The SEA/NNLM is offering a free webinar titled, 'The Changing Hospital Library Environment: New Roles for Librarians'. It will be held on February 15 at 11:00am CST.

There is no need to pre-register.

UPDATE- 2/24/12
A recording of this webinar is now available. I highly recommend viewing this, even if you're not a hospital librarian as there were great ideas for all librarians.

The University of Utah Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library will be offering a free, online stream of the lecture, 'eScience and the Evolution of Library Services'. It will be held on February 22 from 2:00 - 3:00 CST.

Kathy Broyles is this year's Librarian of the Year!

Her accomplishments this past year are many, and include: serving her profession as Archives Committee Chair, she has served on SCC's Credentialing Committee, and is a former MLA Awards Committee Chair. She has done lots of things at UNTHSC as well, such as organizing outreach events while there was a hiring freeze in place, and taking continuing development courses that lead to a certificate in Archives Management. Her positive attitude and research expertise has made her the 'unofficial' head of the Reference Office at UNTHSC. Way to go Kathy!

Shelly Burns, HealthLINE Treasurer, was recently honored by her Texas Woman's University Library colleagues by being named the very first winner of the Elizabeth Snapp Award for Excellence in Librarianship. She received a cash award and a plaque. The award, named in honor of TWU Library Director Emeritus Elizabeth Snapp, is for a full-time MLS librarian serving at a TWU campus in Denton, Dallas or Houston. Congratulations, Shelly!

The Association of Research Libraries has recently published a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries. A PDF is available for free from the ARL website.

Thanks to Lisa Huang from Collin College for sending along information about a boycott against Elsevier that is gaining momentum.

An online pledge was created by Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge. The pledge asks scientists not to publish, referee or do editorial work for any Elsevier title. It now has over 3,000 signers (as of Feb 2, 2012). Impressive work considering that the pledge has been up for less than a week.

Perhaps Elsevier will pay more attention to the complaints of the content creators, editors, and peer reviewers than they have to us librarians!

Medical librarian and blogger, Mark MacEachern linked to a BMJ article that looks at the accuracy of the MEDLINE Randomized Control Trial publication type. They found that not all RCT's are indexed with the matching publication type- no real surprise there.

Mark also linked to an article on creating search filters to pull up RCT's that might not be correctly indexed. It's titled, Retrieving Randomized Control Trials: A Comparison of 38 Published Search Filters. Helpful if you need to create a very thorough search.

I try to steer clear of politics or legislation of any sort on the HealthLINE blog, but I have been seeing a lot posted on the Research Works Act published on library, medical and science blogs over the last week or so. And as it directly relates to what most of us do as medical librarians, I wanted to put a few links out there so those of us not up to speed on this issue can learn more about it.

The Research Works Act is a bill that was introduced into the US House on December 16, 2011, and it appears to be another attempt (the third since 2008) to circumvent the NIH's open access policy. The Association of American Publishers is a supporter (of course) and here is an excerpt from their website:

"The Research Works Act will prohibit federal agencies from unauthorized free public dissemination of journal articles that report on research which, to some degree, has been federally-funded but is produced and published by private sector publishers receiving no such funding. It would also prevent non-government authors from being required to agree to such free distribution of these works."

More Information:

• Action Alert from the MLA
• An NYT op-ed piece by Michael Eisen
• ALA's opposition to the bill
• Blog post from The Digital Shift (Library Journal)
• Blog post from ePatients.net
• Blog post from Scientific American
• Blog post from the Society Pages
• Open Access Archivangelism blog post

I love using Medline statistics to show the value of medical librarians to our clinicians. I like to ask, "Do you really want to be trying to keep up with the literature on your own when there are almost 3,000 new citations added to Medline every day?" Of course not!!

I get these numbers from the very interesting Key Medline Indicators page from the NLM.

Did you know that there were 1.8 billion Medline searches last year? By the way I felt at the end of the year, I'm pretty sure I performed about half of those!

I really love the iMedical Apps blog for discovering what's new and cool in health-related apps for all mobile devices. Their website is a bit overrun with ads, but it helpfully breaks down apps by device and by medical specialty.

Karen Kraft of the Krafty Librarian blog announced today that iMedical Apps now has a forum dedicated to medical librarians. There are already a couple interesting topics including the best library lists of medical apps and a discussion on institutional/library purchasing apps for their patrons.