June is PRIDE Month

Midwest Matters - June is Pride Month

Jacqueline Leskovec at The Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) - The outreach arm of The National Library of Medicine -- posted a series of articles in June featuring resources to support the health and well-being of LGBTQ people.  

These would be great links to share with your health care orgs to improve the care of LGBTQ people.

Welcome to Pride Month - Week 1 

Week 2 - Providing Quality Care in a Welcoming Environment

Week 3 - Resources Throughout the Life Cycle

Week 4 - Searching for Quality Resources for Sexual and Gender Minority Health

Week 5 - Showing You Care

ABOUT JACQUELINE LESKOVEC
Jacqueline Leskovec, MLIS, MA, RN (she/her) is the Network Coordinator for NNLM Region 6. She is the lead for the Partner Outreach Program (POP), Network membership and user accounts, the Data Reporting System (DRS), and the Region 6 website. She has been with the Network since 2005. In addition to being a health sciences librarian, Jacqueline maintains her license as a registered nurse. She works from her home office in Chicago. She is well acquainted with power tools and will be happy to bore you with details of her many home repair and remodel adventures.

Good Things Come In Trees (NPR Podcast)

Last year, a tree next to my house had to be taken down. It was becoming root bound and limbs were becoming brittle, not to mention a large crack that made its way from the ground to the main branches. I was sad to see it go. It's absence reminded me of how much trees contribute to their environment, not the least of which is the sense of peace you get in a tree-filled area. 

Learn more from this recent NPR podcast: Good Things Come in Trees. 

Just Ask: What I Learned from 100 Days of Rejection y Jai Jiang

What I learned from 100 days of rejection: 

TED Talk by by Jia Jiang

Jia Jiang adventures boldly into a territory so many of us fear: rejection. By seeking out rejection for 100 days -- from asking a stranger to borrow $100 to requesting a "burger refill" at a restaurant -- Jiang desensitized himself to the pain and shame that rejection often brings and, in the process, discovered that simply asking for what you want can open up possibilities where you expect to find dead ends.

Watch at YouTube, or click the link above to read the transcript.

I heard about this speaker from our Infection Prevention Community, several of whom had just returned from the APIC 2022 Annual Meeting where Jiang was speaking.  I think his topic has broad appeal for the rest of us, too, in learning to face our fears and accomplish so much more if we keep at it, and don't run away from rejection.

Read the book:

Rejection Proof: How to Beat Fear and Become Invincible through 100 Days of Rejection

Book Review: The Master and Margarita

 Mikhail Bulgakov, a well-known Russian author, began his novel, The Master and Margarita, in 1928 but did not complete the manuscript until 1940.  Even then, knowing it would offend censors in Stalin’s Russia, the author chose to keep the book under wraps, not wanting to run afoul of a backlash from the government.  It was finally smuggled out to the West and published after the author’s death in 1966.  Since then, it has been acknowledged as one of best novels of the 20th century.  

That accolade is well deserved.  It is an enchanting book that describes what happens when Satan, in the disguise of a character named Wolan, visits Moscow with his minions in the 1930s.  What follows is easily guessed, with all hell breaking loose.  The story has two parallel tracks, describing the havoc caused by Satan’s appearance in Moscow along with a description of Pontius Pilate’s decision to allow the crucifixion of Jesus.  Remarkably, the author is able to unify the two tales into a satisfactory whole.

While it might sound like a gloomy read, the opposite is true.  Humor abounds as Bulgakov delights in the devilry taking place, which highlights the close interaction between good and evil.  Religious beliefs put to the side, the reader cannot help but be amused by the chaos caused by Satan’s return to modern times, as he either seduces the story’s characters or wreaks havoc on their disbelief.  The Master and Margarita remains a must-read here in a world where Satan still seems to be in charge of the discourse.

Robert Koehler

MasterandMargaritaFirstEdition - The Master and Margarita - Wikipedia

Work Challenges and Inspiration among WHSLA Members: Featuring Brenda Fay

  

Michele: In March, I participated in a listening session with Erica Lake from the NNLM Region 6.

