Mark MacEachern | Health Sciences Librarian

• Co-taught a 2-hour session to first year dentistry students.  Content = Ovid MEDLINE and PubMed and PICO searching.
• Attended a great presentation on academic article introductions.  The presenter was tremendously engaging. 
• Edited the final article discovery report.  The project began in September.  We met every Thursday after that.  Now we're done.  It was enjoyable and I'm happy with our recommendation.
• Pursued an email question about accessing a non-UM thesis, which the other institution won't lend because it's their lone copy.  We're working on a work-around.
• Discussed a systematic review search with surgery faculty.  It'll be a short turnaround.  
• Set a date to record the lectures for the first year Pharmacy course (Feb 10). 
• Had a meeting with a Dentistry faculty pushed back until next week. 

And if Chekov were alive he'd be 150.  The Guardian's nice write up.

At work:

• A hospitalist cancelled a 9am research consultation w/ me.  Topic = The leadership and mentorship roles of physicians.  In preparation for the mtg, I threw together (what seemed to me to be) a decent set of search results (for a first search).  I sent him the PubMed results.
• A first-year student was, for some reason, unable to access Ovid from off-campus.  I spent a few minutes trouble-shooting before the problem ironed itself out.
• Volunteered to proctor a dental exam. 
• Had 2 separate research consultations w/ M1 students as part of their longitudinal case study groups.  One early afternoon; the other late.  Both students needed help finding literature on cultural perspectives of health care.  I showed them the research guide a colleague of mine put together for precisely this purpose.  Since both prefered PubMed, I translated the Ovidlish into PubMedese.  I also intro'd them to the ATLA Religion Database to give a non-med slant on things.  Last, I showed some advanced Google strategies (inc site searching) to help them minimize the garbage retrieval.  One of the consultations veered into the land of impact factors and H-Indexes. Aside: I should point out that the LCS is part of the first and second year medical curriculum.  Each small group has 12 or so students + a faculty leader + a librarian.  I've been assigned to 3 M1 groups and 1 M2.  Two of the M1 faculty leaders frequently send students to me.
• Had a working lunch w/ a colleague.

At home:

• Prepped for an early Wed morning presentation.  Topic = Keeping current w/ the literature.  Audience = Nuclear Medicine Fellows.

Library Day in the Life.  I participated in the last one (which turns out to have been Round 3) in July '09.   Seems like it was, as they say, only yesterday.  Time Flies. 

In any case, this week'll be a killer.  Expect a lot of posts about systematic review searching and presentation prepping/giving and other random project doing.  I'll continue using the Library Day in the Life to group these posts together.

• Started writing a portion of a report.  Since Fall '09, I've been a member of an article discovery working group - a group tasked by library administration to evaluate a few article discovery tools.  We - the committee members - personally evaluated each of the tools and then ran a successful user survey to, you know, get input from the users.  The report, which is due at the end of January (this week!), will summarize our findings and ultimately present our Taskers with recommendations.
• Held my weekly liaison office hours in the School of Dentistry (2 hours). 
• Co-chaired a committee meeting comprised of members from both the library and the Office of Medical Education.  We are, as you can imagine, both heavily involved in med-ed, yet to date have done very little in the way of collaboratin'.  Thus - we're getting together committee-style to make sure we don't continue along this isolated path.
• Finished my section of the report late in the evening.  First draft in Google Docs.