Blogs

February 25 - March 1 Endangered Data Week strives to shed light on public datasets that are in danger of being deleted, repressed, mishandled, or lost. Learn about and register for this special programming through the Cushing Whitney Medical Library. If you have any questions about Data Week at CWML, please email medicaldata@yale.edu.     1. Research Data Management for the Health Sciences Monday, February 25 10:00 am - 11:00 am TCC Are you a modern researcher? The current capabilities for collecting and generating large data sets mean researchers need to know how to manage their data as a part of their research process. This workshop will overview research data and research data management while providing examples of strategies to keep data findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable (FAIR), and protected.   2. RSpace Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) Demonstration Monday, February 25 9:30 am - 10:30 am, and 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Location: Anlyan Center TAC N203 Conference Room Guest presenters: Rob Day (Director of Sales at RSpace) and Rory Macneil (CEO and Cofounder at RSpace) The RSpace ELN is designed for labs that want to transition to a compliant and secure documentation platform, but need something that’s intuitive and easy to use.  Something that everyone can get started with quickly, and the PI can use to keep tabs on what’s happening in the lab. Through the demo you will learn how to get started, see options for organizing your lab group, understand sharing and collaboration, be introduced to document and template creation, managing and annotating images, support for chemistry, and learn how to set up and take advantage of the many optional integrations like those with protocols.io, OneDrive and Google Drive. RSpace has some powerful capabilities in the following areas: Flexibility:  RSpace doesn’t force you into a limited number of restricted workflows; it gives you tools to enhance your existing workflows. Traceability: Linking and unique IDs, added to powerful search capability, simplify finding data and documents and relations between them. Connectivity: RSpace is interoperable with a wide range of general purpose and science-specific tools, including file storage apps OneDrive, Google Drive, Box and Dropbox, tools like protocols.io, Github and Slack, and data repositories like Figshare and Dataverse.  It’s easy to get data out of RSpace in a variety of formats, e.g. pdf, html and xml, so you’ll never be locked into RSpace. If you have any questions before the class, please email medicaldata@yale.edu 3. Using Covidence to Improve your Systematic Review Workflow Wednesday, February 27 9:30 - 10:30 am Location: TCC If you are a student, faculty, or researcher working on, or planning to work on a systematic review - this class is for you! From screening to data extraction, this online tool helps streamline the systematic review process. Come learn how Covidence can help you manage the large quantities of citation data data associated with conducting a systematic review.     4. Data Analysis Using Qlucore Omics Explorer Thursday, February 28 10:00 am - 12:00 pm Location: C-103 Qlucore tools enable researchers to quickly visualize, analyze and perform biological exploration (e.g. GSEA) on various data including RNAseq, microarrays, proteomics, miRNA, methylated DNA, metabolomics, lipidomics, mulitplex and FACS data, clinical data, biomarkers, etc.   If you have any questions about this class, please email Rolando Garcia-Milian at rolando.milian@yale.edu   5. Data Discussion: Touring the Cushing Center and the Cushing Tumor Registry Thursday, February 28 11:00 am - 12:00 pm Location: Meet in the lobby of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Lobby “The brains are so cool!” All our visitors say that - but have you heard the story of how this collection came to be, and how researchers are still using these samples today? For Endangered Data Week, we’re offering this special tour exploring how Cushing Tumor Registry has survived a century, and still supports research today. The Cushing Tumor Registry was endangered when researchers moved institutions, when key staffers retired or died, when funding streams dried up, and when environmental conditions threatened preservation. Could this happen to your project? Join Cushing Center Coordinator Terry Dagradi and Research and Education Librarian Kate Nyhan to discuss the continuing life of this extraordinary (and at one time, endangered) collection.   6. Introduction to R with Swirl Friday, March 1 10:00 am - 11:00 am Location: TCC R is a powerful programming language that can be used for collecting, cleaning, manipulating, analysing, and visualizing your data. This class will show you how to use the Swirl package to help you teach yourself the basic functions of R. This workshop is designed for those who have never used R previously, and there will also be the opportunity to learn about more advanced tutorials and resources available to you at the end of the workshop.

  Welcome to Resource Spotlight! The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library provides access to an incredible array of databases, e-book collections, software and more. In this series of posts, we’ll be showcasing highlights from our collection. In this edition of Resource Spotlight, we’ll be looking at Global Health. Produced by CABI, an international not-for-profit organization focused on solving problems in agriculture and the environment, Global Health is the premier resource for public health information.  Global Health aims to comprehensively cover public health-oriented topics including biomedical life sciences, chronic diseases, disease diagnosis and therapy, environmental and occupational health, epidemiology and biostatistics, health promotion and wellness, health systems, infectious and vector-borne diseases, nutrition, public health emergencies, tropical and international health, and more.  Though PubMed and Embase may be the go-to resources for a lot of biomedical research, Global Health offers access to thousands of journals that are indexed in neither database. Furthermore, Global Health includes international publications and grey literature sources (proceedings, theses, reports, electronic-only publications), meaning researchers are able to access information on an issue from many perspectives and publication types.  Finally, another distinguishing characteristic of Global Health is its editorial policies. Entrance into the database is governed by subject specialists who select relevant papers. Publications from more than 100 countries are reviewed for inclusion, and non-English papers deemed relevant are translated to broaden access to that research.  At Yale, you can access Global Health through the OvidSP platform. Ovid offers an intuitive search experience that lets you build complex literature searches line by line. You also can save searches and set up automated email alerts, so you can stay up to date on a topic with relatively little work. For questions on how to best use Global Health, please contact Kate Nyhan.   

