With Halloween being this weekend, I thought I would share my favorite Halloween jam: La Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns! It also makes for great background music when writing searches.
Watching the orchestra play the song is its own treat!
A happy early Halloween, for those that celebrate! 🍬🎃
A little something macabre just for Halloween!
Caitlin Doughty explores "Books Bound in Human Skin." Yes, it's a thing, but not what you might be picturing -- Ed Gein or Silence of the Lambs.
Learn more:
What do you actually know about OpenEvidence? Ebling Library's new, 5-minute video offers a critical look at its accuracy and transparency for healthcare professionals and medical librarians. Check out the video embedded below, or via YouTube!
The Library Evidence Synthesis Services Symposium (LESSS), being a free virtual symposium for information professionals supporting evidence syntheses, released both their archive and video recordings from their June 2026 symposium.
As an attendee of this year's symposium, the event is truly a treasure trove of information, and features a number of sessions dedicated to improving the sustainability of evidence synthesis services (including the art of saying "no" to poorly conceived evidence synthesis requests, being both a vital skill and a prospect dreaded by many in our field).
Check out the archive and recordings! You're in for a treat! 🍬😉
Happy watching and/or reading! ☕
Trailer for The Librarians
Yesterday, I attended a local gathering for Banned Books Week, Oct 4-10. They showed the PBS documentary, The Librarians.
There were tables up front with local sponsors:
They had a table filled with about 15 banned books wrapped in brown paper. Written on the outside was a description of why the book had been banned. Upon entry, everyone got a ticket, and these books were given away as door prizes at the end of the night. I won the book above.
Most of the time was spent on airing the 2-hour documentary. I would have loved a discussion afterwards, as there was so much to unpack. But there just wasn't time ... The documentary focused on the hell that some school librarians in Texas and Florida (and other places) have been enduring by Moms for Liberty and other such groups using school boards to accuse Librarians of grooming "our kids" and exposing them to pornography -- which is the furthest thing from the truth. All while demanding that hundreds of books be removed from the shelves -- mostly LGBTQ+, Black and Brown History, and a few other topics.
My own public library has adopted ALA's Freedom to Read policy, and has not had a problem with this issue.
What are you doing for Banned Books Week?
Happy National Medical Librarian month! Two recent articles focused on the effects of medical librarians on patient care and improvements to evidence based practice. Below is a brief (AI) summary of each with links to the articles:
Key Takeaways:
Value Demonstration: Survey data from multidisciplinary clinicians provides concrete evidence that librarian-mediated searches directly impact patient care, policy development, and clinical decision-making.
Strategic Advocacy: Health sciences librarians can leverage these practical evaluation models to demonstrate ROI, justify staffing and resource needs, and secure deeper integration into health system operations.
Key Finding: A cross-sectional analysis reveals that nurses who completed librarian-led literature search classes demonstrated significantly higher basic, advanced ($p = .02$), and overall EBP competencies.
Impact on Practice: Librarian-led instruction directly targets major EBP barriers—such as limited search skills, lack of time, and poor database familiarity—by empowering nurses to locate unbiased evidence efficiently.
Actionable Takeaway: Librarians can use these outcomes to advocate for sustained library funding and formal integration into hospital-wide EBP training and clinical infrastructure.
Ovid and MLA have partnered for Medical Librarians Month to offer a free webinar: Generative AI in Action: Practical Strategies for Medical and Health Sciences Libraries.
Details relating to the webinar (including the registration link) are included below.
Is Scopus a narcissist?
The answer is yes. Yes, it is, as discussed in a new UX Database Tips Blog post written by yours truly. Below is a snippet from the post:
Picture this. You've just finished translating a complex search strategy into Scopus for an evidence synthesis (and just in the nick of time! Your eyes are going googly from staring at your screen all day, your coffee is dangerously low, and your researchers are practically knocking down your office door to get their hands on your search documentation). As a final test, you run the search in Scopus and do a quick skim of the results. Scopus has helpfully highlighted your keywords in yellow within the abstract of each result. As you look through the results, however, your heart sinks, and the world seems to spin. In a number of the abstracts, the term "Scopus" is in blazing yellow.
You may be thinking to yourself, "What on earth? The term 'Scopus' isn't in any of my search hedges! Is one of my terms mapping to the term 'Scopus'???" At least, this was my thinking when I found myself in this nightmarish situation.
The answer is no. Let your heart rest easy, dear colleague. The reason "Scopus" is being highlighted in the abstracts of your search results is simple and ultimately harmless: Scopus is a narcissist.
Check out the full post in the UX Database Tips Blog.
Thanks for tolerating the shameless self-promotion (it looks like Scopus isn't the only narcissist here 😉).
Happy reading! ☕
Enjoy!
