Happy DNA Day

Today is the 6th annual DNA Day and there is something to celebrate.  Yesterday, the very day before DNA Day, the U.S. Senate passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.  The Act will protect individuals against discrimination based on their genetic information when it comes to health insurance and employment.  The House is expected to approve the legislation as soon as next week, and it is anticipated that President Bush will sign the bill into law shortly thereafter.  Yea!

Donate Your Medical Textbooks

Donate your recent medical textbooks to a worthy cause!

Physicians in Iraq and Afghanistan have been working very hard to restore their medical education system at all levels and in all fields. In order to support this effort, the UCSD Medical Alumni Association has partnered with UCLA’s “Books Without Borders” program, which will provide textbooks needed to teach courses for physicians, nurses, laboratory technicians, EMTs, and other health professionals. Your donations are needed!

The goal is to collect medical texts, including journals and reference materials, which will be sent to the Afghan National Military Hospital at the Medical University in Kabul. Books covering the basics of anatomy, physiology, nursing, physical therapy, and pharmacology are in demand, we well as publications on pediatrics, primary care, and OB/GYN. Multiple copies will be beneficial for medical schools and reference libraries.

Medical texts with current information dated 2000 and forward, and journals and reference materials published after 2005 will be accepted. Donations may be dropped off inside the UCSD Bookstore at the Medical Counter located on the first floor (look for the sign) between April 1-July 1, 2008.

For more information, contact Brooke Bain, Director of Medical Alumni Relations, UCSD School of Medicine, at babain@ucsd.edu or (858) 822-1210.

DNA Testing Talk on May 1

Don’t miss George ”Woody” Clarke’s talk about “DNA Testing: 21st Century Justice” in the UCSD Biomedical Library Events Room on May 1, 2008 from 12:00-1:00 p.m.  Mr. Clarke will be available after the talk to sell and sign his new book, JUSTICE AND SCIENCE: TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS OF DNA EVIDENCE, recently published by Rutgers University Press.  Mr. Clarke is a Judge of the Superior Court for the County of San Diego.  More details about the topic and Mr. Clarke are located on our blog. 

This talk is part of the Biomedical Library lunchtime lecture series, and complements the current display in the library breezeway, “Forensic Science: Where Science Meets Law.”  Space is limited so please RSVP to Vicky Anderson at vkanderson@ucsd.edu as soon as possible to reserve a seat.  Feel free to bring a discreet lunch; cookies and water will be provided.

National Library Week

April 13-19, 2008 is National Library Week. The American Library Association has produced a series of fun short videos with different facts about libraries. This one’s my favorite. (BTW, my money’s on the gorilla.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1zgVgRLBUc

IOM report on Aging America

The Institute of Medicine has release a new report “Retooling for an Aging America: Building the Health Care Workforce,” highlighting the need for changes in schools of medicine, nursing, & public health in order to meet the needs of an aging and long-living population. Some of the reforms suggested call for more training and also higher pay.

Some changes are already underway with new medical schools and new programs specifically for meeting the needs of the elderly population, but more needs to be done. John Rowe from Columbia University warns of an “impending crisis” and the need for new health care delivery models.

Last summer, PricewaterhouseCooper’s Health Research Institute estimated a severe shortage of health professionals in the next decade. See previous blog story.

Hat tip to Chronicle blog.

We Get Suggestions

A couple of recent suggestions:

- “Please get a coffee vending machine for the Biomedical Library. Thanks!”

The library received the anonymous request above, as well as a more formal request from the first-year medical students. I’m sorry to say that the Biomedical Library will not be providing a coffee vending machine in the near future. We have done a good amount of investigation, and it does not look possible on a number of fronts.

The biggest challenge is from a business model perspective. Library administration is firm that providing a vending machine at the Biomedical Library must be done at no cost to the Libraries. With easily accessible providers of coffee (ClubMed, Leichtag Coffee Cart) available through the morning and early afternoon, it is unlikely that a vending machine would consistently generate enough business during the remainder of the day to break even. Knowledgeable campus officials have given us their assessment that the vendor would likely want to remove the vending machine, or ask the Library to subsidize the cost of the machine in as little as six months.

Another significant challenge is logistics - from a traffic flow/facility cleanliness perspective, the best location for a vending machine would be the breezeway. Unfortunately, there is no water or sewer access in the breezeway, and conservative estimates put the cost of adding this at $10,000. We are aware that there are self-contained units, but these require daily maintenance - the Library is not willing to take this on, and vending companies would expect a significant profit to provide this level of maintenance. As described above, we are not confident these profits would materialize.

Due to the Library’s current struggle to maintain facility cleanliness, we are not willing to provide vending machines, or any associated food service materials (microwave, etc), with the inevitable additional mess, elsewhere in the Library.

I’m sorry we couldn’t satisfy this request. We will continue to evaluate if it’s possible to provide this type of service in the future.

- “Keep the library open past 6pm on Saturdays, especially during Finals”

Over the years, the most frequent request we’ve received related to the Library’s hours has been to stay open past 6pm on Saturdays. Some of the factors we consider with this question include staffing, and the cost of keeping the facility open.
- From a staffing perspective, providing longer hours on Saturday would require two more staff members to work that day. There would be a significant cost associated with this, as well as more problems related to staff illnesses and vacations.
- From the facility cost perspective, it’s important to understand that it takes a large amount of energy to provide light and climate control for the Library. We would have to see a lot of use of the facility to justify the added cost. Based on experience throughout the UCSD Libraries, Saturday evening is usually not a busy night.

