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Explore Medieval and Renaissance Medical and Scientific Manuscripts

March 1, 2019 - 10:35am by Melissa Grafe

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is pleased to announce that our medieval and Renaissance manuscript collection is now online!  The effort to digitize the manuscripts and make them freely available worldwide was generously funded by the Arcadia Fund. The manuscripts contain early medical and scientific knowledge on a variety of topics, including surgery, gynecology, medicine, herbs and remedies, anatomy, healthful living, astronomy, and mathematics.  They are handwritten in Latin, Italian, Greek, German, and English.  Some are illustrated, like MS18, De herbis masculinis et feminis [and other botanical and zoological works, including the Herbarium of Apuleius].  Turning the pages of this manuscripts reveals numerous hand-colored drawings of plants and animals, including the mandrake root. The mandrake root was valued for a variety of medical uses, including as an aid for reproduction. Mandrake root, as depicted in Harry Potter and in legend, would let out an ear piercing, killer scream when uprooted.   Other manuscripts are filled to the very edges of the paper with text, including marginalia and commentary, like MS11, which has 24 different texts including Aristotelian treatises. The earliest work is the Bamberg Surgery, dating from the 12th century and purchased, like most of this collection, by Library founder and famed neurosurgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing.  As medieval medical scholar Monica Green writes, “The Bamberg Surgery doesn’t get a lot of love in histories of surgery, because of its patchwork character. As [George] Corner himself said, “it is a notebook, a partially organized collection of notes, memoranda, prescriptions, and excerpts from other books.”  Please explore these manuscripts on Cushing/Whitney Library site on Internet Archive, as part of the Medical Heritage Library.   You can also find other Arcadia-funded digitized texts, including Yale Medical School theses and early Arabic and Persian books and manuscripts, in this collection.  The Library plans to make the medieval and Renaissance manuscripts available through Findit, Yale University Library’s Digital Collections site.

Finding Drug Information

February 27, 2019 - 1:37pm by Caitlin Meyer

Despite the promise of tools like Quicksearch and the breadth of massive databases like Scopus, certain types of information simply cannot be found in one place. No need to fret, though! We've got you covered. This series of blog posts will serve as a home of recommended resources and searching tips for hard-to-find types of information. Have a suggestion for a subject? Shoot me an email!  Assembled by Alexandria Brackett Drug information -- what does that mean? It's an incredibly broad topic: Some resources cover progress on drug development and industry, some resources offer drug interaction details, some resources identify generic options for trade name drugs. Here you'll find a curated collection across all of these areas and more. Feel free to reach out with any questions! Recommended Resources  ClinicalKey - Drug Monographs  ClinicalKey is an online resource designed to provide answers to clinical questions. ClinicalKey draws from a collection of clinical resources covering most medical and surgical specialty. DailyMed  National Library Medicine (NLM) database that provides trustworthy information about marketed drugs in the United States. Litt’s D.E.R.M. Database  Litt’s Drug Eruption and Reaction (D.E.R.M.) Database allows you to search the profiles of generic and trade name drugs, while also providing references that link directly to PubMed. The Medical Letter  Critical appraisals of new prescription drugs and comparative reviews of drugs for common diseases. Micromedex Healthcare Series  Micromedex provides a wide range of databases tailored to meet the needs of healthcare professionals, including information related to drugs, acute care, toxicology, and patient education. Patient education materials are included in the CareNotes module of Micromedex. Natural Medicines  Combines the Natural Standard and the Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database resources. Drug Industry Information Resources Medscape - News & Perspective Medscape Reference offers medical news, expert interpretations of news, point-of-care information, drug and disease information, and opportunities for CME. Business Source Complete  Offers full-text access to top scholarly business journals, magazines, & trade publications, dating back as far as 1886. Also offers access to industry profiles, company reports & SWOT analyses, market research, & country reports. IBISWorld  Features key statistics, product segmentation, and outlooks/forecasts for over 700 US industries. Also includes Global, UK, & China reports. Thompson ONE Features company financials and filings, earnings estimates, M&A data, analyst reports, company deals, takeover defenses and much more Drug Development Resources ClinicalTrials.gov  NLM database of privately and publicly funded clinical studies conducted around the world. Patient Volume Data  The Patient Volume Databases offer access to nationwide patient samples to track activity in various treatment settings. Statistics available may include discharge rates, demographic information, concomitant diagnoses and/or procedures, and drug information. The databases cover a large number of ICD-9 codes, and are also searchable by keyword. Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL)  The Cochrane Library is produced by the Cochrane Collection and is a collection of databases designed to provide high-quality, independent evidence to inform healthcare decision making. CENTRAL is a highly concentrated source of reports of randomized and quasi-randomized controlled trials. Innovation & Entrepreneurship Research Guide  This guide features resources made available by the Yale University Library that students can use to learn about industries, research competitors, and understand markets.  

