Welcome all new students and welcome back all returning students, faculty and clinicians. We in the Biomedical libraries have been quite busy over the Summer finishing off projects from last year and preparing for the new academic and fiscal year. We believe you will be pleasantly surprised by the length and breadth of our collections and services, especially in the area of electronic media. In terms of access to online full-text journals, the USA Biomedical Library now ranks 7th in the nation in the number of titles available. 90% of these full text titles are accessible from home, your offices, or anyplace else with an Internet connection. A number of important electronic resources have been added over the Summer. Specifics are listed elsewhere in this issue of Biofeedback. Our connection to the university network backbone was upgraded from 10mb to 100mb over the Summer. This will greatly enhance speed of searching and downloading from the Web. Please excuse our dust in September (expected) while we continue to improve the library by installing compact shelving in the back part of the campus Biomedical Library’s first floor. This will nearly triple the amount of shelving space in that area. We expect any disruptions to be minimal. Access to the materials will be available consistently throughout the project.

 

-Thomas L. Williams

“In 1994, there were fewer than 75 peer-reviewed electronic journals. As recently as 1997, some of the largest STM publishers still had no journals online. In 1998, about 30% of the titles in Science Citation Index (SCI) were available online. Four years later, the percentage of online journals in SCI is approaching 75%; the journals in Social Sciences Citation Index are about 63% online; and 34% of the journals indexed in Arts & Humanities Citation Index now have electronic versions. Most of the large scientific publishers have their primary scholarly titles online for 2002.

Library Journal, April 15, 2002, 127(7):51-5

The USA College of Medicine Medical Alumni Association has donated $1,000 in honor of Dr. Robert Boerth, recently-retired Chairman of Pediatrics.

The funds are to directly benefit the library at Children’s and Women’s hospital. The Association’s generosity is much appreciated.

-Tom Williams

 

Would you have guessed?
PROSPERO USER STATISTICS

Since its introduction in June 2000, the Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery department has transmitted 2838 documents using Prospero. Besides our users at USA, some of our frequent users are Loansome Doc subscribers from other institutions, physicians in remote areas, laboratories and medical libraries.

BIOMEDICAL LIBRARY JOINS
BETA TEST OF NLM'S LINKOUT

The Biomedical Library has joined a beta test of the National Library of Medicine’s LinkOut program. The beta test involves providing access to USA journal holdings in PubMed. The Library is already participating in LinkOut for electronic journal holdings. Now, PubMed users will have access to holdings information, similar to that in OVID.

How it works: Access the Bio- medical Library’s web page at: http://southmed.usouthal.edu/library/index.html Click on Medline, CINAHL, etc. Scroll down to the PubMed links and click on one of them. They both work. (It is impor-tant that you connect to PubMed via our web page. Accessing it from www. pubmed.gov will not give you our journal holdings.) Run your search on PubMed. Display the abstract of your relevant reference. At the abstract level, the Biomedical Library will have one or two links: a link to the electronic version of the journal and/or a link to SOUTHcat to check our holdings.

-Ellen Sayed

Free Palm Software - Medical Calculators

This a list of free calculating software for Palm OS. You may find more medical software for Palm OS or Pocket PC at ePocrates (http://www.epocrates.com/), Handheldmed (http://www.handheldmed.com/), pdaMD (pdaMD.com), Skyscape (http://www.skyscape.com/) or other places.

For more free software for Palm OS see links in the first paragraph or contact Jie Li at jli@jaguar1.usouthal.edu or 470-7855.

-Jie Li

 

 

PDA USER SURVEY

During this semester, the library will be asking PDA users, in a survey format, how the library can help. We will be asking what PDA operating system is used, if there are any requirements to use PDA resources, for what functions the PDA is being used, and how we can help you use library resources. Also, there will be a place for comments or any other information PDA users think might be helpful about PDA use at the University and its hospitals. So, start thinking about what could happen here and fill out the survey when it becomes available.

-Geneva Staggs

STAFF NEWS

Media Production Services

Walter Beckham, shot more than 50 photos of the Mobile area, which were sent to a library in Kosice, Slovakia. Dr. Turner Rogers made the arrangements for the exhibition, and traveled to Kosice for the opening of the exhibit on “Mobile Day”.

In June, Walter Beckham, along with his wife Clare King, and Lynda Smith Touart, with her husband, Rich Touart, were invited to exhibit works in the “2 by 2” exhibit at the downtown gallery of the Mobile Museum of Art. Sixteen couples took part in that show.

Frank Vogtner and Lynda Smith Touart are among the ten artists who have been invited to show in the “BLUE” exhibition at the Gulf Gallery in Fairhope in October.

Ernie Seewer, at our Mastin office, recently completed two PowerPoint classes to update his computer skills.

Edda Gilbert, also in the Mastin office, presently has an exhibit of her photographs at the Eastern Shore Art Center in Fairhope. In September she will be exhibiting her work at the Daphne Civic Center. She will also be serving as one of the judges in the photographic contest in the USA Medical Center in October. For the second year in a row Frank Vogtner has been awarded a prize at the Savage Photo Dog Days of Summer show, on display there until September.

Joanne Brookfield is presently putting together the final production pieces of a video for the children of Camp-Rap-A-Hope. Joanne was also part of a “work-out-a-thon” to raise money for St. Jude’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

-Lynda Touart

 

 

Biomedical Library

Kathy Glass joined the circulation department on July 25. Kathy comes to South Alabama from Virginia where she taught math to middle school children for 31 years. Kathy will be staffing the department in the evenings and on Sundays. Donna Ladnier, who has been with us for almost 2 years, will be moving to day time and staffing the department on Saturdays.

Tom Williams and Ellen Sayed have received notification that their paper, The Biomedical Library Goes Global, has been accepted for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Chapter of the Medical Library Association in Nashville next month. The paper will discuss Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery beyond our borders.

Everly Brown has left the Biomedical Library and is now Head of Circulation at the Health Sciences and Human Services Library at the University of Maryland in Baltimore.

Jie Li, as chair of the International Cooperation Section of the Medical Library Association, organized three session programs at MLA annual meeting and served as moderator for two. The sessions were: AIDS in Africa and the Impact of Information (moderator), Electronic vs. Print Resources (moderator), and Document Delivery in the 21st Century: Different Formats, Innovative Methods.

Three library faculty members are on the 2002 executive committee of the Alabama Health Libraries Association. Jana Slay is the handbook editor. Geneva Staggs is a member-at-large. And Diane Williams is the editor of the Association’s newsletter, Synapse.

Long-time Biomedical Library Secretary, Bonnie Seibert, was promoted from Secretary IV to Secretary V. This promotion was due to Ms. Seibert’s expanded duties, which she continues to perform with excellence.

Bonnie Seibert and Tom Williams