Burnham has been appointed as a member of the National Program Committee for the 2003 Medical Library Association meeting in San Diego. In March Judy Burnham was an invited participant in an Outreach Panel at the joint meeting of the Alabama Health Libraries Association and the Georgia Health Sciences Library Association in Columbus, GA. Judy discussed the fee based outreach program of the Biomedical Library, the SOUTHmed Information Network. Also in March, Judy presented “Finding Consumer Health Information on the Internet” for the Odyssey USA Group.

•Jie Li was appointed the International editor for MLA News, the Medical Library Association’s newletter. She will begin her appointment this April.

•Ellen Sayed is the new editor of the Medical Library Association/International Cooperation Section Newsletter.

•One LTAI position is vacant in the Circulation Department on campus and will not be filled for the next fiscal year due to proration and the University-wide freeze on hiring. To fill this void, some student assistant hours will be added.

Electronic Journals

The Library is continuously adding electronic journals to the collection. This growing list can be accessed from "Electronic Publications" on the Library's home page:

http://southmed.usouthal.edu/library/epub.htm

Links to electronic journals can also be found in SOUTHcat:

http://southcat.usouthal.edu

In the interest of time, and sometimes funds, patrons may be well served to check the Library's electronic journals before placing requests. It may be possible to print the article, full text, at your desktop. For more information on how to access our electronic journals, see the article on full-text online resources in this issue of Biofeedback or call us at (334) 460-6891.

-Ellen Sayed

Increasing Journal Costs Necessitates Current Subscription Review

The Association of Research Libraries has released a list of High Priced Journal Subscription Prices – 2000 on the ARL web page (http://db.arl.org/journals/). From this list of 100 titles covering all academic disciplines, the Biomedical Library subscribes to fifteen. The titles and their costs are listed below:

Because of rising journal costs and the need to control expenditures for journal subscriptions, the Biomedical Library is reviewing current subscriptions to identify journals subscriptions than can be cancelled. If a title is owned in both print and electronic formats, we are considering canceling the print copy. If the library owns several copies (housed at more than one location), we are considering canceling additional copies. We are also looking at usage statistics to identify possible titles for cancellation. Before finalizing any cancellations of journal subscriptions for 2002, faculty will be consulted. If you have any questions on the process, please contact Judy Burnham at 460-6888 or jburnham@jaguar1.usouthal.edu

UCITA (Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act): What is it?

“UCITA: A Guide to Understanding and Action,” a teleconference aired December 13th, was sponsored jointly by several library organizations and attempted to generate both light and heat about this legislative initiative to provide uniformity to state commercial laws involving the licensing of software and information. UCITA began in 1999 as an amendment to the Uniform Commercial Code, but after multiple drafts and significant dissent among its drafters, the name was changed to UCITA and adopted by the National Commissioners of Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) before sending to the state legislatures for consideration. It has been passed in two states and has been considered in 6 others to date, not yet in Alabama. Librarians and information technology professionals are particularly concerned about this legislation because its adverse impact in a number of areas. These areas include:
•Copyright – UCITA represents a shift from the established balance between intellectual property owner and user as defined in the copyright legislation and case law toward contract law. Since copyright law includes a fair consideration of societal values, such as the advancing knowledge among the citizens, in addition to economic values, this focus on the economic values inherent in contract law presents a real threat to the ability of higher education and other institutions to disseminate knowledge and information in accordance with their missions.
•Operations – UCITA is likely to increase the cost and complexity of doing business, especially in regards to the time and resources devoted to contractual negotiations. Also, some provisions in UCITA would allow software firms to waive liability for known defects in their software that they neglected to disclose to their customers, while other provisions would prohibit public criticism of software products.
•Reverse engineering – IT professionals are concerned about the provisions of UCITA that would allow licensors to prohibit currently permissible uses of reverse engineering for research, teaching, debugging, security testing and other purposes.
The panelists for the teleconference, James Neal (Dean of University Libraries at Johns Hopkins), Rodney Peterson (Office of Information Technology, University of Maryland). Sara Wiant (Director of the Law Library and Professor of Law at Washington and Lee), and Catherine Wojewodzki (Reference Librarian, University of Delaware Library), expounded on these and other troublesome provisions of the legislation. They also provided attendees with strategies to modify or oppose UCITA legislation in their own states.
For more information about UCITA please contact a librarian at the reference desk.