Picturing Disability Technology

February 27, 2019 - 9:47am by Melissa Grafe

Our first 2018-19 Ferenc Gyorgyey fellow, Jaipreet Virdi, Ph.D., shares an aspect of her research on disability technology through photographs and postcards, with little help from Twitter… Picturing Disability Technology Written by Jaipreet Virdi* In a 2014 article, historian Katherine Ott expressed: “Both the artifacts owned and used by people with disabilities and those that are used upon them or that are encountered in life create possibilities, impose limits, assert political and ideological positions, and shape identity.”[1] This statement has guided my research on the material culture of disability and the nature of disability as both an individual experience and a collective one. By examining how disabled people created, modified, and used technologies, tools, and machines as a medium of social interaction, my work aims to conceptualize how such objects shaped the meanings and management of disability – to understand, as Toby Siebers has written, the ways in which objects are “viewed not as potential sources of pain but as marvelous examples of the plasticity of the human form or as devices of empowerment.”[2] My research also examines representations of disability technologies: how did disabled people ascribe meanings and values to their objects? Wheelchairs, canes, walkers, braces, spectacles, hearing aids, prosthetics, and etc., all color various interactions with disability. Since most of these technologies are essential for navigating (sometimes literally) the world, visual representations of disabled people with these technologies provides us with valuable insight for understanding people’s lived experiences of disability. In photographs, for instance, everything from poses, dress, props, and the inclusion of disability technology, are visual evidence of conscious decisions to frame an image of disability. Such images enable us to perceive the kinds of technologies people used, how they adapted them to their bodies, and how they personalized them to reduce the stigma of “otherness”[3] or “freakery.”[4] The Robert Bogdan Disability History Collection at the Medical Historical Library (in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University) contains over 3,500 photographs and ephemera representing disability. Since the 1980s, Bogdan had collected such representations, ranging from the 1870s-when photographic images became popularized—to the 1970s at the heights of the disability rights movement. Bogdan’s 2012 collaborative book with Martin Elks and James A. Knoll, Picturing Disability: Beggar, Freak, Citizen, and Other Photographic Rhetoric (Syracuse University Press), provides a broader historical context of the collection, including a history of different types of citizen portraits. The carte de visite was the most common photographic format from 1860 to 1885, with each photograph printed from a negative and mounted on a piece of thin cardboard; some people chose to have the photograph on a postcard, so as to send messages to family and friends. Cabinet cards were also popular at the end of the nineteenth century, though they were three times larger than the carte de visite. Citizen portraits were often taken at a local studio, positioning subjects to “echo family visual rhetoric, not disability conventions”—there is no obvious attempt to conceal the disability, for it is part of the family reality as conveyed in the photograph.[5] Other photographs also use props and positioning of people to convey “normal life” within an inconsequential setting to frame an image’s ordinariness, instead of using disability to define the situation.[6] Disability technologies and other visual indicators of disability are prominently present in many of these photographs. As Bogdan points out, “their presence is not so intrusive as to change this picture’s place in the category of atypical family photograph.”[7] In this wedding portrait, for instance, the two women in wheelchairs are part of the wedding party and positioned to provide balance—the same way a photographer will arrange individuals according to height to obtain symmetry in portraits—without drawing much attention to their wheelchairs.   Wedding party with 2 women in wheelchairs, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs.   These photos also do not tend to specifically feature the disability object, rather positioning the people within normal portraiture conventions, whether it is to show romance or familial ties. The use of additional props, moreover, were used to further confine the photographs within portraiture traditions – the disability technology, though consciously included in the photos, are not the subject of the portrait. Rather, it is the people and their relationships with each other. As Bogdan asserts, “Although some of the images were shared, even sent through the mail, they were distributed privately to intimates, family members, and friends. They were not produced for commercial public relations, to solicit money, to sell, or for personal or organizational gain.”[8] Through these images, we can see most assuredly that people with disabilities were “too busy living to be restrained by our post-structuralist worries over the cultural contingencies of what they did or who they were,” as Ott has remarked.[9]   Assorted photographs of women in wheelchairs accompanied by other people, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs. Assorted photographs of women in wheelchairs accompanied by other people, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs.   