Starting on Sept. 20, the Medical Library will expand its offerings of daily newspapers to include a print subscription to the New York Times. Both daily editions and the Sunday edition will be available. Readers will be able to enjoy the Times, The Houston Chronicle, the Galveston County Daily News, and The Wall Street Journal in the comfort of out leisure reading area on the second floor. No reason now not to be well-informed.
It’s been a while since we took a swing around our local souk to see what’s stirring. In this morning’s New York Times, a story appears about scientific jiggery-pokery, but not in regard to research misconduct. The misconduct occurred after the research, which itself was conducted very, very well. It’s a matter of who gets credit for one of the great, really great, medical discoveries of the 20th century:streptomycin, the perfect drug for treating TB. Selman A. Waksman got the Nobel, the kudos and a nice share of the royalties accruing from the sales of the drug. But, there was another guy in the picture, and more to the point in the lab, a Dr. Schatz. He disputed Waksman’s claim to be the sole discoverer, and went to court about it. He prevailed and Rutgers and Waksman had to give him credit and a share. It was all very nasty and grubby, but the point here is that an alert archivist discovered some crucially important notebooks in the archives, where they had lain in an unopened box for years and years. Now, what happened in the lab at Rutgers can finally come to light.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/science/notebooks-shed-light-on-an-antibiotic-discovery-and-a-mentors-betrayal.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Apple had a big show unveiling various things, including a Macbook Pro with Retina screen. This is a very nice machine, but the figure written on the price tag is going to scare some people off.The whole Macbook product fleet has been redone and there are a several machines at different prices with different loads. IO6 was previewed and drew appreciative oohs! and aahs!
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/06/apple-unveils-new-macbooks-ios-6-and-new-mountain-lion-features-at-wwdc/
The Swiss Army knife was officially registered this day in 1897 as an accessory for, well, troops in the Swiss Army. Soldiers entering the service are still issued with a version of the item, which has transmogrified almost beyond recognition.Switzerland by the way has conscription and a very long period of military eligibility. Troops keep their weapons at home and are supposed to be ready for call-up at very short notice. It seemed to me that there were soldiers everywhere, on train station platforms, on the march, but that’s because the reserve units exercise frequently, so there’s always somebody coming and going.
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2008/06/june-12-1897-the-swiss-army-gets-its-own-knife/
And finally, a shout from Open Access Alley, because the merchants there have been complaining about neglect. It seems that two gentlemen Peter Binfeld and Jason Hoyt have come together to found a new Open Access journal which they are calling PeerJ. A new scientific journal seems about as necessary as another Starbucks, but there is a catch: this one will offer OA manuscript vetting and publication for the sum of $99. Yes it does sound a little strange, but, read on:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/new-open-access-journal-aims-to-disrupt-scholarly-publishing/
OK , I think we’ll head back to the Palace now, since Our Grateful Subjects have had a chance to see that We are aware of them and their doings. Peace
The Medical Library is happy announce that some changes have been made in the way we handle new books. Every week, a selection of new titles recently added to the collection is placed on display for review by our users. Recently, we’ve begun arranging these differently. They no longer face spine-out on the new book shelf. Instead, they;re displayed cover-out, so you can just glance at an item and read the title without having to turn your head. We have some reasonably comfortable chairs close by, If you decide you want to borrow the item, take it to Circulation with your ID badge. We’ve also added a new feature called Spotlight of the Month. These are not necessarily new. They may have been here a while. They were picked for special display because they describe an important scientific discovery from a new slant, shed light on the personality or work of famous scientists and physicians, or discuss some significant trend or event. We’re hoping to do this about once a month. Please stop by and see it all.
The medical library has added the journal Frontiers in Bioscience to its online periodicals collection. This item was often requested from other libraries and that level of activity prompted the decision to purchase our own copy for the convenience of our campus users. Our subscription runs from 1999 to the present and we will be receiving content directly from the publisher. UTMB personnel can connect to this journal from the Library’s web page, through the Our Journals search utility. The default logic is “Title Begins With”, so on the search line, type Frontiers, and press Search. Frontiers in Bioscience is the fourth item down on the hit list.
The UTMB Library has recently opened a Twitter service for the convenience of the campus community. You can catch up on new services, changes in operating hours ( eg, for holidays), new books added, exhibits and everything else. Go to the Library’s web page and find the Blue Canary, or rather, I guess it’s the Blue Bird of Happiness, or of Quiet Resignation, as in the famous New Yorker cartoon. Sign up there.
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has launched a new site which can help health care providers and the general public to gain information about a wide vairiety of drugs. Called Drug Info Portal, the web site is a composite access platform, or portal. Over 15,000 drugs can be searched via DIP. The interface is very simple, and the user only needs to enter a drug name in order to start the process. Information has been compiled from a variety of sources, such as the NLM databases MEDLINEplus and LactMed . A number of other more technical information resources also contribute data to DIP. Read about it:
Drug Info Portal
Methods in Enzymology is an important resource in bioscience, and the Medical Library has recently arranged for online access to it for UTMB personnel. The first installment, so to speak, of coverage runs from the year 2000 to the present, but in the near future access will be extended to the entire corpus of the title, from 1955 to the present.
UTMB personnel now have access to some new resources. The online versions of the Mental Measurements Yearbook, and Tests in Print are available for use via the Library’s website. In addition a new version of the searching software for Scifinder Scholar has been released by Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), and our campus personnel can download the product to their individual workstations via a link on the Library’s website as well.
New Resources
The Moody Medical Library has its own logo, labeled FIND IT AT UTMB, on PubMed search results. The FIND IT button is a link to a page which will help users move from the “discovery” that an interesting item exists to “harvest”, that is, acutally getting the document. Once you complete your PubMed search, select the useful documents by clicking in the check boxes to the left, then change the display format to Abstract Plus. The FIND IT button should be on the upper right side of the display, a little below the line on which the publishers’ cartouches appear. FIND IT will tell you whether we have the item in print, in e format, either direct (“article”) or through scanning of a journal’s web site (“browse”). If we don’t have it at all, the screen will offer you a chance to obtain the document via our ILLIAD interlibrary loan request software, and will even populate the ILL request form for you. Can’t beat that!
The Library has added a number of electronic textbooks in general medicine, nursing and various clinical specialties under the umbrella heading of Books@OVID. The titles are provided by OVID Technologies, Inc. which also creates the proven search interface to MEDLINE and a number of other literature retrieval services. There are about 50 titles in the list. Users can browse the contents of the individual books, browse by subject or make use of either a simple query function or the full OVID search. The simplest way to get to Books@OVID is to start on the Library’s home page, select Databases from the column on the right, and on the succeeding screen, which is labeled Core Databases, find the link to Books@OVID, four items down from the top.
Books