Meta-directory of the Countway community

Countway Photo Day from CBMI on Vimeo.

Bibliography of Clinical Genomics

Recently, we held a summit on the topic of clinical grade reporting of full genomic sequence. Given the growth in the number of papers (likely to grow hyperexponentially in the near future) David Osterbur has followed up with a very nice bibliographic guide to this emerging literature. Feel free to contact him if you would like other such articles added to the guide.

Libraries are going to the dogs

Yale Law School has gone for the full monty, so if your medicolegal liability is getting you down, we are pleased to present Cooper as a prescribed cure. Please observe the maximum dose of 30 minutes.

Many happy returns

This twitter feed of returns of items borrowed from the Countway Library provides a glimpse of the vibrant engagement of our community with the scholarship of the present and past. These include The Anatomy of madness : essays in the history of psychiatry, Calories don't count by Herman Taller, Tachycardias--mechanisms, diagnosis, treatment, and Observed brain dynamics by Partha Mitra. One could presume that these were not all borrowed by the same patron, but if they were, what questions were they asking?

Master of your information domain

A nice appreciation for National Librarian Week can be found here.

Hat tip: Daniel Masys

Deadly Medicine

We are hosting a sobering exhibit about what happens when medical science loses its moral compass. More details can be found here.

We, the librarians

As Harvard University reorganizes its extensive library system, it is worth reconsidering where library activity occurs and who drives it. This effort in Finland (hat tip David Osterbur) is a reminder that although professionally trained librarians with a mission and institutional memory are central to the curation, preservation and dissemination of scholarly materials, there is no sharp demarcation as to where expertise, time and effort can be found in our collective efforts. If individual scholars do not curate their own, increasingly electronic, notes, their messages, and other residua of the scholarly process, there will be very little for institutional librarians to work wit and a gaping hole in the scholarly record. But first, academic institutions will have to provide them with a easy to use process that can last their entire careers. This is a first class opportunity for entrepreneurial, techno-librarians who can think at the scale of the Internet. Conversely, libraries must reach out the to network of distributed expertise in all areas of academic endeavors which is populated by experts often well outside the walls of organized academe. Literally tens of thousands of precious modern and ancient scholarly archives remain in the dark, queued up, waiting for an overworked archivist to provide even the most cursory cataloguing. Shotgun mass annotation, leveraging external expertise will have to become the norm and, again, there is a large opportunity for those who are able to provide such capabilities at scale and with the appropriate legal and institutional framework.

What does a Harvard Medical or School of Public Health student think when she first tours the library?

Circulation and reference staff gave tours and orientations to the incoming medical and public health students and just wrote down every question that the students asked. The students volunteered these questions, and they were not prompted. The word cloud below represents their questions. It will be interesting to see if this cloud will change with time for this group. (Hat tip Wendy Brown)

What are they checking out at Harvard Medical School?

Enterprising souls at the circulation desk of the Countway Library of Medicine have provided this Twitter feed on the books being checked out (http://twitter.com/hrvrd_med_out). See how studious your colleagues are?

Who's Gonna Pay for these Journals?

Town Hall Meeting: Who’s Gonna Pay for these Journals?

2:00-3:30 PM

Thurs., April 8, 2010

TMEC, Walter Amphitheater

Harvard Medical School

Scholarly Communication is broken.

Your access to articles in Brain Research, Tetrahedron Letters, Cell, Nature publications, and other leading journals in every discipline is paid for to the tune of millions of dollars per year by Harvard libraries.

Journal costs are skyrocketing and free market processes are failing to control costs--STM publishers can charge what they want without regard to value because they have a monopoly on the content that you have given them.  More and more you will be seeing "This article is not included in your organization's subscription " because libraries can no longer afford to buy back the content that has been freely given to the publishers. Commercial publishers make up to 40% profit on work produced here at Harvard and other research institutions. How can we establish some control over these costs and at the same time make it easier for you to regain control of your rights to use your own work?

Come to a Town Meeting and discuss what we can do to fix scholarly communication!

Libraries can be catalysts for translational research

It's an open secret that most major academic health centers are lagging in providing their researchers with state of the art knowledge in the computational techniques required to analyze data sets with tens of thousands of variables. The exponential growth of the generation of these data sets over the last decade has far outstripped the ability of the average post-doctoral student to analyze them. With the advent of libraries whose curatorial taste and reference expertise now extends to vast biomedical data sets and their analysis, we are well positioned to catalyze the diffusion of bioinformatics expertise through the research community. One such example is heralded here at the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center.

When is obesity as infectious as tuberculosis (or even more)?

As part of our Notable Books series, Nicholas Christakis will be reviewing the interesting relationship between our social networks and disease burden (and related phenomena). This is in context of his recently published book:Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. Time: December 10th, 4pm. Place: Countway Library of Medicine, 5th floor, Ballard auditorium.

Information Technology is Central to the Conduct of Medicine

Medicine always was a discipline of information processing. We took data (signs and symptoms) from the patient, matched them against our knowledge-base (the hopefully updated residue of medical school) and then came up with a interwoven diagnostic and therapeutic plan. We then understood that this information processing could be automated. But then, there were no electronic medical record systems that could truly provide the data that such automation required. Decades later, the federal government is trying to make a concerted push into this arena, one that explicitly includes the patient (us) as an active participant in this information processing enterprise. Yesterday, we wrapped up an interesting meeting attended by representatives of the government, academia, and industry to address some specific opportunities to catalyze successful deployment.

Never Ending STories

In preparation for a conference on substitutable platforms in health IT, I was directed to an instance of a growing form of self-publication that we call the Never Ending STory (NEST). This instance of NEST is the knol which has become an increasingly popular venue for publications including ones that look a lot like standard peer reviewed journals. More generally, a NEST starts as an embryonic paper. With iteration and with the help of co-author and reader suggestions, it incubates a mature manuscript. Unlike a blog, it is not just a snapshot of a narrative perspective in a sequence of snapshots, but a single integrated document. Unlike a wikipedia article it does not claim encyclopedic authoritativeness (or at least sole authoritativeness so that disagreeing contributors have to battle it out) but only the moderated perspective of the authors. Unlike a standard peer review article, it's publication does not signify the end of its incubation and the hatching of a fully mature narrative. And it is timely and time efficient to make NEST's more prevalent. How often, have you read a scientific article from five years ago and wondered if more recent developments had influenced the authors' perspective on their prior results and/or conclusions? Would it not be more effective to allow the author to update their articles (while maintaining an archival history of all prior versions) so that they continue to be current? Or if there were additional data that bolstered the case of the original article, the author could add these data to that article without having to go through an entire process of a new publication just for the incremental data. That would reduce unnecessary publication noise and increase the value of the article to the reader.

Although, right now, we are using the knol as the infrastructure for our NESTs, we can hope that academic publishers will provide vehicles of similar functionality. Until, then we will just have to incubate our own.

Accidental Neurosurgery

An interesting footnote for one of the more famous inhabitants of the Countway's Warren Museum.

Another perspective from the Boston Globe.