MLA News Selected Articles

August 2001

Chapter Project of the Year Takes on a Life of its Own Medical Images on the Web State Morbidity Database: Web Access to Gray Literature

The Southern Chapter of MLA won the 2001 Majors/MLA Chapter Project of the Year Award. The award was given for the work done by the chapter to establish the Martha C. Watkins Memorial Scholarship. Watkins, a highly regarded member of the Southern Chapter, was deeply committed to education for librarians and those who use library services. She was a founding member of the Southeastern Conference of Hospital Librarians (SCHL) and, when that organization disbanded in 1995, the remaining treasury was used to build the scholarship fund.

Now that the fund has been established, scholarships are awarded each year to hospital librarians who need financial assistance to participate in professional education opportunities.

Though the scholarship is only given to hospital librarians, Southern Chapter members from many types of libraries contribute to the fund. Because needlework was a passion of Watkins, handmade ornaments and crafts have been created by chapter members and raffled or sold at annual meetings, a tradition that seems to be taking on a life of its own. The financial goal of the fund has been reached, but the membership still expects a new ornament each year.

Award Honors Creative Problem Solving
The Chapter Project of the Year Award, sponsored by Majors Scientific Books, was originally proposed by the Platform for Change Implementation Task Force as a way of encouraging health sciences librarians to respond creatively to the challenges of an evolving profession. It includes a sum of $500 and is given each year for a special project that demonstrates advocacy, service, technology, or innovation contributing to the advancement of health sciences librarianship. In the past, awards have been made for projects that involved benchmarking, resource sharing, research, and Web page development.

Chapters that have undertaken worthwhile projects are encouraged to apply for the 2002 award. The application process is not difficult, but submissions must include the project goals, objectives, evaluation, and outcome and must be approved and signed by the chapter chair.

Chapters should note that the deadline for submission of applications has been changed this year to November 1, 2001.

Complete information can be found on MLANET, including a PDF version of the necessary forms (www.mlanet.org/awards/honors/).

Sometimes a picture conveys more information than any textbook or article. After conducting a class for faculty at University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) about how to search for medical images online, the attendees suggested that the library create a Web page to assist other campus faculty and students in finding images. The sites listed below and links to other Websites of medical images are available at www.unmc.edu/library/eresources/medimage.html. It is recommended that the usage policies, licensing agreements, and copyright restrictions for all sites be checked before using their images.

Editor’s Note: Kathryn E. Kerdolff, AHIP, was this year’s winner of the ISI/Frank Bradway Rogers Information Advancement Award for creation of the State Morbidity Database.

The State Morbidity Database (SMD), created at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Library, aids in retrieval of state publications, such as the Louisiana Morbidity Report, which are not indexed by any of the commercial sources. Morbidity publications report state and local disease incidence data and include summaries and compilations of statistics on communicable diseases and reportable conditions.

Accessing this important gray literature has always been problematic. The term “gray literature” describes publications that may have limited distribution, sporadic publishing histories, confusing title changes, and incomplete physical collections.

The state morbidity publications, a perfect example of gray literature, became accessible when the SMD was created. The SMD, an Internet catalog of all the states’ morbidity publications from 1997 to the present, provides a central Website for locating and accessing these publications. It is also an indexed bibliographic citation database of the articles and incidence tables, which are the critical sections of these publications. Each record in the database has an Internet link to the location of the publication, and, when the full-text document is available on the Web, the database links directly to the article in either hypertext markup language (HTML) or portable document format (PDF). Morbidity publications that are not available via the Internet are linked to the appropriate library catalog to show holdings. The SMD is updated once a month or as publications become available; links are checked periodically for connectivity.

The publications are indexed with the state name and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). Index terms facilitate searching the SMD in basic or advanced mode. Basic searching involves a single term search and is best suited to find all the citations from a particular state, by searching state names, or all the citations for a certain disease or condition across state lines. Advanced mode allows Boolean logic to be used, and both the state and disease fields can be searched.

The SMD is linked from the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Library–New Orleans Web page as a locally created database. The Louisiana Morbidity Report is also available as a separate database that goes back to 1967. Suggestions or feedback regarding the SMD may be sent to Kathryn Kerdolff, AHIP.

For more information on gray literature, see Section Programming I abstracts from MLA/CHLA/ABSC 2000 in Vancouver at www.mlanet.org/am/am2000/program/abstracts/contrib1d.html.