-Reprinted by permission from Kay Hogan Smith, Lister Hill Letter 12(1):3, 2001

Staff Spotlight

-Judy Burnham

-Mike Carmichael

Hello, Goodbye:
NLM Gateway Replaces Internet Grateful Med

In late January the National Library of Medicine announced it’s plans to gradually phase out Internet Grateful Med (IGM). The popular, user-friendly, Web-based interface was devised as an intelligent gateway system to help users access information from 15 of NLM databases including MEDLINE, AIDSLINE and BIOETHICSLINE. Over the years, IGM, and its accompanying Loansome Doc option, have served as an invaluable source of biomedical information for health professionals worldwide.

While it may be time to bid IGM farewell, the good news is that it is being replaced by a more powerful and flexible search tool, the NLM Gateway. Conceived to serve as a “one-stop shopping” site, users’ queries will automatically be searched over multiple NLM retrieval systems with results returned in grouped categories (for example, journal citations, book records, meeting abstracts, etc.). In addition to traditional literature citations, the site will also offer an ever-growing collection of full text, video, audio and image resources. At the present time the Gateway offers access to the following: MEDLINE/PubMed, OLDMEDLINE, LOCATORplus, AIDS Meetings, HSR Meetings, HSRProj, MEDLINEplus and DIRLINE. The site also allows users to order documents from nearby libraries through Loansome Doc. Future additions to the site will include: HSTAT (Health Services/Technology Assessment Text), Toxnet on the Web (toxicology and hazardous substances information), ClinicalTrials.gov (information for the public about clinical trials), Images from the History of Medicine, Profiles in Science (archives of several prominent biomedical scientists) and UMLS Knowledge Source Server (comprehensive Metathesaurus records). Check out the NLM Gateway at: http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/gw/Cmd

-Justin Robertson

It is necessary to make some minor changes to your browser to use the service. The details are available at http://southmed.usouthal.edu/library/medgate1/index.html It is best to use either Netscape or Internet Explorer as the browser. If you use AOL or Compuserve, you can connect to the Internet, then minimize the AOL or Compuserve browser and open either Netscape or Internet Explorer to use the proxy service.

If you have configured your browser correctly, a box should pop up as a separate window when you try to access one of the proxy sites. If this box does not pop up, close the browser and try again. If it still doesn’t pop up, check the configuration instructions carefully and call or email us for further help.

This box will pop up once per session. It is possible to go from site to site and back again without signing on again unless the browser is closed or the Internet service is interrupted.

The User Name is the same one used at the Biomedical Library sites to sign on to the computers. The format is: first initial, middle initial, last name, and the last 3 digits of the student number (for students) and the last 3 digits of the social security number (for faculty and staff) – for example jwsmith903. The Password is normally either the entire student number (for students) or the entire social security number (for faculty and staff). If you do not have a user name and password, you may fill out a form at the Biomedical Library or online at: http://southmed.usouthal.edu/library/medgate1/proxyform.htm

-Sally Murray

More Full-Text Online!

Over 1300 full text electronic journals are now accessible through the Electronic Publications page of the Biomedical Library (http://southmed.usouthal.edu/library/epub.htm). Because of the rapid growth in the number of full text e-journals now accessible, the page was split into sections for full text -journals, tables of contents/abstracts, electronic books and medical library newsletters.

Several electronic books have been added to the web page through the Books@Ovid collection. Those titles include:

• Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment
  
• Kelly’s Textbook of Internal Medicine
  
• Lippincott Manual of Nursing Practice
  
• Interpretation of Diagnostic Tests
  
• Facts and Comparisons
  
• Textbook of Gastroenterology
  
• Surgery: Scientific Principles and Practice
  
• Nursing Care Plans
  
• Merritt’s Neurology
  

To access these titles visit the Electronic Books section of the Biomedical Library’s web page (http://southmed.usouthal.edu/library/ebooks.htm). Some books are also accessible from home through the Biomedical Library’s proxy server.

