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         The Medical Historical Library is the new home for a large collection of approximately 3,800 short published works on topics related to child welfare used by Arnold Gesell and the staff of the Yale Child Study Center as a reference collection. Topics include children and the war; day care centers; education; infant mortality; juvenile delinquency; intellectual disability and the eugenics movement; mental health; mental illness; nurseries; and nutrition. A portion of collection materials documents organizations and conditions relevant to child welfare in New Haven and Connecticut. Materials in the collection include pamphlets, reprints, newsletters, newspaper clippings, and reports published between 1886 and 1958, with the bulk of materials published between 1910 and 1950. Multiple publications in the collection were authored by Arnold Gesell and Yale School of Medicine faculty and staff.  The collection, the Yale Child Study Center reference collection (Pam Coll 11), is open for research in the Medical Historical Library, and searchable in the online finding aid, down to the title of each published work. The Yale Child Study Center was founded in 1911 by Arnold Gesell. At that time Gesell had completed a PhD in psychology and was working towards an MD at the Yale School of Medicine, which he completed in 1915. Gesell obtained the use of a room in the New Haven Dispensary to continue his previous work with children with disabilities and created the Yale Clinic of Child Development. Gesell became known for his studies of child development at the clinic. Using one-way mirrors to photograph and film researchers interacting with children, he documented developmental milestones for children from infancy through adolescence. Gesell was a prodigious writer, publishing numerous articles and more than a dozen books about his findings for the scientific community and the general public. His most famous work, An Atlas of Infant Behavior, contains 3,200 photographs captured from sessions at the clinic. Dr. Gesell was the director of the clinic until his retirement in 1948. Today, the Yale Child Study Center is a department of the Yale School of Medicine dedicated to improving the mental health of children and families, advancing understanding of their psychological and developmental needs, and treating and preventing childhood mental illness through the integration of research, clinical practice, and professional training. The center serves as the Department of Child Psychiatry for the Yale School of Medicine and Yale New Haven Hospital; is a center for basic neurodevelopment research on the earliest neurodevelopment and behavioral problems troubling children; and provides services in clinics, community settings, homes, and pediatric practices. The center’s faculty are engaged in domestic and international policy making; provide trainings in child psychiatry, social work, child psychology, research, specific intervention and prevention approaches, and in special areas of children’s mental health; and are engaged in research on the genetic and neurobiological basis of childhood psychiatric disorders.

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is delighted to welcome three new staff members to our team: Megan Nance, Kaitlin Throgmorton, and Laura Juliano. Megan Nance joined the Access and Delivery Services team as the Evening/Weekend Access Services Librarian. Previously, Megan was at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida where she was Acting Head of Access Services and Archives.   Kaitlin Throgmorton joined the Technology and Innovation team as the Data Librarian for the Health Sciences. Kaitlin came to us from Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit health research organization, where she was the Bioinformatics Analyst and Data Curator.   Laura Juliano joined the Medical Historical Library team as a Term Archivist. Laura will be processing the Gary Burget papers, a large collection of plastic surgery records and materials. Laura most recently interned at the American Civil Liberties Union, and previously worked as a Collections Assistant at the Brooklyn Historical Society.  

The Medical Historical Library announces that the Wilfrid Rall computational neuroscience research collection (Ms Coll 83) is now open for researchers. The collection is a gift of Gordon Shepherd, MD, DPhil, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Neuroscience at Yale, and the family of Wilfrid Rall. Rall (1922-2018) was a neuroscientist whose work focused on the electrical properties of neurons and the functions of neuronal dendrites. His development of cable theory and the compartmental modeling approach for studying dendrites and synaptic integration helped found the discipline of computational neuroscience. The collection documents his research from 1963-1971, particularly his collaborative work with Gordon Shepherd using the compartmental modeling method to study the functional organization of the olfactory bulb. Research notebooks, correspondence, and reprints of Rall’s publications are included in the archive. Rall’s research notebooks are fully digitized and freely available online. The 11 notebooks, dating from 1963-1971, document his research on dendritic function. Shepherd writes, “Rall used to record the day’s computer runs, calculations and discussions, hypotheses, summaries of progress, and plans for the future. The volumes are a running record of his busy life as one of the first neuroscience biophysicists, and his conscientious efforts to keep up with the many projects and thoughts stimulated by his work. They provide unique insights into how Rall in his earliest work brought together several disciplines in creating the computational approach to analyzing the functional organization of neurons and neuronal microcircuits as the basis for the future field of computational neuroscience.”  

Welcome to Open Access Week 2021!  Visit this page for daily updates with short activities you can complete to learn more about open access publishing and show you support for greater transparency in the scholarly publishing industry.  From SPARC, “Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.”  Open access allows researchers around the world to access scholarship with no waiting periods or embargos, allowing research results to be disseminated and built upon more quickly.  Did you know that the Yale Library supports open access publishing?  We fund a number of membership programs that reduce or eliminate article processing charges (APCs) associated with open access articles for Yale authors.  Our membership with PLOS waives all APCs in all PLOS journals for any article with a Yale corresponding author.  Find more information about library support for open access here.  Take our Open Access Week 2021 Quiz for an opportunity to win a prize up to $25 in value from the Yale bookstore!

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is delighted to welcome two new staff members to our team.  On the Academic and Research Education team we welcomed Kayla Del Biondo and Sofia Fertuzinhos. Kayla Del Biondo joins us as the Simbonis Librarian for Public Health. Kayla will work with Kate Nyhan in providing support to the YSPH community, particularly students, as well as assist Lindsay Barnett with scholarly communication projects and topics, such as open access, copyright, and processing YSPH and other student theses.      Sofia Fertuzinhos joins our Bioinformatics Support Hub as the Research and Education Librarian for Bioinformatics. Sofia received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Yale and the University of Coimbra in Portugal as part of a prestigious joint program. Sofia has worked in neuroscience labs at Yale since 2010, first as a postdoctoral associate, postdoctoral fellow, and associate research scientist.