Redesigning library orientation for first-year medical students during the pandemic.

BACKGROUND: Prior to 2020, library orientation for first-year medical students at Weill Cornell Medicine took the form of an on-site treasure hunt competition. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the orientation for the MD class of 2024 was shifted to an all-virtual format. This shift mandated a full redesign of the library orientation. CASE PRESENTATION: The Samuel J. Wood Library sought to preserve the excitement and fun of the treasure hunt in the new virtual format. The competition was redesigned as a Zoom meeting using breakout rooms, with library faculty and staff serving as team facilitators. Tasks were rewritten, shifting the focus from the library's physical spaces to its virtual services and online resources. The redesigned orientation was evaluated using two data sources: a postsession survey of student participants and a debriefing of the library employees who participated. Student evaluations were positive, while the faculty and staff provided numerous suggestions for improving future virtual orientations. CONCLUSIONS: A successful virtual library orientation requires careful preparation, including testing the competition tasks, full rehearsal with library facilitators, and a thoughtful approach to technology and logistics. We have chosen to share the materials we developed for other academic health sciences libraries that may wish to take a similar approach to their own virtual orientations.

Digital media archive for gross pathology images based on open-source tools and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR).

Macroscopic examination of surgical pathology and autopsy cases is a fundamental component of anatomic pathology. The photographic documentation of such clinical specimens is essential, and it may be required in certain instances. Our department began using consumer-grade digital cameras in 2005 to improve the practice of gross photography. However, the lack of an application to correctly catalog the photographs resulted in thousands of digital image files scattered across shared network drives, with limited case and patient metadata, making image retrieval a cumbersome and sometimes impossible task. Thirteen years later, we examined the legacy method of acquiring and accessing gross photographs in our department and determined the need for a web-based digital media archive to capture images with structured metadata. Using several open-source tools, including MediaWiki, we developed a flexible platform for building our digital media archive with a data schema based on the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard. Following a short pilot, we replaced the legacy method of handling gross pathology images with a new acquisition workflow and digital media archive. Through March 2021, 233 distinct users have accessed the system, 58 of which have uploaded 21,024 images. Of those images, 13,684 (65.1%) correspond to surgical pathology images, 4045 (19.2%) belong to neuropathology cases, and 3295 (15.7%) originate from autopsies. We demonstrate the design and implementation of a customizable anatomic pathology digital media archive solution in an academic pathology department setting using a modern standard for exchanging healthcare information electronically. The system's efficiency and scalability for our current operation will enable us to integrate with other applications and pathology informatics initiatives in the future.

Providing Information to Support COVID-19 Pandemic Response: Academic Medical Librarians' Roles in Creating an Intelligence Report.

In March 2020, the Dean of the George Washington (GW) University School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS) and the GW COVID-19 Incident Management Team asked the Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Public Health to initiate a daily report that surveyed COVID-19 literature/resources. This COVID-19 Intelligence Report would serve as a concise, authoritative source of COVID-19 information for clinicians, the Incident Management Team, and operational leaders. The Senior Associate Dean established an Intelligence Gathering Team comprised of clinicians and librarians. Himmelfarb librarians facilitated the collection, distribution, and archiving of COVID-19 resources and Intelligence Reports.

The Librarian Reserve Corps: An Emergency Response.

The Librarian Reserve Corps (LRC) is a volunteer network of medical, health sciences, and public health librarians who have responded to the urgent need for public health information during the early days of the COVID-19 crisis. The LRC was first formed to assist with the indexing of daily publication lists distributed within the World Health Organization's Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN). With the explosion of information related to COVID-19 beginning in December 2019, librarians have brought critical skills and experience to the response, providing comprehensive literature searching and indexing to COVID-19 research publications. The evolution of this effort follows the trajectory of scientific publication trends and developments related to COVID-19.

A Novel Partnership Between Physicians and Medical Librarians During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

An ongoing collaboration between physicians and librarians provided critical information during the COVID-19 pandemic. A development team, which consisted of the hospital and medical school disaster preparedness medical director, the medical library director, professional librarians, and the Departments of IT and Marketing in a multi-state healthcare system worked together to develop a shared website to distribute and curate timely resources during COVID-19. The initial impacts of this collaboration and the website show the benefits of this novel partnership.

An Introduction to Telehealth and COVID-19 Innovations - A Primer for Librarians.

