Shocking! Happy holiday.

New equipment

A defibrillator has been installed in the main hallway of the College of Medicine. This device is used to treat certain kinds of heart attacks. When you head down the hall, it’s on the wall on your left around the corner toward the hospital. It is designed to give you audio guidance when you begin to use it so that no training is required. However we will be offering training sessions in the near future.

Enjoy the holiday

Happy Thanksgiving to all. I hope that everyone has an enjoyable and restful holiday break.

Texting, website, furniture, taxi?

Pilot project at the desk

Information desk staff are starting a pilot project to use text messaging to notify students when study rooms are available. Students who sign up on a waiting list for a study room will have the option to leave their phone number at the desk. An email message can be sent to their phone as a text message. If the student doesn’t respond in 15 minutes, the next person on the list will be notified.

AHSL’s new website

We are in the final stages of completing our new website. Many people around the library are busy migrating content from the old site and creating new content. We are only a month away from having a working version that we can unveil to the world on January 2, 2012! Thanks to everyone who has been working on this project!

New study tables

Our new furniture was delivered on Monday. Stop by the Reference Area to see the new chairs and powered tables. We hope these will be a hit with the students!

CABIII

This Saturday, Sunday and Monday I’ll be attending “Collaborating Across Borders III” a conference on Interprofessional Education (IPE) in Healthcare. Previous CAB conferences were held in Minneapolis and Halifax, Nova Scotia. This year the meeting is in Tucson at the El Conquistador Resort. During the meeting I’ll be getting together with several librarians from other universities to share ideas on supporting IPE.

Facilities News

News from the monthly AHSC Facilities Meeting

Elevators

The head of Facilities Management informed me that we will be getting new elevators sometime in the next six months! Details will follow.

Streetcar project

I have several pages of drawings, photos and text describing the new streetcar that will run from Helen St., South of the College of Pharmacy, under Speedway at Warren Ave. to campus and then on to downtown and ending on Congress St. west of I-10. Tracks will be installed beginning no later than summer 2012. I will leave the packet on the table in the office. Please look at it there and leave for others to see. Some of the same information is available at: www.tucsonstreetcar.com especially in the “Background” section.

Fire Drills

We’ve had plenty of “unplanned” fire drills. Soon the AHSC will be conducting a series of planned fire drills. We will get notice of a two-week window but will not be told exactly when the drill will take place. The library will probably be scheduled for sometime during the holiday break.

Lights in the Medical Research Building (MRB)

You may have noticed lights on throughout the MRB in the evenings after many people have left. There is a problem with the placement of light switches that means people are hesitant to turn out the lights thinking they’ll leave another lab in the dark. Facilities Management is experimenting with motion sensors that will work in the lab areas in order to save energy overnight.

Cred, Tables and Data

MEZCOPH Accreditation

Each of the Colleges we support is accredited by an external oversight organization. The Colleges of Pharmacy and Nursing both relied on our liaison librarians to provide input and support in this important process. Now the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health is starting to prepare for their upcoming accreditation. Annabelle and Mari will be working with the College to get them information that they need for their self-study.

New study tables

We hope that our new study tables for the reference area will be delivered next week.

AAHSL/AAMC

I just returned from the annual meeting of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries that was held in conjunction with the Association of American Medical Colleges in Denver. Among the highlights was a Nobel laureate speaking about the need to get a handle on research data. What used to be kept in lab notebooks is now terabytes, petabytes and even “brontobytes” of data often stored on computers in researchers offices. In another session the speaker explained that Electronic Health Records, now being implemented in doctors’ offices and in hospitals, will only reach their full potential if the human-computer interface is improved so that physicians can view the data in easily understood formats. These were just a tiny fraction of this jam-packed four-day meeting.

Stats, stats, and more stats

Google Analytics

Gary has sent out, and now Nicole is sending out, quarterly reports of the usage of our website from Google Analytics to some folks in the library. Now everyone who is interested can see the cumulated reports on the G drive in the “Google Analytics” folder.

Entryway

Security gates
If you don’t normally come through the front door, be sure to take a look at our new security gates. They are thinner and more attractive than the old gates and, together with some nice plants, grown from cuttings and nurtured by Nga and Tessie, really dress up the front entrance. We’ve requested some design changes to the new front doors but that project is still moving forward. We still hope to have the new doors installed by the end of the calendar year.

New front doors, security gates

The new front doors for the library are custom built items. Facilities is just going out on bid for them and once the contract is awarded it will be almost a month before they are delivered to campus and a little while longer for installation. Facilities hopes to have them in place before the end of the year. However, our new security gates will be installed soon. Javad is working with the vendor to schedule that installation.