WHSLA Spotlight – Janice Curnes at the VA Medical Center in Milwaukee, WI

Hello, I’m Janice Curnes. I’m the Medical Library at the Milwaukee VA Medical Center. I’ve been at the Milwaukee VA since 1990. I manage day to day operations of both the Medical Library and the Patient Library.

Janice Curnes

The Milwaukee VA Medical Center is celebrating 150 years of Outstanding Veteran Care this year.  I thought I would share a little of our library history.

 In May of 1867 the first veterans moved onto the grounds. There has been some form of library service for 148 years.

1869 – Old Main, the main residential building whose tower you can see from Miller Park, included a reading room for Veterans, containing all the daily and weekly papers published in Milwaukee.

Old Main Reading Room 

1891 – Wadsworth Library was built. Wadsworth is still open and under library service supervision. It is staffed by veteran patients. Its primary focus is recreational reading.

Wadsworth Library

1946 – Medical Library service started and a medical librarian was hired when the VA became a teaching hospital, establishing a residency program with Marquette University school of Medicine. The medical library collection would grow rapidly in the 1950s moving first to a Quonset hut until a larger medical library was opened.

Quonset hut

1966 – The Medical and Patient Libraries moved to a shared space in the then new hospital.

2003 -The Medical and Patient Libraries moved to their current location on the 6^th floor. Veteran and staff computer areas were added as well as archive storage. 

Medical Library

Plan to attend WHSLA's 2017 online conference - registration is now open

Registration is now open for the 2017 WHSLA conference, to be held online, Thursday, November 2. All WHSLA members in good standing may attend the conference free of charge. Not a member yet? Join for $20 and attend the fall conference at no charge. Reduced rates are available for students. Not sure if you're paid up on dues? Check the membership list here. 

See the preliminary schedule here: http://www.whsla.org/meetings.

Why attend?

• Network with other Wisconsin health science librarians
• Attend from your home or work
• Hear what's going on with NNLM GMR
• Participate in Michelle Kraft's two-part keynote session on librarians keeping up with change in the workplace and healthcare
• Listen to lightning talks on engaging your audience when teaching, the dark web, the user experience, library friendly contract language, comics for your hospital or academic library, and Kouze and Posner's leadership challenge. 

Retiring archivist’s donation to help preserve Gundersen history - a guest post from Melinda Orebaugh

With a generous donation from Kay Cimpl Wagner, archivist at Gundersen Health System in La Crosse, Wis., and her husband Larry, Gundersen Medical Foundation has established the Kathleen ‘Kay’ Cimpl Wagner, MLS, Historical Preservation Fund. Their gift to establish the fund, along with ongoing donations, will also name the archivist position after Wagner’s retirement.

“Kay has contributed to Gundersen in countless ways. Most recently, as a dedicated archivist, she has helped shape and advance the Gundersen archives,” states Sara Gundersen Battison, MLS, CFRE, director, Development, Gundersen Medical Foundation. “Thanks to the new fund created through Kay and Larry’s generosity, important preservation projects will continue and there will be improved access to Gundersen’s history for generations to come.”

Wagner worked at Gundersen as the medical library director from 1985-1999. Because of her experience at Gundersen, in 2013, Wagner was asked if she would work with retired Gundersen cardiac surgeon and Gundersen Medical Foundation vice president, A. Erik Gundersen, MD, on a special short-term project.

Wagner recalls, “Our project was to sort through an off-site storage facility with decades’ worth of accumulation. What we found was a treasure trove of Gundersen history. We spent nearly a year going through every paper, photo and object determining the historical significance to Gundersen. We also developed policies for proper acceptance for donations so items no longer accumulate in a storage facility.”

At the start of the project, Wagner was a volunteer but it soon became clear that her talents were needed beyond the initial project. So in 2015, the Foundation hired Kay as a part-time archivist. In this role, Kay has continued to inventory, preserve and catalog things of historical significance to Gundersen.

“One of the most interesting finds was a cache of letters from the 1800s written by Adolf Gundersen, MD. We are having them translated and digitized,” Wagner explains. “Eventually, the entire collection of objects, pictures, publications and more will be digitized for online access. In addition, the archives and archivist will have a presence in the Mooney Library on the Gundersen La Crosse Campus.”

Wagner also embarked on an oral history project where she is interviewing people who helped shaped Gundersen.

Wagner will be retiring soon, but she’s only laid the groundwork and strategic plan for the future. That’s why the Wagners established this new fund to ensure the ongoing work of an archivist at Gundersen. 

She notes, “I’m honored to be building the Gundersen legacy. It wouldn’t be possible without the commitment of the Foundation and the Gundersen Health Sciences Library.”

Kay Wagner

Librarians and APIs 101 (Thurs, Oct. 19 webinar)

I'm always on the lookout for webinars and other online learning opportunities. Not too long ago I learned about Library Connect from BrightTALK. Thanks to them, I've attended talks from NIH Library, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Mendeley, UNC Chapel Hill and more. 

A session coming up in October might be of interest to you and other medical librarians. Librarians and APIs 101: overview and use cases will be presented by two librarians from Georgetown and U Florida. You can register here. 

