HSL News

MedlinePlus Debuts Multilingual Feature

MedlinePlus, NLM's database of authoritative health information for consumers, has a new multilingual feature. The new feature provides access to high quality health information in languages other than English and Spanish, benefiting people who prefer to read consumer health information in their native language. It also helps the information professionals and health care providers who serve them.

The new collection contains over 2,500 links to information in more than 40 languages and covers nearly 250 Health Topics. Access the multilingual feature from the MedlinePlus homepage or go directly to www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/languages/languages.html.

Measuring Your Impact

Do you have questions about h-index, eigenfactor, or how to measure the relative impact of a journal, author, or a particular article? HealthLinks has a new Impact Factors page that answers these questions and discusses some of the pitfalls in using impact factors.

UpToDate Alert

As a result of extraordinary price increases to provide UpToDate access for our distributed community of UW Health Sciences students, faculty and staff across the Pacific Northwest Region, I have had to make the painful decision to cancel this heavily used resource. In spite of extensive negotiations with the publisher over the past two years we simply were unable to negotiate a price that our Health Sciences Libraries budget could afford. The price for UW is much higher than for other institutions, in large part, because we are a regional health sciences center with regular faculty and students across Washington as well as in other states throughout the WWAMI region. The new price would be almost 60% of the Health Sciences Libraries resources budget.

While UpToDate has been used by many as an important clinical resource, the Health Sciences Libraries currently licenses and provides additional clinical resources that we encourage you to use. We have gathered these resources into one valuable site called the Care Provider Toolkit located on the HealthLinks site. Please have a look at this site and if you have suggestions of additional resources that we currently do not provide, please let us know.

Please use this comment form if you'd like to suggest a resource to be added or submit a comment.

Efforts are underway to find a funding strategy and an UpToDate model that is affordable and acceptable to the UW.

From Sherrilynne Fuller, Ph.D., Director, Health Sciences Libraries, Associate Dean, University Libraries - dated April 4, 2008

Masters Nursing Students!!

Study exploring contributions of UW Libraries and librarians seeks volunteers for focus groups: Nursing students in the final 3 quarters of the Masters Program.

See flyer for more information.

New Hours for Social Work Library

On Monday, 31 March 2008, the Social Work Library begins new hours.

Mon - Thurs 9:00 am - 8:00 pm
Fri 9:00 am - 5:00 pm
Sat 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Sun 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm

For a complete listing along with holiday exceptions for the Social Work Library as well as other Health Sciences Libraries see Library Hours.

Interim Hours

Winter/Spring Interim (Mar 22, 2008 - Mar 30, 2008) hours for the Health Sciences Libraries are:

Health Sciences Library:

~ Monday-Friday, 7:30am - 7:00pm

~ Saturdays & Sundays CLOSED

Social Work Library

~ Monday-Friday, 1:00pm - 5:00pm

~ Saturdays & Sundays CLOSED

KK Sherwood Library at Harborview

~ 8:00am - 5:00pm, Monday - Friday for those with HMC ID

Electronic resources will remain available.

Planned Maintenance

Tuesday, March 25, 7:30-9am PDT: The UW Libraries Catalog will be down for maintenance. During this outage you will not be able to request materials, access Your Library Account, or "Check UW Holdings" via our electronic resources. Please try again after 9 am.

Patient Drug Information Available from PubMed

Links to Patient Drug Information are now available in the AbstractPlus display in PubMed. The links, when available, are listed below Related Articles on the right side of the screen. The information comes from MedMaster (TM), a publication of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, written specifically for patient education (and also available on MedlinePlus).

The links are generated using the drug name searches that are expanded based on regular PubMed mapping, e.g., albuterol will map to "albuterol"[MeSH Terms] OR albuterol[Text Word] and the citations retrieved will include a drug link to MedMaster for information about albuterol.

For more information see NLM's Technical Bulletin.

QUOSA PubMed-UW channel for Macs now available

The new PubMed-UW channel for Macs will enable users to access and download UW online holdings through the QUOSA application. No need to uninstall older versions of QUOSA. Download the new release from the QUOSA Download Page.

Questions about QUOSA? Check out our QUOSA Help page.

RefWorks at UW now uses UW NetID

In January, the UW subscription to RefWorks, a personal citation database and bibliography creation tool, switched to UW NetID controlled access. If you created an account prior to Jan 4, 2008 follow these directions to convert your account and these steps for using the Write-N-Cite utility.

Monday, Jan 21, 2008

In recognition of the Martin Luther King Holiday, Monday, Jan 21, 2008, the Health Sciences Library will be open 1 pm - 5 pm only. Both the Social Work Library and KK Sherwood Library, Harborview, will be closed.

Electronic resources remain available.

CINAHLPlus Replaces CINAHL from Ovid

Because of an exclusive contract with Ebsco, CINAHL Plus replaces the CINAHL database from Ovid on HealthLinks. CINAHL Plus with full text provides access to the nursing literature and 17 allied health fields from 1937 to the present.

Visit the help page for more information or consult with your library liaison.

Full EMBASE database available

The Libraries now subscribes to the full EMBASE database from 1988 forward. EMBASE complements PubMed with coverage of many European titles. Those writing systematic reviews will find this a useful tool in preparing a literature search.

EMBASE has only a 4 concurrent users license so please log off when you are done searching. For assistance in using this, or other databases, consult your libraries liaison.

Regular Quarter Hours Resume

On January 7, 2008, the Health Sciences and Social Work Libraries resume their usual operating hours. For a full schedule visit the Hours page.

Unbound Central

HSL will no longer carry a subscription to Unbound Central effective January 01, 2008. Low usage levels and budget pressures required a re-evaluation of this product.