In preparation, I asked a few WHSLA Members for their candid answers to the following questions:

1. What challenges do you face with work?
2. What inspires you at work?
3. What CE would you like to see the NNLM work up for us, esp. on the hospital side.

With their permission, I am sharing the responses here on the WHSLA Blog in a series with the hope that WHSLA Members will get to know each other better, share some great ideas and best practices, and realize that we may be facing a lot of the same challenges in a post- (Are we there yet?) pandemic world.

Brenda Fay, MLIS, is currently Library Manager at Advocate Aurora Health Care in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 

and one of our WHSLA Bloggers.

1) What challenges do you face with work?

• I worry  about the next merger…whenever it comes. Our health care system leadership has made it clear that there will be more, and while merging to lower costs for physical items/machines make sense, this rarely (if ever) translates into lower library resource costs. It’s always more, which means cuts invariably happen. Budget pressures are so very real and this is another thing I worry about. Do you cut people or resources when push comes to shove? 

2) What inspires you at work?

• Working with Residents and other learners. It’s really gratifying to teach someone a skill and see them applying it, or sharing it with their colleagues.  

3) What CE would you like to see the NNLM work up for us, especially on the hospital side.  MLA seems to be doing more CE for the academic librarians these days, and NNLM is doing more outreach to public libraries now.  So what would be most helpful for those of us still working in hospital libraries?

• I’d love to see a CE about hospital and library mergers. What to do when your hospital system merges? Who should you reach out to, how do you find out about new stakeholders, how to present a case for your library/staff to remain because of the services and resources you provide.  

• Another CE topic that would be great is How to Prepare a one-page infographic/annual report about your library. Things like this always fall to the wayside it seems, because hospital librarians are busy helping clinicians or other immediate work like getting the journals back up after an IP change, but you and I know that when someone questions the value of your department, you need to have a one-pager or quick thing to tell them/show them. I’d love more practical CEs like that. I could care less about data since it has nothing to do with my job and I’d guess many other hospital librarians feel the same. 

•  Finally we’ve been getting a lot of questions from Residents and MDs looking for financial support to publish in open access journals. This just makes me so mad that publishers are making money of these authors. We have started compiling a list of free journals to publish in, but many clinicians want the prestige of a certain journal, even if they have to pay $1,500-$3,000 to publish. I’d love NNLM to address this and give us boots on the ground librarians resources to help our people publish. 

Thank you, Brenda Fay, for sharing your work challenges and inspiration! 

If you would like to participate and share your answers to these 3 questions in a similar post for the WHSLA Blog, email Michele Matucheski with your answers and I'll make sure it gets posted.

Revisiting Camus' The Plague in Pandemic Times

In the course of sending out eTOCs, I stumbled upon the following editorial from the NEJM this week:

Klass P. "It's Hardly Credible" - Medical Readers and Literary Plague. N Engl J Med. 2022 Jun 11. doi: 10.1056/NEJMp2119103. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35687048.  Link to this article.

 

It's written by a physician re-reading The Plague by Albert Camus as an adult, after having assigned it to students in a medical humanities class in 2021-- an apt topic for pandemic times.  Although she read the novel in high school, she could not remember much about it.  Now re-reading it as an adult, she read it with her "doctor brain" and couldn't figure out why the attending physician in the novel never prescribed the sulfa drugs, the antimicrobials of the day that would have cured people and stamped out the plague.

It's interesting to read her response, knowing what she knows, and how doctors think and the conflicts between the literal vs. literary mind.  Of course, maybe Camus can be forgiven -- He was a writer and a philospher who wrote a magnificent book about existentialism, not a physician keeping up with cutting edge treatments for bubonic plague.    After all -- There was no internet, no PubMed in 1947.  He probably did not have access to Index Medicus, or the French equivalent. 

It's also fascinating to know that others have contemplated this question about why Dr. Rieux, the protagonist of the novel, never prescribed available sulpha drugs to patients during this outbreak in the 1940s.  Were these meds even available in his part of the world?  Were supply chains so disrupted during WWII that he would not have gotten them even if he tried to procure them?

