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Access HSLS Resources 24/7

Are you working from home or somewhere off-campus and need access to an e-journal article or an e-book at 4 a.m. on a Sunday? No problem! You can access HSLS resources remotely with Pitt Passport, the University’s single sign-on service.

Pitt Passport

Remote access for library resources requires a valid Pitt username and password, plus a second method of verification through an app or phone line. This is called multifactor authentication, which can be done in three steps. If you have problems setting up multifactor authentication, contact the Pitt IT Help Desk at 412-624-4357. Once you’ve successfully set up multifactor authentication, you won’t have to do it again. Continue reading

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Tracking down Techniques: Finding Research Methods Using the HSLS Protocols Search

Did you just join a new research group and need to figure out how to perform the standard lab protocols? Does your new research project require you to learn an unfamiliar technique? Are you reviewing a paper and want to check on variations of its experimental methodology?

Between the influx of new technology, plethora of scientific papers and tools, and limited time, it can be challenging to discover potential lab techniques that support your research goals. The HSLS Molecular Biology Information Service (HSLS MolBio) has provided shortcuts to access such resources for years, and we recently updated our Protocols Search engine. Located in the middle of the HSLS MolBio homepage, use the prominent search bar to find experimental methods and protocols with a combined search of Springer Nature Experiments, protocols.io, and a filtered Europe PMC search. Continue reading

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Statistical Consulting Services at the University of Pittsburgh

HSLS receives several inquiries each semester related to statistics training. Although we do not have a statistician on staff, we do partner with the Department of Biostatistics to offer classes on R and programming. We also work with groups on campus that offer statistical consulting services to the Pitt health sciences community. If you are looking for consultations or training on statistical methods and study design, the following list (updated Dec. 2021)* may be useful.

Readers take note: most of these groups have a waitlist for services. Contact your chosen center early to have the best chance of meeting your deadlines!

Organization: Biostatistics, Epidemiology, & Research Design (BERD) Core
What do they do:
Offers statistical and study design consultations, and workshop-based/one-on-one trainings.
Who can use their services:
All University of Pittsburgh researchers, including faculty, fellows, and medical students; medical residents working closely with a Pitt faculty member can receive indirect support. Junior investigators receive priority.
Is there a cost?: No cost for up to ten hours of support per project; support beyond 10 hours per project can be discussed based on availability.
Contact:
Submit a contact request through the CTSI Research Requests + Service Tracking Portal

Continue reading

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Treasures from the Rare Book Room: Discovering Unexpected Attributes of Old Books

4 microscope plates with annotationsWhen I selected Alfred Donné’s Cours de microscopie complémentaire des études médicales, anatomie microscopique et physiologie des fluides de l’économie: atlas exécuté d’après nature au microscope-daguerréotype (Paris: J.B. Baillière, 1845) as the next feature for the Treasures from the Rare Book Room series, I was certain it would be solely about the book’s novel illustrations. It turned out that this book has a link to Abraham Lincoln!

When this book appeared in print, the daguerreotype was cutting-edge technology. This was a new process for photographic images and was introduced to the public in 1839. However, French bacteriologist and physician Alfred Donné immediately recognized the usefulness of photography in microscopic observations. In 1840, he produced the first images under the microscope using this technique. Continue reading

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Featured Workshop: Choosing a Citation Manager

HSLS classes and workshops have been scheduled for the 2022 spring semester. We have a full lineup of classes including data management, bioinformatics software, visual design, and more! You can quickly view all Upcoming Classes and Events or sign up to receive the weekly Upcoming HSLS Classes and Workshops email.

Featured workshop of the month: Choosing a Citation Manager

Wednesday, January 26, 2022, noon-12:30 p.m.

Register for this virtual workshop*

Anyone familiar with academic writing can attest to how time-consuming it can be to manually manage and format citations. Citation managers are tools that help you to collect and organize references. These tools also help format citations and create bibliographies for dissertations, theses, and other writing projects.

With so many citation management options available, it can be overwhelming to decide which program to choose. This 30-minute class will briefly introduce participants to three frequently utilized citation managers: EndNote, Sciwheel, and Zotero. Continue reading

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HSLS Staff News

The HSLS Staff News section includes recent HSLS presentations, publications, staff changes, staff promotions, degrees earned, etc.

Names in bold are HSLS-affiliated

News

Congratulations to Tristan Lucchetti who has been promoted to Assistant Director for Administrative Operations.

Publications

Dahm JJ, Assistant Director for Technology Integration and Fulfillment Services, Reese JG, Technology Integration Services Administrator. Sharing electronically and accessibly in library-led instruction. J Med Libr Assoc. 2021 Oct 1;109(4):690-692. doi: 10.5195/jmla.2021.1361. PMID: 34858106; PMCID: PMC8608205.

