Blogs

Cushing/Whitney Medical Library loves public health, and so we’re celebrating National Public Health Week with the American Public Health Association. In the first week of April, you can enjoy daily public health-themed literature workshops and daily social media postings of our favorite public health posters from the Medical Historical Library. But wait, there’s more! Are you part of APHA’s #1BillionSteps Challenge, encouraging everyone to do consistent physical activity? Would you like to get a few more steps in your day? We’ve got your back! During National Public Health Week, you can join the #1BillionSteps Challenge, Library Edition – right here at Yale. It’s easy and fun! Walk over to visit another library on campus. Take a selfie with something special there. Post your pictures on Instagram with hashtags – especially #SteppingOutAtYale You can win a healthy prize from the medical library! With five libraries to visit, maybe you should check out one every day! Use these hashtags and mentions to tell Instagram about your travels. 147 steps from LEPH to Cushing/Whitney Medical Library See how close we are? Pop over to the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library and take a selfie with Harvey Cushing, our library founder, in the beautiful Medical Historical Library. Walk the long way, by Blue State and in the front of Sterling, to get more steps! And while you’re here, stop in and say hi to public health librarian Kate Nyhan. #SteppingOutAtYale @yalemedhistlib #HappyBirthdayHarvey #1BillionSteps #NPHW #NPHW17 @americanpublichealth #litreviewpleasehelp 1056 steps to Robert B. Hass Family Arts Library Are you looking for a laugh? Visit the Robert B Hass Family Arts Library, where librarians Meredith Hale and Jae Rossman have created a special pop-up exhibition for National Public Health Week! Starting at 10AM on Monday, you can see historical sports imagery from the American Trading Card Collection and An Almanac of Twelve Sports. Look for it behind the glass of the special collections area downstairs, any time the library is open. Thanks @hassartslibrary for these #SpecialCollections! #SteppingOutAtYale #1BillionSteps #NPHW #NPHW17 @americanpublichealth 1478 steps to Lillian Goldman Law Library Do you need a giant rabbit in your life? Of course you do! Visit the Lillian Goldman Law Library and meet Pufendorf. Pufendorf is a symbol of resilience, having survived not only the 2003 Yale Law School bombing but also a kidnapping by 3L’s. Photography is normally forbidden in the law library, but you have a special dispensation for selfies with Pufendorf – if you can find him! Here’s how: Enter the law school from the Wall Street entrance. At the main staircase (right in the middle of the main hallway) go left and down into Library Level 2 (L2) which houses the computer lab, IT, the Rare Book Room, and Tech Services. There is another set of stairs on the left past the Rare Book Room. You’ll find Pufendorf at the base of the stairs. #SteppingOutAtYale #1BillionSteps #NPHW #NPHW17 @americanpublichealth #totemicdappledrabbit 1479 steps to Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Do you want to enjoy history, art, and rare memorabilia of the Harlem Renaissance? Visit the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Explore their rich exhibition “Gather Out of Star-Dust” – what will be your favorite part? The playful map of Harlem nightlife – go right from the entrance; it’s hung to make selfies irresistible The 1917 Silent Protest Parade – go left from the entrance Langston Hughes’s collection of rent party cards – second level behind the Cube. Art, photographs, and sheet music about dancing – all over! Check out the whole exhibit. You’ll love it! And pick up an exhibit pamphlet with a reproduction of the Harlem map, too. Thanks @beineckelibrary #HarlemRen #SteppingOutAtYale #1BillionSteps #NPHW #NPHW17 @americanpublichealth 1267 steps to Sterling Memorial Library Do you want to see the mother ship of Yale University Libraries? Visit Sterling Memorial Library and explore the beautiful nave. Check out the stained glass, and visit the Yale printing press. #SteppingOutAtYale @yalelibrary #1BillionSteps #NPHW #NPHW17 @americanpublichealth You can be a winner! Everyone who participates in #SteppingOutAtYale and #1BillionSteps gets fresh air and exercise – and the winners will also get packets of vegetable seeds and local, sustainable maple syrup from the Yale Landscape Lab! All you have to do is post a library selfie on Instagram with the hashtag #SteppingOutAtYale. The more posts, the better your chances of winning a prize -- thank you @yalewestcampus #yalelandscapelab #maplefest2017 Get in touch Contact public health librarian Kate Nyhan with questions, comments,  boasts about how many steps you’ve taken, and complaints that these figures are off. Email kate.nyhan@yale.edu or click here to set up a meeting to talk about literature searching and more. Thank you Thanks to all the participating libraries and their staff, medical library colleagues, the Yale Sustainability Program and Landscape Lab, APHA, and the Medical Library Association’s Public Health/Health Administration section.  

