New Clinical Education LibrarianI’m happy to announce that
April Aguiñaga, of the Maricopa Integrated Health System, has applied for and been granted an appointment as a Clinical Education Librarian. April joins these librarians who work with our students, residents or faculty in supporting our educational mission: Sally Harvey and Lora Robbins from Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center, Phoenix, Becky Birr, also from the Maricopa Integrated Health System, Phoenix, Kathy Zeblisky from Phoenix Children’s Hospital, Phoenix, Marni Ditmar and Bruce Chandler from Tucson Medical Center and Kathleen Carlson from the Arizona State University Downtown Phoenix Campus.
Carol’s workAs many of you know, Carol has spent half of her time working on the Reynolds grant through the Section of Geriatrics in the College of Medicine. Her part of the project has been so successful and has brought in so many compliments that she was given an appointment as Clinical Assistant Professor, Medicine, in the College. As of July 1 Carol will be paid directly by the Geriatrics Section for this appointment for the duration of the grant. We will continue to pay her for the remaining 51% of her library time.
Stacks projectAs part of our efforts to insure that library space is used to the best advantage of our user community, we are working on a project to review our stack space. After rearranging the 3rd floor stacks during the move from the 4th floor, we have found that some areas of the collection are “tight” and some are packed more loosely. Collections cannot be too tight as we are still getting some paper subscriptions and we sometimes need to do some shifting.
It’s become clear that students like to have a variety of study spaces available. So we have started identifying journal titles that we own in print and electronically. Some of these print volumes are candidates for removal from the stacks. At first, this will help the shelving situation. Eventually we hope to carve out some small spaces in the stacks where study tables can be placed. Currently Collection Services staff are identifying titles that can be removed and the IS Desk staff are pulling the print volumes.
Flashlights We’ve just purchased four emergency flashlights. They plug into the wall and come on automatically if the power goes out. They are located in these areas: Information Desk, Annabelle and Jennifer’s office, Interlibrary Loan, near the Bookeye scanner, and in the Administrative Conference Room in the office.
Kristy, Lindsey and I were thrilled to welcome our (wonderful) 48 new students and got several good hours and quality time with them to provide what we are calling Managing Medical Information I and II. In the first session we quickly reviewed reasons to start at the AHSL home page and key navigation recommendations. In Session II, we went more deeply into how to conduct effective searches, focusing on the EBM Search Engine and PubMed. We were fortunate to have cases with which to work and for the students to relate to, and we believe our results (gratitude, enthusiasm, participation and no sleepers!) show that we were effective. We are grateful to two CELs, Kathleen Carlson and Lora Robbins who were invaluable with the hands-on sections. Their presence also introduced students to two area librarians they can work with and consult. Tomorrow we have a session on mobile computing, and next week, we see our new MS-2s in their first week of class which focuses on Biomedical Informatics. We have also been included as faculty for the learning community/scholarly project (called Scholarly Project 101) curriculum and will be in class with the students for those sessions.