Brick R, Turner R, Assistant Director for Liaison Services and Instruction, Bender C, Douglas M, Eilers R, Ferguson R, Leland N, Lyons KD, Toto P, Skidmore E. Impact of non-pharmacological interventions on activity limitations and participation restrictions in older breast cancer survivors: A scoping review. J Geriatr Oncol. 2021 Sep 28:S1879-4068(21)00211-3. doi: 10.1016/j.jgo.2021.09.010. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34598902.

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Using Wikipedia Responsibly for Health Information and Research

Go to Wikipedia.org
The Wikipedia puzzle globe and wordmark are trademarks of the Wikimedia Foundation. CC-BY-SA-3.0

Overall, analyses of Wikipedia’s biomedical content have found that it is generally of moderate to high quality but imperfect, with content gaps, a lack of depth, and sometimes errors. There is a strict set of guidelines for citing biomedical information, but individuals’ implementation of these guidelines can vary. Volunteer editors are constantly working to improve Wikipedia’s health articles to make them more accurate, readable, and complete. However, it is unlikely that Wikipedia will become a perfect health information resource anytime soon.

Despite these challenges, Wikipedia is one of the most frequently used health information resources in the world. Over 90% of medical students have reported using Wikipedia in their studies and 50-70% of physicians have reported using Wikipedia when providing care. It is often used as a starting point for background information and research. Wikipedia is even increasingly being used in instruction, as editing articles allows students to practice research skills while contributing to freely available health information accessed by millions of users each year.

Anyone who uses Wikipedia for health information—whether they’re a clinician, professor, student, or layperson—should be familiar with some simple techniques to evaluate the quality of an article. Continue reading

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PubMed Central Article Datasets are Now Available in the Cloud

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) recently announced that two PubMed Central article datasets are openly available in the cloud. This news is especially of interest for those conducting research utilizing text mining methodology or other types of secondary analysis.

PubMed Central (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature from the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). For nearly two decades NLM has supported the retrieval and download of machine-readable open access journal articles through the PMC Open Archives Initiative (PMC-OAI) and FTP (file transfer protocol). To enhance access, these datasets are now also available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Registry of Open Data as part of AWS’s Open Data Sponsorship Program (ODP). Benefits to working with the datasets in the cloud include access to uncompressed individual full-text article files in XML and plain text as well as faster download and transfer speeds.

In summary, PMC Article Datasets housed on AWS include:

  • The PMC Open Access (OA) Subset: includes all articles and preprints in PMC with a machine-readable Creative Commons license that allows reuse (to date more than 3.4 million).
  • The Author Manuscript Dataset: includes accepted author manuscripts collected under a funder policy in PMC and made available in machine-readable formats for text mining (to date more than 700,000).

Continue reading

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Indulge in a Good Book over Winter Break

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Take a break from staring at your computer screen. For a nice change, try reading a traditional book over winter break! The HSLS Leisure Reading Collection has a few hundred newly published fiction and nonfiction books. The Collection is located on the main floor of Falk Library.

Popular books in the Leisure Reading Collection include:

  • 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson
  • Becoming by Michelle Obama
  • Deacon King Kong by James McBride
  • Fifty Words for Rain: A Novel by Asha Lemmie
  • The Institute: A Novel by Stephen King
  • The Last Thing He Told Me: A Novel by Laura Dave
  • Legacy by Nora Roberts
  • Our Woman in Moscow: A Novel by Beatriz Williams
  • A Time for Mercy by John Grisham

Continue reading

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Falk Library Holiday and Winter Recess Hours

Over Pitt’s winter break, Falk Library will have modified hours:

  • Monday, December 20 through Monday, January 3: CLOSED
  • Tuesday, January 4: Resume Regular Hours

Ask a Librarian questions received over winter recess will be monitored periodically.

Best wishes for a happy, healthy, and restful holiday season!

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Featured Workshop: OSF for Project Management, Documentation, and Data Sharing

HSLS classes continue well into December as we wrap up our 2021 schedule of topics such as data management, bioinformatics software, visual design, and more! Sign up to receive the weekly Upcoming HSLS Classes and Workshops email.

Featured workshop of the month: OSF for Project Management, Documentation, and Data Sharing

Thursday, December 9, 2021, 1–2:30 p.m.

Register for this virtual workshop*

Open Science Framework (OSF) is a free, open-source platform that can help scientists make their research more reproducible, more efficient, and more collaborative. OSF enables research teams to bring together data, documentation, workflows, and code all in one place by providing free and secure data storage with plugins for popular third-party tools such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and GitHub. While OSF is a valuable tool at any stage of the research process, it is especially useful for disseminating results and sharing data or code.

