Dana Participation at Breast Cancer Conference Goes from Pink to Green

Once again, the Dana Medical Library participated in the Exhibits Fair at the 2009 Breast Cancer Conference, sponsored by the Vermont Cancer Center. The goal of  Dana’s exhibit was to continue to spread the news about library resources and services for affiliated health care providers, students, and educators as well as for unaffiliated  users, including survivors, caregivers, and  community members. The Library has exhibited at this annual event since the first conference was held back in 1997. However, this year, the Library’s exhibit took on a more environmentally-friendly approach. An electronic Breast Cancer library guide was created to serve as a virtual information portal for the Conference. This “green” library guide provides links to Dana’s robust Consumer Health Collection (CHC) of breast cancer books and to breast cancer Internet sites. A simple, yet attractive, paper bookmark featuring the library guide website was designed and distributed to replace the many paper “pink” bibliographies and patient handouts from past conferences.

In addition, a display of some of the new CHC breast cancer books on Dana’s exhibit table caught the attention of many of the almost 700 attendees at this year’s conference.

Help with Medical Images

A new Online Resource Guide [http://danaguides.uvm.edu/images] has been created to assist patrons in locating and using medical images in papers and presentations. The guide provides a road map to general medical images as well as images in the areas of oncology, neurology and medical history, just to name a few. Copyright issues are also explained so you can feel confident using images in your presentation legally.

Marshall Fox. Histopathology of liver in fatal human plague. CDC. Public Health Image Library. [accessed 2009 May 11]. Available from: http://phil.cdc.gov/phil/imageidsearch.asp Image ID 728.

H1N1 Virus Information

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) offer the following resources on the H1N1 Flu:

• Newest 2009 H1N1 Flu Outbreak Sequences
• Citations recently added to PubMed
• MedlinePlus (consumer health information)
• Enviro-Health Links.

The following information is provided by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS):

• US Info
• Things you can do
• Plan & prepare
• International Info.

The image above of the newly identified H1N1 influenza virus was taken in the CDC Influenza Laboratory.

Information Overload? Make a Resource Guide YOUR Portal to the Library

A wide variety of people use the Dana Library website: clinicians, researchers, educators, graduate students, medical students, and undergraduates. That means that there is a LOT of information wrapped up in one Web site. Do you want JUST the links that you need? We have a solution.

Librarians have created specialized individual web pages (called Research Guides) that can be used as portals to just the information you need. Only want clinical information? Try the Clinical Care research guide (http://danaguides.uvm.edu/clinicalcare). Only need Pediatrics resources? Check out the Pediatrics guide (http://danaguides.uvm.edu/Pediatrics).

All of these guides have unique, easy to remember URLs that can be bookmarked or made into an icon for a desktop. Use one of these guides instead of the Dana Library home page. That way, you don’t have to continue to sift through the many pages on Dana’s site looking for what you want. For example, nurses at FAHC have put the FAHC Nursing Resources guide (http://danaguides.uvm.edu/fahcnurses) on the nursing hub on FAHC’s intranet while residents at Milton Family Practice have put an icon on resident computer desktops linking directly to the Family Medicine guide (http://danaguides.uvm.edu/familymedicine).

Go to http://danaguides.uvm.edu/ to browse research guides already created by Dana librarians. If you can’t find what you are looking for, consider contacting the librarian assigned to your department, program or subject area (see http://library.uvm.edu/dana/about/staff/specialist.php) to request a research guide tailored to the needs of your department or program.

In fact, the best way to have useful resource guides is to give input; contact librarians directly with your ideas or leave comments on the guides themselves. We welcome all of your comments and suggestions and hope you will help us make these tools as useful as possible!

Featured Online Research Guide: Family Medicine

With the new web site, patrons will see many new online research guides as well (such as the one pictured at right).

These are websites that bring together all of the pertinent information and resources on a given topic on one page so that you don’t have to look all over the web site to find what you need.

One such research guide is on the topic of Family Medicine. In collaboration with members of the Family Medicine Department, in particular Dr. John King, Residency Program Director, librarian Laura Haines, liaison to Family Medicine, created a web site to meet the information needs of Family Medicine health care practitioners and students. Highlights of the site include resources that answer clinical questions, links to professional sites and patient education information. Go to http://danaguides.uvm.edu/familymedicine to learn more. Send comments or suggestions directly from that site or to Laura Haines at laura.haines@uvm.edu.