Over 230 Springer-Verlag titles were added to the page in February and are accessible from home via the Library’s proxy server. The collection includes such titles as Acta Diabetologica, Calcified Tissue International, Journal of Cancer Research and Clinical Oncology, Molecular and General Genetics, and Skeletal Radiology. A number of other titles have been added to the list of electronic journals including: Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology, Breast Cancer Research, Cancer Control, Experimental Lung Research, Genome Biology, Haematologica, Health Care for Women International, IUBMB Life, Journal of Family Practice, Journal of Laryngology and Otology, Molecular Biology of the Cell, The Oncologist, Pathology and Ultrastructural Pathology.

The lists of electronic resources are continuously growing and changing to meet the needs of our users.

-Jana Jasper

Site Spotlight: DynaMed

http://www.DynamicMedical.com/

Endorsed by the Pennsylvania State University/Good Samaritan Hospital Family and Community Medicine Residency Program, the DynaMed (or Dynamic Medical Information System) website provides information on over 2,000 diseases. The site is updated daily and free to use (registration is required for new users).

Designed to provide quick and easy access to medical information, DynaMed is a potentially useful resource in a clinical, educational or research setting. It provides an organized structure for finding disease-based information, including both standard medical knowledge, and current developments.

DynaMed was specifically created for health care professionals by a physician as a clinical reference tool to be used during patient encounters. It was designed to fulfill the physician’s needs for organized information, and to replace routine textbook and article searches. The database provides links to full text articles from some journal websites.

DynaMed also provides a platform for multiple users to communicate with each other and contribute to the core set of medical knowledge. It provides a way for health care professionals to add their share of professional experiences and suggestions. The system provides a fast, easy and comprehensive way for medical professionals to share and disseminate knowledge.

-Jie Li

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.

-Jorge Luis Borges

Meet the New SOUTHcat!

SOUTHcat's new look coming May 2001.

New features will include: location, call number, and status information appearing on the title screen. It will no longer be necessary to click on each title to determine location or to see whether it is checked out!

Among other new features, users will now have the ability to limit after performing an initial search. If you receive too many hits when performing a search, it will be possible to set the limits to narrow the search without starting over. It will also be possible to sort results by title, author, or date. All in all the new SOUTHcat should make accessing the USA libraries’ collection even easier.

-Sally Murray

New Feature Alert:
Direct Export

OVID has recently added a new feature for EndNote or Reference Manager users. A “Direct Export” option has been added under “Citation Format” in OVID’s Citation Manager. Choosing this option allows users to save their search results directly into EndNote or Reference Manager files. In OVID, after you finish your search, select “Direct Export” from the “Citation Format” box at the end of the page and then click “Save”. A window will then pop up allowing you to choose either EndNote or Reference Manager. After selecting the appropriate one, the citations are automatically imported to the EndNote or Reference Manager file. This feature is also available in the ScienceDirect database.

-Jie Li

George Papanicolaou Exhibit

-Everly Brown

SOUTHmed Update

SOUTHmed members can now access the ScienceDirect database through the Biomedical Library. ScienceDirect contains the full-text of journals published by Elsevier Science. SOUTHmed members can access the full-text of over 800 of the 1200 titles contained in the database. Bibliographic citations can be obtained for the other titles. Information on the access process will soon be forwarded to SOUTHmed members.

ScienceDirect joins other full-text available to SOUTHmed members, including Harrison’s Online. Other products such as MDConsult are available at a discount to SOUTHmed members.

SOUTHmed members also have ready access to the collection of the Biomedical Library. The library will also provide reference services, database searching, document delivery and training classes. SOUTHmed provides information services for hospitals, individual health care professionals and attorneys.

For further information on joining SOUTHmed contact: Judy Burnham (334) 460-6888 jburnham@jaguar1.usouthal.edu