Telehealth services have slowly yet steadily increased over the past few decades as new technologies emerge. However, social distancing mandates, state shutdowns, and an overburdened healthcare system during the COVID-19 pandemic forced a dramatic surge forward in telehealth use and policy. While many of these emergency measures are temporary, the successes, failures and lessons learned during this period will change the way telehealth is administered, moving forward. This column will review recent changes to telehealth and telemedicine services during the pandemic and their impact on healthcare systems.

Pandemic-Proofing Your Library: Disaster Response and Lessons Learned from COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected libraries across the globe, including academic health sciences libraries, in many ways. This manuscript describes the challenges, solutions, and practices employed by the Stony Brook University Health Sciences Library in order to maintain continuity of services to patrons including faculty, hospital staff, students, and clinicians while operating in one of the earliest epicenters of the pandemic. Some of the major changes the library underwent in response to the pandemic included implementing new online anatomy resources, contactless circulation, remote interlibrary loan services and modified operating practices.

Adapting to Remote Library Services during COVID-19.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent Stay At Home order, the Southern Illinois University Medical Library utilized new technologies and implemented new virtual service models in order to improve internal communication, and to continue providing services and resources to patrons remotely. The changes happened quickly, and the librarians faced several challenges during this time, but things went smoothly overall and there were some considerable silver linings. Several of the newly adopted technologies, service models, and virtual resource offerings proved to be extremely effective and their use will continue beyond the duration of the pandemic.

Librarian Contributions to a Regional Response in the COVID-19 Pandemic in Western North Carolina.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Mountain Area Health Education Center formed a response team with the goal of building capacity across Western North Carolina health systems to collectively identify needs, coordinate resources to fill gaps, and strategically manage the regional threats of the pandemic. The library team collaborated on interprofessional projects by gathering information and using LibGuides to quickly and easily organize and share resources. The team met challenges, including moving to telecommuting, balancing a growing workload, and navigating a changing information landscape, and in doing so, strengthened relationships across the organization and the region.

Mind like Water: Flexibly Adapting to Serve Patrons in the Era of COVID-19.

The ability to be flexible and adapt quickly to changing circumstances is a crucial skill for librarians to develop in a world increasingly characterized by rapid change. It can take a crisis to learn how effective librarians have become in developing the needed adaptive behaviors, including a willingness to change workstyles, experiment with new technologies and readily move on from failed experiments. In this paper, librarians from the Preston Medical Library at the University of Tennessee Graduate School of Medicine, prompted by the crisis of COVID-19, present their response. Beginning with a description of how services were provided prior to the pandemic, librarians detail their response in several key areas and show how they implemented new approaches to teaching, collaboration, and mutual support, working together to handle patron issues and pursue scholarly activities.

When One Library Door Closes, Another Virtual One Opens: A Team Response to the Remote Library.

The University of Central Florida Health Sciences Library is a digital library with 98% of resources being electronic and available online. Though almost all aspects of the library's operations were impacted by the closing of the physical space during the coronavirus pandemic, being a digital library helped the library team transition quickly to remote reference, programming and instruction services.

Causality dilemma: creating a twenty-first century university archive.

For its fifteenth anniversary, the Jay Sexter Library at Touro University Nevada (TUN) sought ways to capture its institutional history by founding an archive. Among many challenges, the library struggled to convince the administration of the importance of an archive. To generate interest in TUN's history, a task force comprising library, executive administration, and advancement staff hosted and recorded a panel event with some of the university's original faculty, staff, and administration. By having this event, new TUN employees were able to experience the shared knowledge of TUN's early days, and the library was able to create and preserve its own institutional history.

Medical and health informatics services during and after the COVID-19 pandemic should be virtual, tailored, responsive and interactive: a case study in Belgium.

This is part of a new series in this regular feature regarding trends in the provision of information by health science libraries. By sharing expertise and drawing together relevant trends the series intends to serve as a road map for both health science librarians and health informatics professionals. This article shows how a medical and biomedical research library changed practices, and reassessed user needs for the COVID-19 emergency. Discusses changes to online education (and collaborative working) to provide user-friendly services, researcher support tailored to need and re-visioning library space. J.M.

Infodemia: impacto na geração de conhecimento

No âmbito da Comemoração do 50º Aniversário do Centro Latino-Americano de Perinatologia/Unidade de Saúde da Mulher e Reprodutiva (CLAP/SMR) da OPAS, em coordenação com o Centro Latino-Americano e do Caribe de Informação em Ciências da Saúde (BIREME), foi realizada nesta quarta-feira, 25 de novembro, uma Conferência virtual sobre Infodemia, ou quantidade excessiva de informações, em alguns casos incorretas. Na Conferência foram apresentados temas da Mostra do Conhecimento, Saúde da Mulher e COVID-19, e alguns aspectos do impacto da pandemia na geração e divulgação de informação científica.