This man even goes so far as to call it literary malpractice:

Deudon EH. A case for literary malpractice: the use of Camus's The Plague in American medical schools. Linacre Q. 1988 May;55(2):73-80. doi: 10.1080/00243639.1988.11877958. PMID: 11650149.  PubMed link.

She also cites the World Health Organization's Plague Manual as  evidence for what the world knew about treating bubonic plague at the time.  

Klass's piece is an interesting article, revisiting medicine in literature with a what-would-you-do take on it.  Of course, if Dr. Rieux had treated patients with standard therapy for the times, we would not have the existential story where things get so bad, and people are pushed to the brink that you see their true characters ...  I suppose he could have set the story in another time period BEFORE sulpha drugs?

Take a look ... and tell me what you think!

Ransomeware Webinar - Lessons Learned from Bitter Experience

* Guest Post by Jennifer Barlow, Clinical Librarian for Ascension Borgess Health Care in Kalamazoo, MI, and past president of The Michigan Health Sciences Library Association (MHSLA).

Last December, the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) presented a webinar on Ransomware Attacks : What Librarians Need to Know.   Two librarians related their experiences with ransomware attacks. Though they were both cautionary tales, they had very different outcomes, and each provided useful takeaways. The webinar is now available on YouTube. 

Hancock Health in Indiana was attacked in 2018. They chose to pay a $50,000 ransom and were back up fairly quickly. However, complying with criminals may encourage them in further attacks. 

University of Vermont Medical Center suffered an attack in 2020. They decided NOT to pay. Systems were down for weeks, and the recovery process took nearly 3 months. Hundreds of employees were furloughed during that time. The cost to recover was between $40 - 50 million. All PCs and servers had to be wiped and rebuilt. 

It’s a tough choice deciding whether or not to pay. And there’s no guarantee that even if you fork over the ransom, the hackers will keep their word and restore your data. 

Lessons learned included: 

❖ When an attack is underway, immediately disconnect computers from the network - but don’t turn them off, you may not be able to turn them back on. 

❖ Essential information, including contact information, should be duplicated off network. 

❖ Make sure people know how to use back-up processes. 

❖ Collect alternative contact information for key personnel, in case hospital system email / phone is inaccessible. 

❖ Make a communication plan. 

❖ Special lessons for libraries: Encourage users to set up personal accounts with our databases. Maintain core textbooks in print. Rely on interlibrary loan partners in a crisis. 

The main takeaways: Be vigilant, be prepared, and practice. 

Check with your organization to see what instructions your own IT people recommend in the event you are hacked.

* Special thanks to Jennifer Barlow for allowing us to repost this article from her Ascension Borgess Library Line Newsletter.  Used by permission.  

Summer reading 2022

While I typically enjoy non-fiction, after three grueling years of grad school, it feels too much like doing homework.  I've switched over to novels for now.  Here are a few I've read and enjoyed recently:

Mr Cadmus by Peter Ackroyd.  This was kind of an odd one, but if you enjoy mysteries and British humour, I'd recommend it.

Ask again, yes: a novel by Mary Beth Keane.  A story of intergenerational family trauma and how different people cope.  There were a few nights I stayed up too late reading this one.

The mystics of Mile End by Sigal Samuel.  A story about a Jewish family who becomes obsessed with climbing the Tree of Life.  I just happened to see this one while browsing the shelves, and thought it looked interesting.  It had complex characters, and the story is told from their varying perspectives.

The boy in the black suit by Jason Reynolds. The story of a grieving teenage boy who goes to work in a funeral parlor following his mother's death.  The book is written for teens, but sometimes it's nice to read something easy, even if the subject matter is tough.

In retrospect, my summer reading list is sort of depressing, but that's just how I roll.  What are you reading for fun these days?

Radio Advisory: The Evolving World of Clinical Evidence

 

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00:00:33

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00:34:53

Episode 114: The Evolving World of Clinical Evidence.