Assorted photographs of women in wheelchairs accompanied by other people, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs.   One series of photographs piqued my interest: of individuals outdoors in wheelchairs that have chains attached to the wheels. This design feature appears in different styles of wheelchairs, but I have never previously encountered it in my research, either in manuscripts and archives, or in material culture collections. Inspecting the photographs, I took an educated guess: would these be for raising or hoisting the individual from the chair? My guess didn’t seem right to me, so I took my question to twitter.     As historians have discussed, crowdsourcing on social media is useful for harnessing participatory knowledge. It blurs the boundaries between specialist and non-specialist knowledge, offering new insights for working with primary sources. What seemed to me to be a questionable, confusing design feature was quite obvious to others – the wheelchair is a hand-crank, with the chains fixed to move the wheels the same way that a bicycle pedal moves a bicycle. Now, since I don’t own or ride a bicycle, chain gears were not something I was familiar with, but others have shared their knowledge to enable me to paint a better picture of how this design feature was useful for wheelchair users. The exchange on twitter formed a conversation about self-propelled wheelchairs that governed my research through the Bogdan collection and the broader history of the wheelchair. Litters, swings, cradles, carts, carrying-chairs or sedan chairs were used prior to the formation of the wheelchair as we know it, and individual chairs were not mass-produced until the mid-twentieth century to assist the increasing numbers of soldiers surviving from spinal cord injuries. Wheelchairs became associated with disability and thus, users were stigmatized and perceived as unable to contribute to society. These photographs, however, reveal the extent to which disabled people governed their own lives and sought to be self-sufficient, even taking an action pose in their studio portraits to represent their maneuverability. Man in wheelchair formed like a cart, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs.   As Penny Wolfson has shown, users relied on their own craftsmanship or that of others to shape a mobility device for their own needs.[10] Wheelchairs could be made by adding cart wheels on dining or library chairs, by repurposing motorcycle engines, or adding gears for hand-cranked wheelchairs. While most nineteenth-century wheelchairs were manufactured by furniture makers prizing comfort, adaptability, and mobility, some users repurposed from household furniture and included crafted additions for comfort: home-sewn cushions, crocheted blankets or feet mats, and trinkets attached to spokes. These features provide us with clues into the personalized relationship between user and technology, presenting experiences of disability that were not always negative or exclusive. Moreover, photographs of disabled wheelchair users in various settings—in a field, in the streets, on the porch—indicates the challenges of maneuvering within the built environment, especially of navigating on unpaved streets. The wheels, cranks, and other design features that are visible in the photographs additionally reveal variants of disability experience. By the 1970s, wheelchairs became markers of disability as well as symbols of activism, leaving behind intimate traces of their owner(s). And those hand cranks aren’t simply designs of the past; old designs can always be made new again.   *Jaipreet Virdi is a historian of medicine, technology, and disability. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. Her first book, Hearing Happiness: Fakes, Frauds, and Fads in Deafness Cures will be published by The University of Chicago Press. The Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Grant generously supported this research; special thanks to the grant selection committee and to Melissa Grafe. Photograph images from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs. You can find Jai on twitter as @jaivirdi.   [1] Katherine Ott, “Disability Things: Material Culture and American Disability History, 1700-2010,” in Susah Burch and Michael Rembis (Eds.), Disability Histories (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 119. [2] Toby Siebers, “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body,” in Lennard Davis (ed), The Disability Studies Reader (New York & London: Routledge, 2006), 177. [3] Catherine Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other,” The American Historical Review 108.3 (June 2003): 768-793. [4] Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). [5] Robert Bogdan, Martin Elks and James A. Knoll, Picturing Disability: Beggar, Freak, Citizen, and Other Photographic Rhetoric (Syracuse University Press, 2012), 145. [6] Bogdan, Elks, and Knoll, Picturing Disability, 146. [7] Bogdan, Elks, and Knoll, Picturing Disability, 154. [8] Bogdan, Elks, and Knoll, Picturing Disability, 145. [9] Katherine Ott, “The Sum of its Parts: An Introduction to Modern Histories of Prosthetics,” in Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm (eds.), Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 1-42; 3. [10] Penny Lynne Wolfson, “Enwheeled: Two Centuries of Wheelchair Design, from Furniture to Film,” MA Thesis, Cooper-Hewit, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution and Parsons the New School for Design (2014).  

