Lynn Yeager's Blog

The library staff may be few, but we're mighty! Three of of the staff graduated last week with their Masters' degrees from the School of Library and Information Studies program at OU-Tulsa. Congratulations to Liz Amos, Megan Donald and Karen Harmon! 

The federal government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has developed a free resource to help health care providers learn more about the evidence supporting eight quality improvement strategies. “Closing the Quality Gap: Revisiting the State of the Science” offers Executive Summaries of eight evidence reports that focus on various aspects of health care quality. AHRQ’s evidence reports offer an unbiased analysis of available research on specific health care topics. The individual reports are:

The well-documented success of Oklahoma's Medicaid program in bringing affordable, efficient health care to more than 1 million Oklahomans discredits claims that it is somehow "broken".

Schusterman Library Director Stewart Brower and Morningcrest Health Library Librarian Ruth Neal recently published an article in the February edition of the Journal of Consumer Health on the Internet titled Morningcrest Health Library: a Clinic-Based Approach to Health Information Literacy Services.

Congratulations to Schusterman Library Graduate Assistants Liz Amos, Megan Donald and Andy Taylor for having their poster submission accepted for presentation at the OU-Tulsa Research Forum, held in the Learning Center on April 4th! The title of their poster is Building a healthier community through environmental design: starting the discussion at the Wayman Tisdale Health Clinic, a Community Health Environmental Design (CHED) project of the OU-Tulsa Urban Design Studio.

The Schusterman Library is fortunate to have 7 graduate students of the OU-Tulsa School of Libary and Information Studies working for us and we want everyone to know how much they are appreciated. They work early, late and long hours. They fill in for each others' schedules and for our staffs' schedules. They do special projects for librarians, manage the AskHere Desk in the Commons and show up on time and on schedule.

The library would be hard pressed to find better employees than our GAs. Many, many thanks to all of them for their high quality service to the library!

The White House announced today that it has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research.

Find health data on most countries and even create your own custom country comparison data sheet at the US Global Health Policy website, www.globalhealthfacts.org. The sites are produced by the Kaiser Family Foundation. You can track worldwide health policies, find health coverage data on the uninsured, print off global health policy fact sheets and more on this excellent site.

This report presents data on live births, birth rates, fertility rates, total fertility rates and children per woman rates by race/Hispanic origin for Tulsa County and the State of Oklahoma for years 1991 to 2008, and for the United States for years 1991 to 2010. Preliminary 2009 through 2011 birth data for Tulsa County and Oklahoma are included in the data file, but should be used with caution as values are still preliminary and subject to change.

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences has worked to create this excellent series of articles that help explain "how basic biomedical research - from the history of a field to the people doing cutting-edge work today - lays the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention." Check out "Forecasting Flu" to get the flavor of the site. Each article contains illustrative material, such as photos, charts, diagrams, and links to other relevant publications.

If you enjoy TED talks, you'll find the TED Radio Hour most compelling. Each show is dedicated to a different theme, such as the source of happiness, crowd-sourcing innovation, power shifts, or inexplicable connections. The episodes are co-produced by NPR and TED and visitors to the site can make their way through over a dozen programs. Some of the offerings here include "Africa: The Next Chapter," "The Future of Cities," and "Where Ideas Come From."

The UK's The Gaurdian online newspaper has a lot of interesting data and data visualizations. Click Data in the top right corner to access the Data Store where "Facts are Sacred." (Don't be fooled by "Store" -almost everything is freely available to view and download.) The DataBlog toolbar is a nice feature which allows searching for facts A to Z.

President Clancy has published an interesting article in this month's Academic Medicine journal. The title is Linking Health Equity With Economic Development: Insights From My Year as Chairman of the Board of the Chamber of Commerce and can be found in the December 2012 issue of vol. 87(12):1665-7.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is a remarkable institution that stands at the forefront of research in a wide range of medical fields. This site provides access to the HHMI Bulletin via the iPad in a format that is most visually stimulating. On this site, visitors can browse screen shots of this most wondrous compendium, complete with exclusive videos, interactive graphics, and audio slideshows.

What exactly is a model organism? As defined by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), such an organism is one that used in a number of research agendas and projects.