May 3rd, 2022

 34 mins 53 secs

 Transcript

 Link with Timestamp

 Download MP3 (16.4 MB)

About this Episode

The life sciences part of health care isn't just drugmakers and medical device companies—data and evidence coming from life sciences is critical to the entire health care ecosystem. In this episode, Rachel Woods sits down with Advisory Board's Solomon Banjo and Pam Divack, and SVP of Optum Life Sciences Lou Brooks, to talk about the evolving role of evidence and how evidence impacts all parts of the health care ecosystem.

MM's comment: No mention of Libraries role in evolving clinical evidence, but I thought it was something most of us would want to stay on top of ...

June Programming (no cost) via the Science and Technology Section (STS) of ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries)

 The Science and Technology Section (STS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) invites you to join us for as many of our FREE virtual programs in June 2022 as you would like.  Information for each of our five (5) sessions is below, along with registration links, where applicable.  We hope to see you there!  

 

June 7, 2022, 3:00-4:30pm ET -  STS Hot Topics Summer Discussion

  The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a rapid proliferation of scientific output, with the release of many pre-prints, datasets, and scholarly articles, as well as the popular articles that discuss them. With the output of articles retractions and misinformation also followed. The STS Hot Topics committee will host a discussion session to examine changes to scientific publishing and communication practices during the pandemic. 

  The discussion session will feature brief talks and multiple breakout sections for participants to discuss impacts to our own work. Our speakers will be:

·  Ms. Julia Gelfand, Applied Sciences & Engineering Librarian at the University of California Irvine. She will be speaking on "STEM Publishing Lessons Learned from the Pandemic: New Practices for Libraries & Publishers". 

·  Dr. Jodi Schneider, Assistant Professor of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She will be speaking on retractions in publications during the pandemic.

  Please join us via Zoom on June 7th from 3:00 - 4:30 pm ET. Register in advance for this meeting: https://go.umd.edu/hottopicssummer22. Speaker presentations will be recorded. Breakout room and general discussions will not be recorded. 

  After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. If you have any questions regarding this event, please email ACRL STS Hot Topics Committee Co-Chairs, Isabella Baxter (ibaxter@umd.edu) and Mike Goates (michael_goates@byu.edu). 

 

June 13, 2022, 2:00pm-3:00pm ET - 2022 STS Government Information Update

  Join us for the annual STS Government Information Update! This year's topic is the new National Institutes of Health (NIH) Data Management and Sharing Policy that will be implemented in January 2023. The potential impacts of this policy on libraries and library workers will be addressed by our four presenters: Kristin Briney (Biology & Biological Engineering Librarian at Caltech), Lisa Federer (Data Science and Open Science Librarian at the National Library of Medicine), Taunton Paine (Director of Scientific Data Sharing Policy at NIH), and Robyn Reed (Biomedical Informatics and Emerging Technologies Librarian at Penn State College of Medicine).

  This is a free, virtual program that is open to all. Register in advance at https://bit.ly/3scysvr 

  After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

 

June 14, 2022, 1:00pm-4:00pm ET - 2022 STS Annual Program

  This free program will be held virtually and will consist of three (3) parts: 

·  (A) 1:00pm-2:30pm - The (Pending) Science Information Literacy Framework:  Three panelists will introduce the new (pending) Science Information Literacy Framework (https://acrl.libguides.com/sts/STSILFramework): Nikki Rech (Sciences Research and Instruction Librarian at Georgia Southern University, and member of the Task Force that wrote the framework); Aditi Gupta (Engineering & Science Librarian at University of Victoria Libraries); and Anamika Megwalu (Faculty Director of Library Instruction & Assessment at San Jose State University). Then participants will break into small groups to discuss their experiences with and/or to delve deeper into the framework.  Sponsored by the 2022 STS Conference Program Planning Committee. 

·  (B) 2:30pm-3:00pm - Networking time

·  (C) 3:00pm-4:00pm - Equitable Practices in Scholarly Communications:  Join Yasmeen Shorish, Head of Scholarly Communications Strategies & Special Advisor to the Dean for Equity Initiatives at James Madison University, for a talk and discussion of equitable practices in scholarly communications.  Sponsored by the STS Professional Development Committee.