Fair Use Week

February 18, 2019 - 9:25am by Dana Haugh

Celebrate Fair Use Week (February 25 - March 1) with Yale University Libraries! "The week highlights the many uses relying on fair use and helps to inform our academic communities and the public at large about this exception created in the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.  Fair use is described in §107 of the Act and may be used judiciously upon undertaking analysis of the section's four factors: Purpose of the use; Nature of the work being used; Amount of the original work used; and whether there is an effect on the Marketability for the original copyright holder.  This clause in the law allows all individuals the right to use copyrighted works without permission of the copyright holder IF the user, after reasonable assessment of the four factors, finds that the use weighs in favor of fair use.  For more information about fair use and undertaking a fair use analysis, see the fair use tab in this Research Guide under Using Copyrighted Works and the Fair Use Analysis tool also found on the office of General Counsel's Rights Clearance for Digital Projects." The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library will be hosting a fair use popup table on Tuesday, February 26th from 11:30am - 1:30pm. Stop by and learn about fair use and its importance in our community! For a full list of events, please see this page: https://guides.library.yale.edu/copyright-guidance/fair_use_week

Love Data Week 2019 at CWML

February 6, 2019 - 8:32am by Sawyer Newman

February 11 - February 15 Love Data Week aims to raise awareness and build a community to engage on topics related to research data management, sharing, preservation, reuse, and library-based research data services. Learn about and register for data related programing run through the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library below. If you have any questions about Love Data Week at CWML, please email Sawyer Newman at medicaldata@yale.edu.   1. Research Data Management for the Health Sciences Monday, February 11 10:00 am - 11:00 am, TCC Data, data everywhere, but not a drop is usable.  ~Rime of the Modern Researcher Are you a modern researcher? The current capabilities for collecting and generating large data sets mean researchers need to know how to manage their data as a part of their research process. This workshop will overview research data and research data management while providing examples of strategies to keep data findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable (FAIR), and protected.   2. Data Collection Software Demonstration: The REDCap Connection Tuesday, February 12 10:00 am - 11:00 am, TCC REDCap@Yale REDcap is an electronic data collection system that can be used to collect and securely store large datasets.  