**UPDATE** Some people are not seeing the changes. Clear the Cache & Cookies from your Browser(s). This should correct the problem.

The ejournal Portal (our ejournal A-Z list) has changed.

Starting Friday, June 2nd, there will be an “Online Only” option. This will return hypertext links leading directly to ejournals.

To search for Print journals and ejournals (not to mention microforms of journals), use the “Print and Online” option. This will search our Catalogue and allow you to see which print issues we have. Records that say  [electronic resource] will also take you to ejournals via the orange “Online Access” button.

So, if looking for journals:

1. go to the ejournal Portal
2. select the option you want
3. enter the journal title
4. …and Search!

Courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections

A story on the digitization of UBC Library’s exceptional Tokugawa maps collection appears in the June 2011 issue of UBC Reports.

You can view the article here, and view the table of contents here.

Photo credit: Martin Dee

Meet Dean Giustini, Reference Librarian and blogger at UBC’s Biomedical Branch Library at Vancouver General Hospital.

What’s been the biggest change to health libraries and librarianship that you’ve encountered during your career?

Two equally important trends that have changed health libraries and librarianship are: 1) the shift to digital forms of medical information and 2) the rise of evidence-based practice in health care.

In some ways, these are two complementary trends. Medical information is much easier to locate now because of the Internet and Google searching. Go to Google.ca, plug in a few symptoms, a drug name or a suspected diagnosis, and presto. You have some possible answers. Freely accessible medical information on the Internet can also be a huge detriment to patient care so with the shift to online forms of information comes the importance of teaching people how to assess the verity of what they are finding. Health literacy is a trend that is now a part of most major health care systems around the world.

The rise of evidence-based practice in health care continues to have a major impact on my work as a health librarian. I used to do all the literature searching for physicians at the start of my career; now, I teach others how to do it themselves using tools like PubMed, Scirus and Google Scholar. For in-depth searching for clinical trials, grants and systematic reviews, there is no other major test of my skills as a searcher that is quite as rigorous. All of this is in support of the work that we as librarians do in health.

You’ve been called a “tech evangelizer” in health librarianship. In terms of technology, what is the next game-changing development that will impact your field?

The confluence of mobile devices and social forms of learning is important. I also think that associated trends in electronic health (e-health) and creating electronic patient records for access by physicians and patients are on the horizon.

You’ve been an active blogger in your field for years. How has blogging impacted your role and reception as a health librarian?

I owe a great debt to blogging for all the opportunities it has afforded to me during my career. Authoring a blog is a lot of work but it requires discipline and staying current with trends so it’s well worth the time if you can do it. I’ll never retire from blogging. I enjoy it too much.

For more information on Dean’s social media efforts, please visit here. You can find out more about Dean’s Search Principle blog here.

You already know that if you run into an access problem with a Library resource, you can use the blue “Access Problems?” button (when available) or just use the eResources Help Form to report the problem.

But to help paint a clearer picture of the problem, you can also cut & paste the URL from your browser when using the ejournal Portal (the ejournal A-Z list), Citation Linker (360 Link) or Summon. Any URL that begins http://gw2jh3xr2c.search.serialssolutions.com or  http://ubc.summon.serialssolutions.com is a Permanent URL (PURL).

By sending a PURL along, we can see the same screen you saw. Neat, huh?

You already know that if you run into an access problem with a Library resource, you can use the blue “Access Problems?” button (when available) or just use the eResources Help Form to report the problem.

But to help paint a clearer picture of the problem, you can also cut & paste the URL from your browser when using the ejournal Portal (the ejournal A-Z list), Citation Linker (360 Link) or Summon. Any URL that begins http://gw2jh3xr2c.search.serialssolutions.com or  http://ubc.summon.serialssolutions.com is a Permanent URL (PURL).

By sending a PURL along, we can see the same screen you saw. Neat, huh?

A recent article in the National Post examined the politics of unschooling- a concept that offers no curriculum to conquer, no grade levels to pass and no rules to follow.  Click here to read the article.

A new oximeter measures blood oxygen level by plugging into mobile phones. The PhoneOximeter, developed by UBC’s Electrical & Computer Engineering in Medicine, can detect signs of low blood oxygen levels, thereby preventing brain damage or death from an overdose of anesthesia. The device, which clips onto a finger to link to a clinician’s phone, […]