  You are welcome to attend any or all parts. Register at https://go.umd.edu/STS2022

  Many thanks to Elsevier for sponsoring the live captioning for this program!

 

June 15, 2022, 3:00pm-5:00pm ET - 2022 STS Research Forum & Membership "Breakfast"

  This free program combines the STS Research Committee's Research Forum presentations with the STS Membership "Breakfast." The Research Forum from 3-4 ET and the Membership "Breakfast" from 4-5 ET. Come for part or all!

  In the first hour of the program, the STS Research Forum will consist of two presentations, with time for questions and answers at the end. The two presentations will be:

·  The Status of Women in STEM in Higher Education in the United States during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Review for STEM Librarians - Heidi Blackburn, George Mason University

·  Understanding Open Access (OA) Trends in Engineering through Scholarly Assessment: A Bibliometric Analysis of Open Access Publications at the College of Engineering at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville - Jonathan M. Torres, Rutgers University-Newark , and Jay McAllister, University of Arkansas Libraries

  The second hour of the program will be a virtual membership "breakfast" with casual discussions in breakout rooms. Learn how your science librarian colleagues are handling issues such as transformative publishing agreements and the great reshuffle/resignation or choose to talk about new things you're learning and excited to share. This is a wonderful time to reconnect with colleagues from around the country! 

  Register in advance for this event:

https://uic.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAoc-ihrD4sHdLziEbDphEaRpeyxXlRDH0g  

 

June 16, 2022, 3:00pm-4:00pm ET - 2022 STS Lightning Talks

  The STS Research Committee will host its free virtual Lightning Talks session on Thursday, June 16. The session will consist of three short presentations, with time for questions and answers at the end. The three sessions will be:

·  Using curriculum mapping to improve information literacy instruction in engineering - Tracy Zahradnik, University of Toronto

·  Incorporating the ACRL Information Literacy Framework into a Natural Resources Management Decision-making Framework - Patricia Hartman and Robert Gitzen, Auburn University

·  Beyond ENIAC, LO, and Reaper: Promoting DEIA in the History of Computing - Carmen Cole, Penn State University

  Register at https://forms.gle/tHUTFGPhZVRbWkmr7

 

Please contact Bonnie L. Fong (STS Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect) at LibrarianBonnieFong@gmail.com if you have any questions.

Dance Plagues and Red Shoes

The Red Shoes by Kate Bush (1990s throwback)

Last month, I read an article by BBC News about a real life dance plague (aka choreomania) that inspired Hans Christian Anderson's classic The Red Shoes.

• Read the full article here: The people who 'danced themselves to death' by Rosalind Jana (12th May 2022). 

Here's a quote to whet your appetite or just help explain why it's relevant for today:

Ecstasy and anger

It was perhaps inevitable that the dancing plague regained popularity now. The last two years have yielded feverish interest in the many pandemics that have gone before us, from the Black Death to the Spanish Flu. We have looked to them not only for comparison, but also, seemingly, to reassure ourselves that all epidemics eventually end. Within that, something tenuously classed as a plague where the contagion isn't sickness, but movement was always going to be alluring. As Welch acknowledges, one of the things lost during lockdown was the communality of dancing: that exquisite feeling of being physically proximate to hundreds of other people, everyone carried by music that commands the muscles and turns a sea of strangers into fellow travellers bound by shared experience.

A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518 by John Waller

In case you were wondering, a quick and dirty search of PubMed brought up a handful of articles on "choreomania OR dancing plague."

There are many interpretations of The Red Shoes out there.  Just Google it, and you'll see!  To me The Red Shoes was less about moralizing and punishment for the vanity of wanting a pair of pretty dance shoes, and more about getting swept up in something you can't control -- like addiction, or possession, or even just loosing your footing in a meaningful life.  If you don't have plans for your own life, someone else will and it may not be to your liking.   

If you are fascinated with this tangent of story as medicine, check out Clarisa Pinkola Estes' classic book, Women who Run with the Wolves.  The author is a Jungian analyst and cantadora [Keeper of the Stories] and includes a long chapter on The Red Shoes and a compelling interpretation.    It is one of my all-time favorite books ever. ;-)