It is very useful to researchers and widely used throughout the Yale School of Medicine, Public Health, and Nursing Schools. Get connected and learn about this great system: what it is, how it is used, why is needed, and how it relates to other data collection systems being used at Yale. If you have any questions about this session, please email medicaldata@yale.edu.   3. Functional Analysis of Omics Data with Metacore Wednesday, February 13 10:00 am to 12:00pm, C-103 MetaCore is an integrated software suite for functional analysis of Next Generation Sequencing, variant, CNV, microarray, metabolic, SAGE, proteomics, etc. MetaCore is based on a high-quality, manually-curated knowledge base. In this session we will learn how to search the knowledge base and do overrepresentation analysis to identify and learn about the functional significance (relevant pathways, networks, and diseases) of a list of differentially-regulated molecules. The Medical Library provides free access to this online software for Yale affiliates. Please register for a MetaCore account before attending this session. If you have any questions about this class, please email Rolando Garcia-Milian at rolando.milian@yale.edu   4. Excel 2 Wednesday, February 13 10:00 am - 12:00pm, TCC Excel is a commonly used spreadsheet software, but you may not be taking full advantage of its features. The target audience for this two hour class is Excel users who have the basics down, and who are ready to be introduced to some of Excel’s more advanced features. Topics will include formulas (including IF, COUNTIF, VLOOKUP), pivot tables for data summarization, and conditional formatting.       5. Data Services Meet and Greet Thursday, February 14 1:30 pm - 4:30 pm, Hallway outside of the CWML Cushing Whitney Medical Library Data Support Services Learn about the Cushing Whitney Medical Library can help you with your research data through consultations, workshops, and resources, and meet the Data Librarian for the Health Sciences. Towards a Yale Data Initiative - Introducing Yale Center for Biomedical Data Science A brief introduction will be provided to the Yale community on the Center for Biomedical Data Science, including our missions, objectives, members, seminars, training events, web presence, and more. Yale Open Data Access (YODA) Project Come meet and greet the YODA team at Yale. Through experience and input from the public and stakeholders, the YODA Project has iteratively developed a model to make data available to researchers in a sustainable way, in which data sharing becomes a part of the clinical research enterprise of the future. The mission of the YODA Project is to not only increase access to clinical research data, but to promote its use to generate new knowledge.   6. Introduction to R with Swirl Friday, February 15 10:00 am - 11:00 am, TCC R is a powerful programming language that can be used for collecting, cleaning, manipulating, analysing, and visualizing your data. This class will show you how to use the Swirl package to help you teach yourself the basic functions of R. This workshop is designed for those who have never used R previously, and there will also be the opportunity to learn about more advanced tutorials and resources available to you at the end of the workshop.     7. Introduction to Google Analytics Friday, February 15 1:30pm - 2:30pm, TCC Join our Web Services Librarian for a hands-on workshop that will demonstrate how you can use Google Analytics to better understand your website users. This workshop will cover account setup, code snippet installation, the Google Analytics Dashboard, acquisitions, user behaviors and understanding the audience of your website. If you have any questions about this class, please email dana.haugh@yale.edu