===============================

"The webinar presenters will provide an overview of APIs (application programming interfaces - see definition below) and a broad look at various use cases within the library from updating library systems to conducting research or facilitating access for other researchers.

Specific use cases include using an API for text mining (clinical applications) and using APIs to update an institutional repository.

The webinar is meant for librarians who do not currently have a strong technical background, but who want to familiarize themselves with the technology and its applications. 

An API is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. In other words, an API is the messenger that delivers your request to the provider that you’re requesting it from and then delivers the response back to you. -- Shana Pearlman, MuleSoft Blog"

Robots scheduling nurses and assigning rooms to patients

It's not hard to imagine that robots and artificial intelligence will become more and more a part of the health care sector. It's easy to see how a robot companion or device could assist older patients in their homes or perhaps keep them out of the hospital, but what about on an active Labor and Delivery unit? A 2016 robot made decisions that 90% of doctors and nurses agreed with in regards to L&D nurse scheduling and patient room assignment. 

What do you think? Is there a future for robots in health care? 

Full story at http://news.mit.edu/2016/robot-helps-nurses-schedule-tasks-on-labor-floor-0713

"Today’s robots are awkward co-workers because they are often unable to predict what humans need. In hospitals, robots are employed to perform simple tasks such as delivering supplies and medications, but they have to be explicitly told what to do.

A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) thinks that this will soon change, and that robots might be most effective by helping humans perform one of the most complex tasks of all: scheduling.

In a pair of new papers, CSAIL researchers demonstrate a robot that, by learning from human workers, can help assign and schedule tasks in fields ranging from medicine to the military...."

Don't eat that egg (or steak or toast)! - a guest post from Michele Matucheski

Someone posted this to FB, but I’ve been telling people about this video as an example of how technology and our knowledge/science changes …  I think it’s also a great example of why people need to keep up with research, and the latest developments because the state-of-the art and general consensus – even practice guidelines --change so fast.    What you knew 5 years ago may not be relevant today.   

The perfect justification for Library Services!  

-Michele Matucheski

The “Internet” in Space

Earlier in the year, NLM director Dr. Patricia Brennan commented in her blog that there is no internet in space, making NLM services unusable to future colonists and space explorers at this time.    However, Vint Cerf, an internet pioneer, corrected her.  See this blog post from July 18, 2017. https://nlmdirector.nlm.nih.gov/2017/07/18/there-is-an-internet-in-space/

I found this information fascinating.  Just think of the ultimate in outreach – searching PubMed on Mars and beyond. I wonder what the Surgeon General of the Army who first started the collection in 1836 would think.

                                            Rover "Curiosity" on Mars.  Photo from NASA

WHSLA WISDOM CHAT: Wednesday, August 22, 2015 3:00 PM

Wednesday, August 22, 2015 3:00 PM

Guest Speaker:  Gale Hannigan, AHIP

Gale Hannigan, AHIP, is the chair of the MLA Task Force to Review MLA’s Competencies for Lifelong Learning and Professional Success.  She will provide a brief overview of the new competencies and answer your questions.  Members are encouraged to review the competencies before the meeting http://www.mlanet.org/p/cm/ld/fid=1217.   After the presentation we will have our usual member news sharing.   Our online discussions are for WHSLA members only. 

WHSLA 2017 Online Meeting - Lightning Talk Lineup

We're very excited to announce the topics our lightning talk speakers will be presenting on at our very first Fall 2017 online WHSLA meeting. As you may have heard, we'll be enjoying a CE course from Michelle Kraft in the morning. Then in the afternoon, librarians from across Wisconsin will be sharing their expertise on a variety of topics you can hopefully apply to your own job. Thanks so much to everyone that submitted presentation ideas!

Adding Activities to Engage your Audience / Rita Mitchell, Aurora Health Care

Shining a Light on the “Dark Web” / Rose Trupiano, Marquette University

UX? We Answer! The Library as a Nexus of Inclusion / Taylor McNeir, Marquette University

Library Friendly Contract Language for Hospital Libraries …  Or how we got our groove back / Michele Matucheski and Kellee Selden, Ascension

Graphic Medicine – comics for your health sciences library / Brenda Fay, Marquette University

Kouze and Posners Leadership Challenge / Carrie Papa-Schold

To stay in the loop about the upcoming online meeting on Thursday, November 2nd, keep checking our website or keep an eye out for emailed communications.

Elsevier Acquires bepress

On Wednesday, August 2nd, news broke that Elsevier had acquired bepress, the company which supports Digital Commons, used as the institutional repository platform for over 500 institutions, predominantly US colleges and universities.

If you're a bepress customer, you're probably very surprised at the news as bepress failed to communicate this development to existing clients before Elsevier made their announcement.

This is certainly not just a health sciences librarianship issue, but advocates of scholarly publication and open access are very concerned about this acquisition. According to the Scholarly Kitchen article, https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/08/02/elsevier-acquires-bepress/:

"Today, Elsevier announces its acquisition of bepress. In a move entirely consistent with its strategy to pivot beyond content licensing to preprints, analytics, workflow, and decision-support, Elsevier is now a major if not the foremost single player in the institutional repository landscape. If successful, and there are some risks, this acquisition will position Elsevier as an increasingly dominant player in preprints, continuing its march to adopt and coopt open access."