Annual Report 2006 - 2007

In the fall of 2003, the staff of the Library created a strategic plan which was approved by the Library and Learning Resources Committee.  This plan formalizes goals to be achieved over the next few years and is divided into three sections: Education Goals, Research Goals, and Clinical Goals. Driven by the Medical School's strategic plan, the Library's strategic plan addresses the specific ways that Coy C. Carpenter Library can assist the Medical School and the Hospital in meeting their goals and aspirations for the future.  Our achievements over the past  fiscal year (2006-2007) reflect our commitment to achieving the goals established in our strategic plan. 

Education Goals

Expand the Library’s educational programs

Carpenter Librarians have been involved in the creation of the state’s first consumer health web site. Funded through the National Library of Medicine and the state of North Carolina, this web site is designed to provide residents authoritative health information with emphasis on local resources.  The NC Health Info Portal will also direct consumers to local physicians and medical practice clinics: http://nchealthinfo.org/ .

The NN/LM SE/A (National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Southeast/Atlantic) awarded the Carpenter Library money to conduct consumer health information classes in partnership with Forsyth County Public Library. The award funded a digital projector and SmartBoard that was installed downtown at the Central Library in its Computer Learning Center (CLC). The Consumer Health project group is teaching a series of classes, first to public library staff and county health department staff, and later to the general public.

 Librarians taught 205 classes in 2006-07 to 1,484 faculty, nurses, residents, staff, medical students, graduate students, allied health students and physician assistant students. RightClick!, the local training company, taught 57 software application classes to 143 students.

The new Library web page went live in April. The new layout was designed to highlight more resources and increase the ease of navigation.

The Library added free classes for Medical Center staff on Excel and Photoshop.

The Library reduced its printing and photocopying charges to $0.03 for black and white copies (color copying remains at $0.10 a page).

The Library created an electronic reserves module in its online catalog system (Voyager) for the Department of Internal Medicine to allow residents to access and download articles needed for assignments without violating copyright restrictions.

Dorothy Carpenter Medical Archives’ oral histories are now included in the National Library of Medicine’s online oral history guide: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/oral_history/. Duke University Medical Center Archives is the only other North Carolina institution in the directory which includes over fifty U.S. institutions with oral history collections in biomedicine, public health and health care.

The Archives’ staff created web pages and mounted several digital exhibits including the North Tower Photo Collection which depicts and identifies the photos in that hallway and the Samuel Worcester Butler Medical Admission Tickets from the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania.

After participating in a planning grant, the Archives staff began selecting photographs, establishing workflows and participating in committee meetings for the Digital Forsyth grant with WFU ZSR Library, Public Library of Forsyth County and Winston-Salem State University Library. In the first year of the potential three-year grant, the Archives staff has described, scanned and cataloged over 150 photographs depicting the history of Forsyth County: http://www.digitalforsyth.org/

Librarians presented posters at both the national and the regional meetings of the Medical Library Association:  

Clinical Goals

Provide health-care professionals with information resources which affect patient care

The Dorothy Carpenter Medical Archives has digitized the Pediatric Dermatology Slides Database . The database consists of over 200 annotated slides taken by Dr. Carolyn Coker Huntley during her tenure (1956-1983) in the Department of Pediatrics at Bowman Gray School of Medicine. The collection illustrates a variety of conditions including dermatitis, seborrhea, psoriasis, and eczema. Dr. Daniel Krowchuk (Department of Pediatrics) and Dr. Alan Fleischer (Department of Dermatology) reviewed slide titles and subjects for accuracy and currency.

Two more librarians joined the FPIN network (Family Physician Inquiries). The Library now has three librarians trained to perform FPIN literature searches. This is part of an ongoing collaboration with the Department of Family and Community Medicine in which physicians and librarians work together to publish digested current clinical information.

The Library added Dynamed to its list of resources to provide a clinical tool similar to UpToDate that can be accessed off-campus. Dynamed is a point-of-care reference created by a physician for physicians. There are clinically-organized summaries for nearly 2,000 topics.

The Library purchased fifty PDA downloads and a two concurrent user license to PEPID for the Department of Family and Community Medicine. They were distributed to residents and third-year medical students. PEPID was developed by a physician in partnership with FPIN. It provides nearly 3,000 disease and trauma topics with diagnosis, pathophysiology, and treatment.

back to top of page

Research Goals

Improve access to research literature

The Library purchased a site license for the University to Ingenuity Pathways Analysis.  Ingenuity Pathways Analysis (IPA) software is a web-based application that assists researchers in modeling, analyzing and understanding complex biological pathways and networks. It can be used in -- but is not limited to -- cancer, immunology and metabolic research as well as toxicology, biomarkers and RNAi studies. Wake Forest joins Stanford, Yale, Washington University, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Cancer Institute (among others) in making this product available to our faculty, staff, and students.

The Library purchased the Health and Psychosocial Instruments (HAPI) database. HAPI provides information on measurement instruments (i.e., questionnaires, interview schedules, checklists, index measures, rating scales) in the health fields, psychosocial sciences, and organizational behavior.

The Library purchased electronic journal backfiles this year. Some of the collections include Wiley’s Neuroscience, Oncology and Hematology, Cell and Developmental Biology collections; Elsevier’s Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology collection, and Cell Press titles.  The backfiles will give Campus-wide access (back to volume 1) to the full text of approximately 200 titles.

Recognizing the Library’s role in educating our users about the changing field of scholarly communications, a librarian reorganized existing online resource “toolkits” and built new ones to create the Scholarly Publishing Assistance section of the Library website.  This section guides faculty and students to resources pertinent to publishing, including those addressing copyright and intellectual property, scientific writing, the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy, open access, and links users to information about the Faculty Publications database.  Awareness of these resources and of the issues they address is raised through presentations at departmental faculty meetings and student orientations.

In a cooperative effort, the three campus libraries created an inter-campus authentication through the proxy server for authorized users at all campuses. No matter which library web site users enter, when they select a licensed resource, they will be prompted for their University or MedCenter login and password. User information is routed to the appropriate user base and access is authorized inless it is to a restricted resource or one that is only available to a specific audience.