Endangered Data Week 2019 at CWML

February 6, 2019 - 8:28am by Sawyer Newman

February 25 - March 1 Endangered Data Week strives to shed light on public datasets that are in danger of being deleted, repressed, mishandled, or lost. Learn about and register for this special programming through the Cushing Whitney Medical Library. If you have any questions about Data Week at CWML, please email medicaldata@yale.edu.     1. Research Data Management for the Health Sciences Monday, February 25 10:00 am - 11:00 am TCC Are you a modern researcher? The current capabilities for collecting and generating large data sets mean researchers need to know how to manage their data as a part of their research process. This workshop will overview research data and research data management while providing examples of strategies to keep data findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable (FAIR), and protected.   2. RSpace Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) Demonstration Monday, February 25 9:30 am - 10:30 am, and 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Location: Anlyan Center TAC N203 Conference Room Guest presenters: Rob Day (Director of Sales at RSpace) and Rory Macneil (CEO and Cofounder at RSpace) The RSpace ELN is designed for labs that want to transition to a compliant and secure documentation platform, but need something that’s intuitive and easy to use.  Something that everyone can get started with quickly, and the PI can use to keep tabs on what’s happening in the lab. Through the demo you will learn how to get started, see options for organizing your lab group, understand sharing and collaboration, be introduced to document and template creation, managing and annotating images, support for chemistry, and learn how to set up and take advantage of the many optional integrations like those with protocols.io, OneDrive and Google Drive. RSpace has some powerful capabilities in the following areas: Flexibility:  RSpace doesn’t force you into a limited number of restricted workflows; it gives you tools to enhance your existing workflows. Traceability: Linking and unique IDs, added to powerful search capability, simplify finding data and documents and relations between them. Connectivity: RSpace is interoperable with a wide range of general purpose and science-specific tools, including file storage apps OneDrive, Google Drive, Box and Dropbox, tools like protocols.io, Github and Slack, and data repositories like Figshare and Dataverse.  It’s easy to get data out of RSpace in a variety of formats, e.g. pdf, html and xml, so you’ll never be locked into RSpace. If you have any questions before the class, please email medicaldata@yale.edu 3. Using Covidence to Improve your Systematic Review Workflow Wednesday, February 27 9:30 - 10:30 am Location: TCC If you are a student, faculty, or researcher working on, or planning to work on a systematic review - this class is for you! From screening to data extraction, this online tool helps streamline the systematic review process. Come learn how Covidence can help you manage the large quantities of citation data data associated with conducting a systematic review.     4. Data Analysis Using Qlucore Omics Explorer Thursday, February 28 10:00 am - 12:00 pm Location: C-103 Qlucore tools enable researchers to quickly visualize, analyze and perform biological exploration (e.g. GSEA) on various data including RNAseq, microarrays, proteomics, miRNA, methylated DNA, metabolomics, lipidomics, mulitplex and FACS data, clinical data, biomarkers, etc.   If you have any questions about this class, please email Rolando Garcia-Milian at rolando.milian@yale.edu   5. Data Discussion: Touring the Cushing Center and the Cushing Tumor Registry Thursday, February 28 11:00 am - 12:00 pm Location: Meet in the lobby of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Lobby “The brains are so cool!” All our visitors say that - but have you heard the story of how this collection came to be, and how researchers are still using these samples today? For Endangered Data Week, we’re offering this special tour exploring how Cushing Tumor Registry has survived a century, and still supports research today. The Cushing Tumor Registry was endangered when researchers moved institutions, when key staffers retired or died, when funding streams dried up, and when environmental conditions threatened preservation. Could this happen to your project? Join Cushing Center Coordinator Terry Dagradi and Research and Education Librarian Kate Nyhan to discuss the continuing life of this extraordinary (and at one time, endangered) collection.   6. Introduction to R with Swirl Friday, March 1 10:00 am - 11:00 am Location: TCC R is a powerful programming language that can be used for collecting, cleaning, manipulating, analysing, and visualizing your data. This class will show you how to use the Swirl package to help you teach yourself the basic functions of R. This workshop is designed for those who have never used R previously, and there will also be the opportunity to learn about more advanced tutorials and resources available to you at the end of the workshop.

New year, new classes!