Love Your Data week is coming! Libraries at Yale are celebrating this international event to help researchers take better care of their data.  #LoveYourData events at Cushing/Whitney Medical Library Data Horror Stories -- Brown Bag Lunch, 2/13/2017Data Valentines -- 2/15/2017 On Tuesday you'll celebrated your loved ones; on Wednesday, you can celebrate your loved ones and zeroes! Create a Valentine to the dataset of your choice. Maybe you and your dataset have been growing together for many years, or maybe you're in the first flush of exploring your data's documentation and variables. If you love your data, tell us about it!  Cushing Center Tour: The Cushing Tumor Registry as a Live Dataset -- 2/17/2017 You may have seen the Cushing Center, with brains, photographs and more -- but have you heard the story of how the collection came to be, how some samples, photographs, and other metadata survived until the twenty-first century, and how researchers are still using these samples today? Join Cushing Center Coordinator Terry Dagradi and Research and Education Librarian Kate Nyhan to discuss the continuing life of this extraordinary collection -- and how lucky we are that the collection has survived intact for so long.  More #LoveYourData events at Yale Check out more events celebrating Love Your Data week! From a workshop on data documentation to an emulation station where you can try out a live demo of '90s games, there's something for everyone. Follow along with #LYD17 and #loveyourdata on Twitter, too! Want more information? Contact librarian Kate Nyhan, and check out Yale's guides to research data management and research data support.

Like other staff at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, I sometimes benefit from professional development support from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine. With their generous support, I participated in #GL18, Leveraging Diversity in Grey Literature, at the New York Academy of Medicine. Some key themes: First, from the perspective of the researcher: keep an open mind about the types of documents that might be relevant, or even essential, to a research question. Perhaps you could mine the differences between transcripts and written testimony before Congressional committees, or maybe you’ll ingest community documents in every format to document bicycle policy. Thoughtful researchers are integrating new, non-traditional genres of evidence into their work. Medical librarians might not even be aware of the diverse types of grey literature that could be relevant to biomedical and public health questions – such as the governmental administrative materials that are generated by legislative, litigation, and regulatory processes; read “The Elephant in the Room”  by excellent speaker Taryn Rucinski of Pace University Law School for more details. Second, from the perspective of the disseminator: you can facilitate discovery through a combination of pleasant user experience design and interoperable metadata. At the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, at WorldWideScience.org, at NDLTD, this dual path to discoverability appeared again and again. Without good UX and high-quality, machine-readable medatadata, dissemination with be a challenge no matter how great (and free) your material is. Diversity was the stated theme of the conference, and to a degree the endless diversity of grey literature makes it hard to work with. How do I cite it? How do I evaluate it? How do I find it? It always depends. What GL18 has inspired me to do is to think more seriously, before starting to engage with grey literature on any topic, about what I expect I might find, how I can manage it, and how I will know when I’ve found what I need to. In this domain, I’ll admit that GL18 didn’t give me all the answers – but that’s ok, because now I know what the questions are. Thanks again to the New York Academy of Medicine for hosting this event, and to the National Network of Libraries of Medicine for funding my participation, and to all the contributors who shared their work at GL18.  Want more info on grey literature and public health? Contact Kate Nyhan, research and education librarian for public health.

