Library Update

Library Services Annual Report

We hope that your 2024 is off to a great start. We’ve been very busy at the library answering your questions, finding articles, conducting literature searches, and negotiating with our vendors to provide the best, most cost-effective resources. We also have started our 2024 strategic planning and have goals to increase awareness about our resources while improving access. As we look to the future, we also reflect on all the work that we did over the last year.  Our 2023 Library Services Annual Report is a good summary of that work and we are happy to share it with you. Have a great February!

Track Your Favorite Journals in BrowZine Bookshelf 

The Allina Health Library is excited to spread the word on the new feature in BrowZine, the Library’s ejournal portal, called My Bookshelf.  

My Bookshelf is the area within BrowZine where you can organize your favorite journals so the current issue is one click away.  To access, you simply need to create an account for yourself, with your email and password of your choosing.  The sign-up page can be accessed by clicking on “My Bookshelf” at the top of the Browzine screen and following the link to create an account.  You will need to select Allina Health as the institution.  You can accept to receive email alerts when new articles are available. 

For a quick 2-minute tour through this new feature in Browzine, view the new video:  

For questions on this and any library resources, email us at library@allina.com. 

Black History Month

This month we would like to highlight Joel Bervell, a Ghanaian-American medical student, social media star, medical educator, and host of "The Dose" podcast with the Commonwealth Fund. In the social media sphere Joel is known as the "Medical Mythbuster", He is committed to fighting health disparities in medicine through education and regularly posts about racial disparities, the hidden history of medicine, and biases in healthcare. Joel is currently participating in the White House Office of Public Engagement’s Healthcare Leaders in Social Media Roundtable, on the Council for Responsible Social Media, served as the American Medical Association’s Medical Student Digital Fellow. Please check out this short video biography of him from Scientific American.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - an ongoing commitment

Allina Health Library Services is committed to fostering a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion within our organization and the communities we serve. We recognize that libraries have a responsibility to challenge systemic oppression and promote social justice in our society and within healthcare. As a part of that work, we continue to build our collections and curate resources with health equity in mind. We are excited to announce that in addition to our existing Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging resource guide, we are adding a Health Equity page to several of our existing Subject Guides linked from our homepage. Check out our Anesthesia Health Equity page where we’ve shared relevant professional statements, articles and videos. We plan to add similar sections on our other pages and would love your help. Please let us know if you have suggestions by emailing us at library@allina.com We hope these resources will help inform health equity-based practices across Allina Health. 

Introducing Proximity Searching in PubMed

Have you ever searched PubMed where keywords or phrases just weren’t cutting it?  Now you can search for multiple terms appearing in any order with a specified distance of one another in the Title and/or Abstract fields. For example, to try a search in PubMed for citations where the terms “neck” and “pain” appear with no more than two words between them in the Title/Abstract search field, search: 
“neck pain”[Title/Abstract:~2]. Search results will include neck pain, neck-related pain, neck-back pain, neck and back pain, neck/shoulder pain, neck and shoulder pain, pain in neck, neck muscle pain and more.

See the PubMed User Guide and view the proximity searching tutorial for more examples and information about searching in PubMed.

Did you know?

Did you know The British Medical Journal (BMJ) publishes a special Christmas issue every year. This issue features a collection of light-hearted and humorous articles and original research papers. The Christmas issue is known for its unconventional and entertaining content, covering a wide range of topics, from the science of Christmas to the health benefits of holiday traditions. The Christmas issue comes out right in time for Christmas, so be sure to watch out for this year's issue! 

Here are some of our librarians' favorite stories from years past: I tried to survive as a Doctor in The Sims 4, Anticipating the ageing trajectories of superheroes in the Marvel cinematic universe and Golf habits among physicians and surgeons: observational cohort study.