January 17, 2019 - 11:38am by Caitlin Meyer

You may already know that the library often teaches workshops on EndNote and PubMed, but there is a lot more going on in our teaching spaces these days. This post will highlight five new events you’ll see popping up on the calendar more frequently. Head to the calendar to sign up! Introduction to R with Swirl with Sawyer Newman Learn about installing R, RStudio, and practice R using the R library Swirl! This hands-on workshop is for those who have no experience in R. After a brief introduction and demonstration in R, participants will work on self-guided exercises using the Swirl package. Research Data Management for the Health Sciences with Sawyer Newman Does your research involve data? This workshop will overview research data and the management of research data while providing examples of strategies you can take to make your data easier to navigate, understand and more secure. Introduction to Cytoscape for the analysis, visualization, and integration of data with Rolando Garcia-Milian Cytoscape is an open source platform for analysis and visualization of networked data, molecular interaction networks, and biological pathways. It also allows integrating these networks with annotations, gene expression profiles and other types of data. The workshop covers getting started in Cytoscape, creating and merging networks, visualization, installing add-on applications and more.  Mobile App Mondays with Alyssa Grimshaw Mobile App Mondays are drop-in times to learn about the library’s extensive collection of free mobile applications, troubleshoot problems, and see a demonstration of the weekly featured application.  Walk-in Wednesdays with Caitlin Meyer (mornings) and Alyssa Grimshaw (evenings)  Walk-in Wednesdays are your opportunity to drop by with questions about databases, citation management, searching the literature, or whatever else is on your mind.  Have an idea for a new class? Email Caitlin Meyer.

Resource Spotlight: Global Health

January 17, 2019 - 11:35am by Caitlin Meyer

  Welcome to Resource Spotlight! The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library provides access to an incredible array of databases, e-book collections, software and more. In this series of posts, we’ll be showcasing highlights from our collection. In this edition of Resource Spotlight, we’ll be looking at Global Health. Produced by CABI, an international not-for-profit organization focused on solving problems in agriculture and the environment, Global Health is the premier resource for public health information.  Global Health aims to comprehensively cover public health-oriented topics including biomedical life sciences, chronic diseases, disease diagnosis and therapy, environmental and occupational health, epidemiology and biostatistics, health promotion and wellness, health systems, infectious and vector-borne diseases, nutrition, public health emergencies, tropical and international health, and more.  Though PubMed and Embase may be the go-to resources for a lot of biomedical research, Global Health offers access to thousands of journals that are indexed in neither database. Furthermore, Global Health includes international publications and grey literature sources (proceedings, theses, reports, electronic-only publications), meaning researchers are able to access information on an issue from many perspectives and publication types.  Finally, another distinguishing characteristic of Global Health is its editorial policies. Entrance into the database is governed by subject specialists who select relevant papers. Publications from more than 100 countries are reviewed for inclusion, and non-English papers deemed relevant are translated to broaden access to that research.  At Yale, you can access Global Health through the OvidSP platform. Ovid offers an intuitive search experience that lets you build complex literature searches line by line. You also can save searches and set up automated email alerts, so you can stay up to date on a topic with relatively little work. For questions on how to best use Global Health, please contact Kate Nyhan.   