Cushing/Whitney Medical Library has organized these four workshops, two of them on high-throughput data analysis tools and two on NCBI public databases. Although these are free and open to any Yale affiliate, registration is required due to limited seating.   Title:      NGS Data Analysis in Partek® Software: Onsite Workshop   Description:    Morning Session (Overview, Hands On: Analysis on RNA-Seq Data): 9:00AM – 12:00PM Free access to Partek Flow is provided by the Yale Medical Library.  This session will start with an overview of Partek Software solutions followed with a hands on RNA-Seq Data Analysis in Partek Flow. Topics will include how to use statistical tests to identify differentially expressed transcripts and alternative spliced genes among sample groups, how to generate a list of genes of interest and identify high level biological trends using Gene Ontology. Import data (fastq, bam, text format)  Perform QA/AC (Pre-alignment QA/AC, Post-alignment QA/QC) Trim bases Alignment Gene/transcript abundance estimate (E/M)  Differential expression detection (GSA, ANOVA) Filter gene list GO Enrichment Analysis Visualization Quality score distribution Base composition PCA scatterplot Dotplot Volcano plot Hierarchical clustering Chromosome view Afternoon Session (Open Lab; Q&A): 1:30PM – 4:00PM We hope to see you there!   Date & Time:     9:00am - 12:00pm, Thursday, September 29, 2016 Location:           C-103, SHM, 333 Cedar St Campus:           Medical School Presenter:          Eric Seiser, PhD, Field Application Scientist, Partek Inc.   Title: Broadcast. Navigating NCBI Molecular Data Using the Integrated Entrez System and BLAST Description: This workshop will be broadcasted from the Taubman Health Sciences Library, Univ Michigan, and provides an introduction to the NCBI molecular databases and how to access the data using the Entrez text-based search system and BLAST sequence similarity search tool. You will learn the varied types of available molecular data, and how to find and display sequence, variation, genome information using organism sources (Taxonomy), data sources (Bioproject) and emphasizing the central role of the gene as an organizing concept to navigate across the integrated databases (Gene, Nucleotide, Protein, dbSNP and other resources). Location: Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Simbonis Conference Room 101A, 333 Cedar St Presenter: Peter Cooper, Ph.D. of the National Center for Biotechnology Information Date/time: 9:00am - 12:00pm, Tuesday, October 4, 2016   Title: Broadcast. A Practical Guide to NCBI BLAST Description: This workshop will be broadcasted from the Taubman Health Sciences Library, Univ Michigan and highlights important features and demonstrates the practical aspects of using the NCBI BLAST service, the most popular sequence similarity service in the world. You will learn about useful but under-used features of the service. These include access from the Entrez sequence databases; the new genome BLAST service quick finder; the integration and expansion of Align-2- Sequences; organism limits and other filters; re-organized databases; formatting options and downloading options; and TreeView displays. You will also learn how to use other important sequence analysis services associated with BLAST including Primer BLAST, an oligonucleotide primer designer and specificity checker; the multiple protein sequence alignment tool, COBALT; and MOLE-BLAST, a new tool for clustering and providing taxonomic context for targeted loci sequences (16S, ITS, 28S). These aspects of BLAST provide easier access and results that are more comprehensive and easier to interpret. Location: Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Simbonis Conference Room 101A, 333 Cedar St Presenter: Peter Cooper, Ph.D. of the National Center for Biotechnology Information Date/time: 9:00am - 12:00pm, Wednesday, October 5, 2016   Title:      Make new discoveries with your OMICs data: Hypothesis testing and assumption-free exploration Description:        10AM- Noon: Exemplary workflows for different experiment designs Hypothesis testing and Assumption-free data exploration Working with annotations, dynamic and interactive plots Input data: any matrix multivariate data (RNAseq, Microarrays, Proteomics, miRNA, Metabolomics, Lipidomics, methDNA, Mulitplex and FACS, Clinical data, Biomarkers, etc.), as well as publicly available GEO data, gene sets files, gene ontology. Complete list is available here. 1-2PM: Getting started session – take advantage of a trial access for Yale! Have a look the info uploaded to the Yale Library folder, including presentation, case studies, tutorials, etc. Qlucore tools allow researchers to perform advanced visualization, exploration and statistical analysis of omics data with the help of an intuitive GUI. Targets of interest can be further explored in terms of biological insight using GO and GSEA.  Unmatched speed, immediate visual feedback, continuous visualization, and synchronized views significantly shorten both data-to-result and query-to-discovery times. By combining right annotations with statistical methods, data selection tools, and the eliminated factors function, a very broad range of different experiment designs can be analyzed with exceptional productivity. This solution draws upon both innovative and classical approaches, fueled by best-in-class industrial and academic research. Qlucore Omics Explorer helps you advance your research by: boosting the speed of your analysis at least by 50% generating new ideas, hypotheses, and giving you a new prospective on your data, and questions you ask of it helping recognize significant insight that is specific to biological process, disease, or function, as well as assumption-free exploration keeping your projects on track with simple QC checks on every step providing publication ready graphics, and intermediate results for collaboration. Qlucore Omics Explorer is used by big commercial companies as well as major research organizations and Universities across Europe and US. (e.g., Boehringer Ingelheim, Roche Diagnostics,  AstraZeneca, DFCI, BWH, Harvard, MD Anderson, MSKCC, MedImmune, Novo Nordisk, etc.). Date & Time:     10:00am - 12:00pm, Thursday, October 27, 2016 Location:           C-103 - SHM 333 Cedar St Campus:            Medical School Presenter:          Yana Khalina-Stackpole, PhD, Business and Support manager, Qlucore

