OCL II: The Public Portal

The original Online Clinical Library (OCL) brings together, in a single place, links to PubMed, CINAHL, electronic journals and books, drug databases and many other information resources for health care professionals. However, many of these resources available at UCSD are restricted, and non-UCSD users do not have remote access to them.

Now there’s the Online Clinical Library II (OCL II), a separate website and a public portal for community health professionals who are not affiliated with UCSD. This site links to current, authoritative, freely available clinical information resources. Some of the sites require you to register, yet once that is completed, the content is freely available.

Both OCL and OCL II were created by the UCSD Medical Center Library under the leadership of the Head of the library, Craig Haynes, and are tremendously useful gateways to clinical information resources.

OCL II: http://gort.ucsd.edu/clinlib/public

OCL I: http://gort.ucsd.edu/clinlib

Who’s Your Librarian?

The UCSD Biomedical Library has designated a librarian to be responsible for many of the departments and units on campus. Biomedical Library liaisons can keep you up to date about new library resources and services, provide customized instruction for you or your group, give demonstrations of new and existing resources, help you integrate an information competency component into the courses you teach, perform literature searches, and answer any questions you may have. Call or email your liaison to find out more about what they can do for you.

PubMed and older browsers

PubMed is making some behind-the-scenes technical changes and one consequence is that some older Web browser versions are no longer supported.  Please check the browser section of the PubMed FAQ to ensure that you are using a browser that has been tested and shown to work with the “new” PubMed.

Bioprospecting - Searching for New Fuels

One of three new research centers looking to develop new ethanol fuels will be located in San Francisco. UC Berkeley & UC Davis will collaborate with Berkeley National Lab in searching for either plants that breakdown more easily than corn stalks or for enzymes that are efficient at deconstructing plant matter.

For more details, see the Chronicle article from 6/27/07.

New Roger Sorting Options

If you do a keyword search in the UCSD catalog, Roger, by default the results are displayed in order of relevance (1-5 stars). 

Now there are additional sorting options:  date and title.  After you do your keyword search, look under the search box for links to “date” and “title.”  Date sorting arranges your results by date, most recent first, and title sorting displays your results alphabetically by title.

Recreational Reading and New Books moved

The Recreational Reading and New Books collections have been moved to provide more visibility. The Recreational Reading collection is now located on the first floor across from the service desk, and includes 300 contemporary fiction and non-fiction bestsellers, a dozen popular magazines, and two local newspapers. The New books are now on the East side of the staircase as you enter the library. Books in this collection circulate normally.

Nature.com Access Issue on the 23rd

At 9:00 PM (PDT) on Saturday, June 23rd, expect a downtime for Nature & its associated journals & services as the Nature Publishing Group will be upgrading key components of the nature.com infrastructure.

WorldCat.org Rocks

Have you visited the free WorldCat.org site lately?

WorldCat.org is a mega-catalog, the granddaddy of all library catalogs.  You can search it for books, music, videos and other types of materials held at local libraries (including UCSD) and thousands of other libraries around the world.

From UCSD connections, there is a link to “Search My Library” that automatically runs a Roger search for that item.  You can also arrange for the orange UC-eLinks button to appear so that you can order an item if UCSD doesn’t own it.  For each item, there is a list of the libraries that own it along with how many miles away they are. 

Do you ever need to get book records into your EndNote library?  You can export WorldCat.org records right into both EndNote and RefWorks.

As if this weren’t fabulous enough, if you register for a free WorldCat.org account, you can create lists of books and other materials and then sort, annotate and share those lists with others (or keep them private).

How cool is that?

We get suggestions

A recent suggestion:

- “While I completely understand and respect the ban on cell phone use, this is a biomedical library and not just for students. Because I am a physician, I must answer pages - although I attempt to limit as much as possible by letting my secretary know where I am.”

Thanks for your comment! Issues related to noise, including cell phone use, have been a hot button issue for many of our users groups since we opened the expanded facility. We have heard from a number of our user groups about the need for an ultra-quiet atmosphere for intensive study.

Despite our best efforts, we struggle against the overall design of the library - large open spaces help to amplify even minor noise issues. Unfortunately, planned noise reduction measures were cut during design of the new facility due to cost overruns.

We knew at the time we decided to restrict the use of cell phones in the library, that this would be especially burdensome to patient care providers. We will continue to consider ways that we can accommodate the needs of as many users as possible, while still meeting the needs of the majority of our users.

FDA Updates via Podcasts

Now you can get your drug-safety information via audio with the FDA’s new podcast service. It started in February 2007, and you can find information about market withdrawals, newly discovered adverse events, or other emerging safety information. Search for them individually at the FDA Drug Safety Podcasts web page or better yet, subscribe to the alerts and know when new alerts are issued.

No iPod needed — you can listen to them on a personal computer. The alerts are not just for health professions and are available for consumers. For details, see the FDA’s press release.