Common EndNote for Mac issues and how to solve them

October 17, 2018 - 9:56am by Caitlin Meyer

EndNote X8 on Mac computers can be finicky. We've collected some common issues Apple users experience and figured out how to solve them. If you are still struggling to get EndNote working well after you work through this page, feel free to sign up for an EndNote class, check out our EndNote tutorials, visit the walk-in IT help desk on the lower level of the medical library, or contact EndNote support.  “When I try to download the software, my computer says it can’t download it because it’s from an ‘unknown developer’!” Open up System Preferences, then Security & Privacy, navigate to the General tab, and click “Open Anyway”. Proceed with download and install. “When I download citations, the computer says it doesn’t have an application to open that type of file!” Temporary solution: Click “Choose Application” -> EndNote x8 -> EndNote x8 Permanent solution: Open your Downloads folder and right click on the downloaded file. Click “Get Info”. Scroll down to “Open with”, select EndNote, and then click “Change All…”. Now, whenever you download a file with that extension, your computer will know what to do. Common citation file extensions are .nbib, .enw, .cgi, .ciw, and .ris, so you may have to do this multiple times depending on where you like downloading files from. “When I try to open a downloaded file of citations, I get a weird pop-up telling me to choose a library. Even weirder, sometimes it says ‘This library is in use by somebody else’!” I’ve had luck bringing my EndNote library back up on the screen and then opening my downloaded file. If the library is minimized or if you’d exited out of EndNote, these problems may occur more often.   “When I use Find Full Text, it isn’t finding anything, says ‘Searching…’ forever, or freezes my computer!” 1.     Connect Find Full Text to library resources. Go to EndNote in the upper left-hand corner -> Preferences -> Find Full Text -> then type http://wa4py6yj8t.search.serialssolutions.com in the OpenURL Path box. 2.     Were you connected to the Yale Guest network at any point today? Exit out of EndNote, make sure you’re connected to Yale Secure, open EndNote, try again. “When I open Word to start writing, I don’t see EndNote as an option!” Go to EndNote, click on EndNote in the upper left-hand corner, and click Customizer. Next to Cite While You Write in the list of components, check the box to install the plug-in. The progress bar may get to the end and the window won’t close. If this happens, force quit EndNote and then restart EndNote and Word. It should work now. “When I try to insert a citation in Word, the ones I’m looking for don’t come up!” Make sure you’re hitting enter after you type an author’s name. If it’s still not working, in Word on the EndNote tab, select Preferences, then Application, then make sure “EndNote” is selected – not “EndNote online.” “When I try to open my EndNote library, it says it’s corrupted or that it can’t open it!” When you create an EndNote library, you also create a .Data folder with the same name. The .enl library file and the .Data folder need to be kept in the same place, or else the library can’t open. “When I try to import PDFs I already have on my computer, I’m not having much luck!” In EndNote, select File then Import. Select Options, then in Import Options select PDF File or Folder.   If you have had any other problems you've encountered and solved, and think they would be helpful additions to this list, contact Caitlin Meyer. 

Fall Class Highlights

August 31, 2018 - 3:26pm by Caitlin Meyer

Are you looking to brush up on your basic literature searching skills? Trying to use PubMed or EndNote and encountering difficulties? Need to set up SciENcv? Our fall workshop calendar has everything you may need and more for a productive fall term. Read on for details or head straight to the class calendar. In addition to weekly PubMed and EndNote classes, here are some of the classes coming up this fall that any member of the Yale community is welcome to register for and attend:  Basic Library Classes  Free resources and support in support of research  Second Tuesdays at noon Have you ever wondered what services and resources the library provides to help you with your research? In just 20 minutes, you’ll learn about first-class bioinformatics software, specialized databases, support for grant compliance, systematic review searching, statistics consultants, and more! Academic Job Search Series at Cushing/Whitney Medical Library The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is excited to participate in this year’s Academic Job Search Series in partnership with the Office of Career Strategy, the Center for Teaching & Learning, and the Graduate Writing Lab.  Tools for Keeping Current & Staying Organized October 4th Expand your toolkit for keeping current with the literature in your field and staying organized during the job search process. This session will cover: setting email alerts in various databases, setting up EndNote as a personal database, and using Trello to track job applications throughout the process. My Bibliography and SciENcv: grant reporting, compliance, and biosketch through MyNCBI October 11th Learn how to create a MyNCBI account and link it to eRA Commons, delegate your account, populate and manage My Bibliography, learn how to use SciENcv to create multiple biosketches, create an ORCID, and more! Special Topic Classes Excel 1 & Excel 2 September 18 & October 4 In part one, refresh your basic Excel skills and move onto some intermediate topics such as formatting spreadsheets, sorting, filters, text-to-columns, combing data, and trimming. In part two, learn advanced functionality such as IF, COUNTIF, VLOOKUP, pivot tables, and conditional formatting. Creating Surveys with Qualtrics September 20 Qualtrics is a web-based tool provided by Yale ITS to create surveys. This hands-on class will prepare you to create your own online survey using the Qualtrics user-friendly interface. By the end of the class you will be able to: create a survey with multiple question types, distribute the survey in various ways, and view/analyze results. 
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