(by Erin Travers*) Drawing after Jacob van der Gracht's Third Figure, Cushing Manuscript, Yale University. Early-18th century. Red and Black Chalk On the back of a letter from the antiquarian and bookseller Menno Hertzberger, dated 29 March 1927, Harvey Cushing recorded his observations concerning a manuscript of Jacob van der Gracht’s printed drawing book, the Anatomy of the outer parts of the human body (The Hague, 1634; Rotterdam, 1660), which had been sent to Boston from Amsterdam. This text, prepared by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter and engraver for the use of “Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, and also Surgeons,” brought Van der Gracht renown during his life, and continues to be his most well known work today. The manuscript version contains twenty-two pages of text and illustration, including a handwritten version of Van der Gracht’s preface, a section on the bones taken from André du Laurens, fragmented comments on the muscles, and explanatory registers for the accompanying illustrations of skeletal and écorché figures that mimic those published in Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Basel, 1543). Hopeful that the drawings may have been preparatory works for the engraved plates, on inspection, Cushing found that the use of red and black chalk to demarcate the flesh and bones of the figures, while visually pleasing, was not conducive to the medium of print. Moreover, he writes that the larger scale of the figures and the presence of the registers on the back of the illustrations, made it unlikely that these were the final cartoons from which Van der Gracht worked, though they may have been an earlier experiment by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist. Contemplating whether a previous owner may have added the text to the illustrations at a later date, Cushing noted, “The paper, however, in the original seven leaves of text bears the same watermarks as that on which the drawings are made. It would be interesting to know the date and place of this paper.” During my time at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University as a Ferenc Gyorgyey Travel Research Grant recipient, I have pursued Cushing’s curiosity and investigated the watermarks hidden in the paper of the Van der Gracht manuscript to determine the date and location of its production.  Using online databases, including the Memory of Paper,  compiled by the Bernstein Consortium, my research makes use of resources that were not available to Cushing in the early twentieth century. Moreover, it is only with the relatively recent publications on Dutch watermarks, such as Theo and Frans Laurentius’s study of the Zeeland archives, or Nancy Ash, Shelley Fletcher, and Erik Hinterding’s works on Rembrandt’s prints, that this type of research is possible. Yet, despite the advances made in this field since the early twentieth century, this method for dating a work on paper should be approached with caution, as the medium is both geographically and temporally transient, and therefore should be considered as a general guide for attribution. Fleur-de-lys watermark "IV" countermark Together, watermark analysis and study of the formal properties of the drawings offers complementary evidence through which we can determine the relation of the manuscript to the published drawing book. The Cushing manuscript offers a clean and consistent watermark of a Strasbourg Bend, a shield with two diagonal bands that is mounted by a fleur-de-lis, and a countermark of the letters “IV."  Indicting the initials of the paper maker Jean Villedary (1668-1758), the countermark, design of the watermark, their size and relation to the vertical chain lines of the paper are consistent with samples dating from Amsterdam and London between 1718 and 1722, making it likely that the manuscript was produced in the first quarter of the eighteenth century (Churchill, no. 437 and Heaward, nos. 73 and 78). Given this date, the possibility that the drawings could have been executed prior to the publication of the printed text is unlikely, and visual analysis of the figures confirms this hypothesis. The process of engraving in the early modern period entailed the incision of a design into a copper plate, which was coated with ink and then pressed onto a piece of paper, transferring the image and resulting in the reversal of the initial example. Essentially, the preparatory work and final print should appear as mirror images of one another. However, in the case of the Cushing manuscript, the figures share the orientation found in the final prints.  Carefully adhering to the model provided by the prints, the drawn figures that occupy the Cushing manuscript are copies made at a later date, and as such offer information concerning the continued engagement with and changing expectations of these types of illustrations by artists and anatomists. Questions concerning this shift are addressed in my on-going dissertation research, which examines the exchange and adaptation of pictorial knowledge between artists and anatomists in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. I am grateful to the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library for its support of my project, and greatly appreciate the opportunity to investigate an inquiry first raised by Cushing nearly one hundred years ago. *Erin Travers is a PhD candidate, history of art and architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara, and a 2016 Ferenc Gyorgyey Fellow