Are you looking to brush up on your basic literature searching skills? Trying to use PubMed or EndNote and encountering difficulties? Need to set up SciENcv? Our fall workshop calendar has everything you may need and more for a productive fall term. Read on for details or head straight to the class calendar. In addition to weekly PubMed and EndNote classes, here are some of the classes coming up this fall that any member of the Yale community is welcome to register for and attend:  Basic Library Classes  Free resources and support in support of research  Second Tuesdays at noon Have you ever wondered what services and resources the library provides to help you with your research? In just 20 minutes, you’ll learn about first-class bioinformatics software, specialized databases, support for grant compliance, systematic review searching, statistics consultants, and more! Academic Job Search Series at Cushing/Whitney Medical Library The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is excited to participate in this year’s Academic Job Search Series in partnership with the Office of Career Strategy, the Center for Teaching & Learning, and the Graduate Writing Lab.  Tools for Keeping Current & Staying Organized October 4th Expand your toolkit for keeping current with the literature in your field and staying organized during the job search process. This session will cover: setting email alerts in various databases, setting up EndNote as a personal database, and using Trello to track job applications throughout the process. My Bibliography and SciENcv: grant reporting, compliance, and biosketch through MyNCBI October 11th Learn how to create a MyNCBI account and link it to eRA Commons, delegate your account, populate and manage My Bibliography, learn how to use SciENcv to create multiple biosketches, create an ORCID, and more! Special Topic Classes Excel 1 & Excel 2 September 18 & October 4 In part one, refresh your basic Excel skills and move onto some intermediate topics such as formatting spreadsheets, sorting, filters, text-to-columns, combing data, and trimming. In part two, learn advanced functionality such as IF, COUNTIF, VLOOKUP, pivot tables, and conditional formatting. Creating Surveys with Qualtrics September 20 Qualtrics is a web-based tool provided by Yale ITS to create surveys. This hands-on class will prepare you to create your own online survey using the Qualtrics user-friendly interface. By the end of the class you will be able to: create a survey with multiple question types, distribute the survey in various ways, and view/analyze results. 

We are delighted to share a report on the work of our first Simbonis intern, Emma Brennan-Wydra, who joined the staff in the Medical Historical Library at the end of May 2018.  Emma offered the following glimpses into her life and experiences as our intern: I graduated from Yale College in 2015 with a double major in Chemistry and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, focusing on the multiple intersections of science, education, gender, bodies, and power. During my time at Yale, I also played flanker for the Yale Women's Rugby Football Club, designed lighting for theater and dance productions, organized a truly astounding number of LGBTQ-related events, and served as the producer of the Fifth Humour, Yale's oldest (and best) sketch comedy troupe. After college, I moved to the Boston area, where I worked as a ballroom dance instructor, played bass in an alternative rock band, and volunteered with the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition. I'm now a master's student at the University of Michigan School of Information, where I've mostly been taking classes relating to libraries, archives, and the preservation of information, but I've also dabbled in data science, programming, and survey research methodology. In addition to my coursework, I work as a research assistant at the University of Michigan College of Engineering, where I'm part of a multidisciplinary group studying engineering education, and in the fall, I'll be a teaching assistant for a master's level introductory course in statistics and data analysis. (I also try to find the time to go out salsa or swing dancing, when I can!) After I finish graduate school next spring, I'm hoping to get a position in an academic library. I had visited the Medical Historical Library and the Cushing Center a few times for class as an undergrad at Yale, but to be honest, I didn't know very much about medical libraries before I started my summer internship. One of my personal learning goals for the summer was to learn more about different facets of academic and medical librarianship, both through direct experience and by talking to other librarians, in hopes of developing more specific career plans for myself. In my six weeks at the Medical Historical Library, I've had the opportunity to get to know librarians from every department of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library and hear more about the work they do, and I've also gotten to work on a number of different projects in and around the Medical Historical Library for myself. Unfortunately, I'm not really any closer to identifying a “dream job” because everything has been so interesting! My first project for the summer was processing a recently acquired collection of medical illustrations drawn by Mildred Codding for our library's benefactor and namesake, neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, along with photographic reprints, notes, correspondence, and other materials that Cushing used in the preparation of his books and articles. Archival processing, I quickly learned, is all about decision-making. As I was planning out how I might want to organize the collection, I found it helpful to imagine what kinds of questions future researchers might be asking. Would the researcher need to find all of the materials from one specific publication, for example, or might they be interested in Cushing's editorial process more broadly? If the materials are organized one way, it might make it easy to answer one type of research question, but other kinds of information or functionality may be lost in exchange. Most of the time with archival processing, there isn't one “right” answer. After I physically organized the materials into new folders and boxes, I began entering information about the collection into ArchivesSpace, an archives-specific information management application that is used across the Yale Library system. This facilitated the creation of a finding aid, which is a document describing an archival collection, designed to help researchers find materials of interest. You can view the finding aid I made here. After I finished the finding aid, I began planning a small exhibition to display some of the beautiful surgical illustrations by Mildred Codding that are part of the new archival collection. The scope of the exhibition quickly broadened to include not only Mildred Codding but also two of the other women who worked with Harvey Cushing: secretary Madeline Stanton and pathologist Louise Eisenhardt. Cushing, like many doctors of the time, employed a large team of female assistants whose work was often uncredited and whose names have been largely forgotten. But these three women—Codding, Stanton, and Eisenhardt—went on to have distinguished careers of their own that extended decades past Cushing's death in 1939. As I began cobbling together a plan for my exhibition, I drew on a variety of sources, including biographies of Harvey Cushing, obituaries and tribute articles, birth and death records, reports from the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, photographs from the Harvard Medical School Archives, and collections of correspondence and diaries held here at Yale. I also had conversations with others who had some curatorial experience so I could learn more about how to create a strong, cohesive exhibit, and I tried to select items, images, and stories that capture some of what made Codding, Stanton, and Eisenhardt so special. My exhibit, titled Not a "Harem": Codding, Eisenhardt, Stanton, and the Lives and Legacies of Dr. Harvey Cushing's Female Associates, is currently on display in the Cushing Center and also available online. It has been such an honor and a delight to have the opportunity to learn about these exceptional women, and I'm so excited to share what I learned with the public. One of the things that excites me most about my future career as an academic librarian is the day-to-day variety of the work, so having the opportunity to experience a taste of that in my internship has definitely been a plus! In addition to processing an archival collection and curating an exhibition, I've also updated and migrated an online exhibition about the Yale School of Nursing to the new Omeka platform, cataloged glass plate photographic negatives of Harvey Cushing's patients, written and edited labels for an exhibit about tobacco advertising, and more. I've learned so many new skills and technologies through this internship, but I've also gotten to do work that employs my preexisting interests and strengths. Although I previously thought I might want to work as a librarian in a subject specialist role for chemistry or another science field, I've thoroughly enjoyed both the medical and historical aspects of my work here.