In this workshop, we will demonstrate OSF, discuss how open science principles work in practice in our fields, and construct an example OSF project site together. Participants of this workshop will learn: Continue reading

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HSLS Staff News

The HSLS Staff News section includes recent HSLS presentations, publications, staff changes, staff promotions, degrees earned, etc.

Names in bold are HSLS-affiliated

News

Pitt’s Office of Human Resources recognized HSLS employees Arlie Chipps, Library Specialist, Amos Glenn, TEC Instructional Design Lead, Brian Krummel, TEC Web Manager, and Joel Marchewka, Web and Application Programmer, for their five years of service to the University.

Maria Davies has joined the HSLS staff as a Main Desk Assistant. Maria graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) and worked at the Indiana Free Library in the Circulation Department.

Rebekah Miller, Research and Instruction Librarian, was awarded the Medical Library Association Mid-Atlantic Chapter’s 2021 MAC Award for Professional Excellence by a New Health Sciences Librarian. Continue reading

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New Leadership within HSLS

I am pleased to announce the appointments of three Assistant Directors for HSLS, as part of our new leadership structure. This structure creates new opportunities to advance traditional library services, while expanding in others, such as incorporating inclusive, diverse, and accessible resources; offering expertise to guide research to publication; integrating emerging technologies into online instruction; and increasing interprofessional education activities across the health sciences.

Julia Dahm has been appointed Assistant Director for Technology Integration and Fulfillment Services. Julia began her career as Technology Services Librarian in 2010. Since 2018, Julia has served as Coordinator for Technology Integration Services, where she has led efforts to support the unique technology needs of library staff and patrons, and has implemented education to support new technologies. She is an active member of Pitt’s Information Technology Advisory Committee and the Board of Trustees Institutional Advancement Committee. As Assistant Director, Julia will lead the library’s technology-based services and resources, including management of the HSLS main desk and technology help desk, technology education, virtual reality, media creation, digital marketing, and multimodal technology accessibility across HSLS collections, resources, and services.

Melissa Ratajeski has been appointed Assistant Director for Data and Publishing Services. Melissa has been at HSLS since 2006, starting as a Research and Instruction Librarian.  Melissa is also liaison librarian to the IACUC. Since 2016, she has served as Coordinator for Data Services, making notable contributions in leading the development and implementation of services supporting faculty, students, and staff throughout the research data life cycle; coordinating a team of faculty librarians to design and implement data services for the University’s health sciences community; and overseeing the library’s data catalog project. She is an active member of the Data Discovery Collaboration Project and offers representation on University data management and policy committees. As Assistant Director, Melissa will lead the library in expanding and implementing effective, user-centered services supporting research sharing and publishing, data management, open science, and research impact and metrics.

Rose Turner has been appointed Assistant Director for Liaison Services and Instruction. Rose began her career as a Research and Instruction Librarian at HSLS in 2014. She is liaison librarian to the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS), where she is integrated into research activities and the curriculum, and is co-author on numerous peer-reviewed research publications. Since 2018, Rose has served as Coordinator for Liaison Services, where she has aligned efforts of the liaison librarians to the schools of the health sciences, and developed optimal approaches for integrating research support, instruction, and scholarship activities for students, faculty, and staff. As Assistant Director, Rose will continue liaison responsibilities to SHRS while leading the library’s liaison and instruction programs, developing user-centered services, and incorporating emerging, instructional technologies and best practices into in-house and curricular instruction.

Continue reading

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Two New LabArchives Products for Pitt Researchers

The University of Pittsburgh has licensed a cloud-based Electronic Research Notebook, LabArchives, since 2016. LabArchives research notebooks assist with the organization and management of laboratory data, safely and conveniently across multiple platforms and devices. Whether managing a research lab as a principal investigator or reviewing students’ lab work as an instructor, LabArchives supports effective research data management plans and helps improve student learning. Pitt researchers seeking to make the transition from paper-based to electronic lab notebooks can watch YouTube videos, read our guide, or attend one of our training sessions.

LabArchives has expanded beyond electronic research notebooks for Research and Education to include two products that we are excited to announce are now available to researchers with a Pitt email address: Inventory and Scheduler.

LabArchives Inventory streamlines the organization, tracking, and ordering of lab inventory. Whether you need to order inventory from a vendor or manage your in-lab created materials, LabArchives Inventory provides a simple and customizable solution for your physical inventory management needs. Use Inventory to customize your inventory types and storage locations, add and manage lab inventory items, and then use the ordering options to request and receive materials. Continue reading