The HSLS Staff News section includes recent HSLS presentations, publications, staff changes, staff promotions, degrees earned, and more.
HSLS welcomes Sarah Price, who has joined our team as a Main Desk Library Associate. She is a graduate of Allegheny College and most recently worked at the Geneva Public Library.
In the month of February, our minds may turn to those we cherish: the ones we spend so much time looking at and thinking about, dreaming of the day we might present them to the world and proudly proclaim them ours. I’m speaking, of course, about our data. Join the Health Sciences Library System from February 12 to 16 to learn about data management, data analysis, and more for International Love Data Week!
New to Falk Library this month is the national exhibit This Lead is Killing Us: A History of Citizens Fighting Lead Poisoning in Their Communities. Visitors are asked to reflect on how the past connects to the present-day challenge of reducing harm and danger from lead exposure. The topic of lead exposure ties in the work of advocates, health care professionals, policymakers, industry, and so much more.
On February 20, join us for a panel discussion that explores this topic in depth, discussing not only challenges faced today but celebrating the successes in our region and looking at future opportunities for making our communities, and communities everywhere safer from lead poisoning. The panel event will be co-hosted by Pitt’s School of Public Health’s Environmental and Occupational Health department, with guest panelists Michelle Naccarati-Chapkis, director of Women for a Healthy Environment, and Marcela González Rivas, Associate Professor in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
Annotating cells in single-cell gene expression data is a challenging task due to the continuous nature of gene expression levels and the complex relationship between gene expression and cellular function. To address this challenge, researchers can utilize cell marker databases and web resources to identify cell types in various tissues.
The databases contain marker genes for various cell types and offer user-friendly web interfaces for browsing, searching, visualizing, and downloading cell type and gene marker associations. For example, CellMarker 2.0 is a valuable database containing experimentally supported biomarkers of various cell types in human and mouse tissues. It includes information about 656 tissues, 2,578 cell types, and 26,915 cell markers. The database offers six web tools such as cell annotation, cell clustering, cell malignancy, and cell differentiation, for comprehensive analysis and visualization of single-cell data, making it beneficial for various search applications, including disease identification and prognostic biomarkers.
For 2024, HSLS upgraded to the full Future Medicine Collection (13 journals total); the new additions are included below. Also, HSLS continually adds new open access journals from numerous publishers. Visit our E-journals A-Z list and click on “Show Select Subject” to view more titles in your area of interest.
Join us for this class:
Wednesday, February 21, 2024, 1-4 p.m.
Hybrid session: Attend online or in person in the Falk Library Classroom
Register for Transcriptome Analysis – From GEO Data Mining to Submission*
This beginner-friendly workshop is designed to equip participants with essential skills in locating and analyzing gene expression studies using the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) repository. The class will be led by instructors from HSLS’s Molecular Biology Information Service.
Syndesmology is the branch of regional anatomy focused on the study of ligaments. Its founder, Josias Weitbrecht, wrote the first comprehensive manual of ligaments in 1742, giving this new area of interest a proper start and full attention. He described more than 90 connective tissues in the human body. The work was illustrated with 82 engravings which impress with their accuracy, quality, and attention to detail. The illustrations were done by three artists: Andreas Grecow and his two pupils, Gregorius Katschalow and Iohannes Sokolow.
The HSLS Staff News section includes recent HSLS presentations, publications, staff changes, staff promotions, degrees earned, and more.
Kelsey Cowles, Research and Instruction Librarian, Rebekah Miller, Research and Instruction Librarian, and Rachel Suppok, Research and Instruction Librarian, co-authored the article:
Cowles, K., Miller, R., & Suppok, R. (2024). When Seeing Isn’t Believing: Navigating Visual Health Misinformation through Library Instruction. Medical reference services quarterly, 43(1), 44–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2024.2290963
Michele Klein-Fedyshin, Research and Clinical Instruction Librarian, co-authored the article:
Hume NE, Zerfas I, Wong A, Klein-Fedyshin M, Smithburger PL, Buckley MS, Devlin JW, Kane-Gill SL. Clinical Impact of the Implementation Strategies Used to Apply the 2013 Pain, Agitation/Sedation, Delirium or 2018 Pain, Agitation/Sedation, Delirium, Immobility, Sleep Disruption Guideline Recommendations: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Crit Care Med. 2024 Jan 9. doi: 10.1097/CCM.0000000000006178. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 38193764.
The HSLS Annual Report for FY 23 is now available.
Dive into HSLS’s innovations and accomplishments in the 2022-2023 academic year, including the opening of the West Wing library space and the acquisition of new resources. Explore the year’s highlights and milestones, a testament to our ongoing commitment to advancing learning, teaching, research, and service across the health sciences community.
If your New Year’s resolution is to improve your ability to recognize health misinformation, you’re in luck! Falk Library is currently hosting an exhibit on visual misinformation on the main level of the library, culminating in a special misinformation escape room, now rescheduled for Friday, February 2, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the Falk Library Classroom.
This exhibit highlights the particular problem of visual misinformation; while attention is often paid to text-based misinformation, visual misinformation is just as much of a concern. In fact, a study found that including a related image with a statement makes that statement more believable, regardless of whether the image provides evidence for that statement.
The University of Pittsburgh Libraries recently acquired Altmetric Explorer,* a resource used to track the impact of a wide variety of research outputs. While not a replacement for bibliometrics, altmetrics are used to capture the online engagement with scholarship. This includes when a work is mentioned in social media, news media, policy documents, patents, and other sources of attention trackable by Altmetric Explorer.
One of the biggest advantages of using altmetrics is that they aren’t limited to journal articles. Open science outputs such as datasets, preprints, protocol papers, preprint reviews, and other output types can be found in Altmetric Explorer as well. To track the attention to any one of these research outputs, it must have a persistent scholarly identifier assigned to it. This could be a DOI, PMID, ISBN, ClinicalTrials.gov identifier, or another type of identifier that’s supported by Altmetric.
Group Study Rooms in Falk Library are provided as multi-functional study spaces for students in the schools of the health sciences. These newly renovated rooms are equipped with spacious tables, whiteboards, and large screens. Groups of up to 10 people can reserve the rooms for up to four hours at a time using the online booking website. You can place a reservation up to seven days in advance, and rooms do fill up quickly during peak study times.
Join us for this class:
Thursday, January 25, 2024, 9-10 a.m.
Online
Register for Searching for Drug Information*
This class will provide an overview of using HSLS and NLM resources to search for drug information. Participants will learn about resources for clinical and research use of drugs, as well as the uses of drug databases such as Micromedex to search for specific properties of drugs. Sources for drug evidence alerts, calculations, and interactions will also be covered.
The HSLS Staff News section includes recent HSLS presentations, publications, staff changes, staff promotions, degrees earned, and more.
HSLS welcomes Jim Lombardi as the new Main Desk Technology Lead. He brings technology and management expertise from his previous role in Event Production with Student Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. At Falk Library, he provides technology services from the Main Desk and supports the Library Classroom and Group Study Rooms.