Want to learn more about the smart and dedicated women who supported the work of our namesake, Harvey Cushing?  Explore our newest exhibition, curated by Emma Brennan-Wydra, Stanley Simbonis Intern for the Medical Library, and now on view in the Cushing Center! Throughout his career, Dr. Harvey Cushing employed a team of women who assisted him as secretaries, typists, medical artists, operative photographers, laboratory technicians, and more.  Cushing's female associates referred to themselves jokingly as his “harem,” but they were far more than that.  These working women were indispensable to Cushing, and their contributions are evident throughout his published works, as well as his diaries and correspondence.  Three of Harvey Cushing's assistants, in particular—secretary Madeline Stanton, neuropathologist Louise Eisenhardt, and medical illustrator Mildred Codding—are remembered not only for their proximity to the famed neurosurgeon, but also as leading lights in their own respective fields, with careers extending decades beyond Cushing's death in 1939. Madeline Stanton, who worked as Cushing's secretary, played a major role in the organization and development of the historical collections at the Yale Medical Library (now the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library).  As Librarian of the Historical Collections from 1949 until 1968, Stanton maintained an “atmosphere of generous and kindly learning” in the Historical Library.  “She always knew,” recalled Gloria Robinson, wife of Yale neurosurgeon Dr. Franklin Robinson.  “She had endless special knowledge.”  (Photograph by Richard U. Light, courtesy of the Harvard Medical School Archives at the Countway Library of Medicine.) Louise Eisenhardt, whom Cushing originally hired as an editorial assistant, obtained a medical degree for herself in 1925 and worked as Cushing's pathologist.  A leading expert on tumor diagnosis, Eisenhardt was the first woman president of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and the first managing editor of the Journal of Neurosurgery, a position she held for 22 years.  She was also the curator of the Brain Tumor Registry, Cushing's collection of pathological specimens and patient records, which is now housed in the Cushing Center.  (Photograph by Richard U. Light, courtesy of the Harvard Medical School Archives at the Countway Library of Medicine.) Mildred Codding was a medical illustrator who worked with Cushing from 1928 until his retirement from the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in 1932.  Her surgical drawings and anatomical diagrams grace the pages of many of Cushing's published works.  A student and disciple of famed medical illustrator Max Brödel, Codding made masterful use of the carbon dust technique, resulting in wonderfully vivid, detailed, and realistic illustrations of living tissue.  After Cushing's retirement, Codding stayed on as an illustrator at the Brigham.  Her later illustrations appear in a number of major works, including Zollinger's Atlas of Surgical Operations.  (Photograph by Russell B. Harding, courtesy of the Brigham and Women's Hospital Archives.) Learn more about these exceptional women at our new exhibition in the Cushing Center, which features photographs, correspondence, books, slides, and original surgical illustrations by Mildred Codding.  An online companion to the physical exhibition, which includes additional photographs and information, is available here.