Infodemia: impacto en la generación de conocimiento

Como parte de la Celebración del 50 Aniversario del Centro Latinoamericano de Perinatología / Unidad de la Salud de la Mujer y Reproductiva (CLAP/SMR) de la OPS, en coordinación con el Centro Latinoamericano y del Caribe de Información en Ciencias de la Salud (BIREME), se realizó este Miércoles 25 de Noviembre, una Conferencia virtual sobre Infodemia, o excesiva cantidad de información, en algunos casos incorrecta. En la Conferencia se expusieron temas sobre la Vitrina del Conocimiento, sobre Salud de la Mujer y la COVID-19, y algunos aspectos del impacto de la pandemia en la generación y diseminación de información científica.

UNLV Health Sciences Library's Initial Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: How a Versatile Environment, Online Technologies, and Liaison Expertise Prepared Library Faculty in Supporting Its User Communities.

In this case study, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Health Sciences Library describes how a flexible and technology-focused service model, liaison relationships, and individual expertise all contributed towards rapid mobilization of online instruction, virtual library services, and new resources to keep pace with the sudden needs of their user communities in the School of Medicine, School of Dental Medicine and local Las Vegas community prior to and during stay-at-home mandates related to the COVID-19 global pandemic of 2020.

A Virtual Nursing Journal Club: Bridging the Gap Between Research Evidence and Clinical Practice.

Creating a nursing journal club is an initiative to promote nurses' use of best evidence in practice. A virtual nursing journal club (VNJC) was implemented in a Magnet-designated, midsize community hospital. The VNJC fostered nurses' reading nursing research studies and subsequent interaction with other nurses. The VNJC's formation, implementation, and evaluation are described. Quantitative and qualitative research critique items and an evaluation form are included that are essential to the site's ongoing processes.

Promoting Library Visibility Through Creative Programing.

Digital libraries and their librarians face a challenge to remain visible to users since almost all their resources can be accessed without having to visit the library space. Libraries with a primarily electronic collection can promote their visibility through creative programing that draws people into the library space or provides opportunities for users to engage with librarians. A new, primarily digital academic health sciences library shares its experiences with developing creative user events and programs to promote the library's visibility.

Accurate Approach Towards Efficiency of Searching Agents in Digital Libraries Using Keywords.

The age of information has done it simple for storing huge amount of data. In actual fact, a considerable segment of existing information is accumulated in the text databases that have huge set of documents from different sources like research articles, news articles, books, e-mail messages, web pages and digital libraries. In many text databases, stored data are in the semi-structured format in that they are neither entirely structured nor entirely unstructured. IR (Information Retrieval) field has been growing in parallel using database systems for several years. Contrasting to the databases system fields that have concentrated mainly on transaction and query processing of the structured data, IR is concerned with firm and retrieval of data from a huge quantity of text-oriented documents. Thus, IR tackles with unstructured and/or semi-structured databases. Information security requirements within a firm have experience major variations in the past some decades. By the establishment of computer, the necessary for automated equipment for securing files as well as other information that stored on the computer turned into evident. This is particularly in case of shared information resources via public network. This is the origin for having a secure computer system / the need for computer security. Computer Security can be achieved by Intrusion Detection Systems. In this paper, we address these issues by applying Similarity Search in two diversified fields: Digital Libraries and Computer Security. The paper discusses a fast and efficient similarity search technique for approximate retrieval of books metadata in Digital Libraries. In DLI the books retrieval takes place just by using metadata such as title, year, edition, author, publishing of a book. Though, if metadata is missing, incorrect or unfinished, then it creates the library retrieval system inefficient, incorrect leads too much confusion to the user. In this context even if the query from the user matches partially or fully with a stored pattern, the information related to that be retrieved. The paper talks about a method that functions rapid and effective, language independent, and flexible library retrieval system signature based similarity search. This system is able to retrieve not only the metadata that exactly matches the query but also fairly accurate identical because of missing words, jumbled words and spell mistakes. Fundamentally, signature file approach is used here. A signature file approach looks like the most capable for huge database as it has superior text retrieval features and requires little storage overhead.