We’re hoping that the soon to be completed expansion of the Price Center, including a 24 hour study lounge may provide a location for students wanting to study outside our open hours.

Thanks for the suggestions!

NIH Policy Takes Effect Today

The NIH Open Access Policy takes effect today, April 7.

If a paper is published based on your NIH-funded research, you need to make sure that a copy of that paper is deposited in PubMed Central within 12 months after publication.  A number of journals submit articles on behalf of authors.  If not, if the journal allows you to submit your manuscript (with peer review changes) yourself, it only takes about 10 minutes to do that.

To make sure that you have the right to deposit your paper, you need to attach this letter from the UC Office of Technology Transfer to the manuscript you submit and/or the copyright transfer agreement.  We recommend that you attach the letter on BOTH occasions.

Confused about what you need to do?  Consult our website, or sign up for a brief overview session about the policy, or contact Nancy Stimson at (858) 534-6321 or nstimson@ucsd.edu or Dominique Turnbow at (858) 534-1195 or dturnbow@ucsd.edu.

UC E-Links not working with PubMed (4/4/07) - RESOLVED

** update ** this issue has now been reported as resolved.  We have done a little spot-checking and we’re able to get to full text, Roger, and Request screens normally.  Please let us know if you find anything amiss! - 4/7/08 

UC E-Links is currently not working with PubMed - it’s not picking up any data about the citations, so no links to full text or print holdings are showing up. The problem is at PubMed’s end and the folks who run UC e-Links are working with the PubMed technical group to solve it. In the meantime, here are two workarounds:

1. Although PubMed is our preferred interface, we also have access to the MEDLINE database via the ISI Web of Knowledge interface at http://isiknowledge.com/medline. The UC E-Links are working there, including Request.

OR

2. Use PubMed for searching and use our catalog Roger, to determine whether we own the items. You can open PubMed in one browser window or tab and the Roger journal search page (http://roger.ucsd.edu/search~S2) in another window/tab. Search for journal titles in Roger to see if we have the item electronically or in print.

If you run into an item in PubMed and you can’t tell if we have it, please contact us for help.

DNA Testing: 21st Century Justice

Forensic DNA testing technologies have presented the criminal justice system with powerful and unique tools for the solution of crime. Small, often invisible, biological material can successfully be obtained from evidence items previously thought to be useless in criminal investigations. The development and use of polymerase chain reaction-based (“PCR”) techniques revolutionized the ability to exclude or include known individuals as the donors of the smallest evidentiary samples. The creation of local, state and national databases of DNA profiles of previously-convicted offenders has similarly resulted in the solution of thousands of suspectless cases. Comparison of DNA profiles obtained from biological evidence in such cases with statutorily-authorized databanks has permitted the discovery of the identity of attackers in cases otherwise not capable of resolution. Of greater importance is the now-common use of DNA typing technologies to examine older cases in which inmates have frequently served lengthy terms in prisons or penitentiaries. More than 200 inmates in the United States have been exonerated by modern DNA analysis of samples seized prior to the availability of DNA testing. 

Come hear George ”Woody” Clarke talk about “DNA Testing: 21st Century Justice” in the UCSD Biomedical Library Events Room on May 1, 2008 from 12:00-1:00 p.m.  Mr. Clarke will be available after the talk to sell and sign his new book, JUSTICE AND SCIENCE: TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS OF DNA EVIDENCE, recently published by Rutgers University Press, for the special price of $20. 

Mr. Clarke is currently a Judge of the Superior Court for the County of San Diego. He served as a Deputy District Attorney for the County of San Diego from 1982-2003. During that time he tried numerous serious felony offenses, including capital crimes. Since 1989 he has specialized in the use and introduction in court of scientific evidence, particularly forensic DNA testing results. As a result of his expertise, he was loaned to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office and presented DNA evidence to the jury in the 1995 prosecution of Orenthal James (”O.J.”) Simpson. Mr. Clarke was appointed in 1998 by the U.S. Department of Justice to the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence, and in 2002 to the U.S. Attorney General’s Initiative on DNA Laboratory Backlogs. He has published and lectured internationally in the area of forensic DNA evidence to organizations including the U.S. Department of Justice, John F. Kennedy School of Government, American Academy of Forensic Sciences, National College of District Attorneys, Harvard Law School and the armed services. He was honored in 2003 with “Prosecutor of the Year” awards by both the California District Attorneys Association and the San Diego County Deputy District Attorneys Association. He was recognized in 2000 by the San Diego County Bar Association as its “Public Lawyer of the Year,” by the San Diego County Deputy District Attorneys Association with its “Charles E. Nickel Award for Professional Excellence,” and by San Diego Magazine as one of “50 San Diegans to Watch in 2001.” 

This talk is part of the Biomedical Library lunchtime lecture series, and complements the current display in the library breezeway, “Forensic Science: Where Science Meets Law.”  Space is limited so please RSVP to Vicky Anderson at vkanderson@ucsd.edu as soon as possible to reserve a seat.  Feel free to bring a discreet lunch; cookies and water will be provided.

Shared Research Facilities database at UCSD

Check out the new Shared Research Facilities & Equipment website at http://research.ucsd.edu/sharedfacilities. It offers a searchable inventory of research facilities, equipment and research support services available for researchers at UCSD, from Alzheimer’s disease assessment to x-ray crystallography.