Staff Portal

Written by Joelle Mornini, Public Services Librarian

In April 2019 when I first joined the NCI at Frederick Scientific Library as the new Public Services Librarian, I was excited to join a new research community and learn more about the cancer research field.  During my first few months here, I’ve had many opportunities to attend fascinating seminars to learn more about the current trends in cancer research, and I’ve enjoyed participating in numerous community-building activities, ranging from the Student Jeopardy Tournament and Annual Book & Media Swap hosted by the Library to setting up a booth at the Farmer’s Market twice a month during the summer and fall. While working with the Library staff, I’ve also been able to assist with planning and providing a broad variety of information resources and trainings, such as interlibrary loan for any book or article a researcher may need and Library orientations and classes offered on a monthly basis.

During my library career, I’ve worked in many different scientific library environments, including a patent search firm, the outreach branch of the National Library of Medicine, and a military biomedical research library specializing in infectious disease research and military psychiatry.  Each library setting offered unique learning experiences, but I’ve never experienced anything like the collaborative, tight-knit and innovative community of researchers and staff at NCI at Frederick. 

I look forward to learning more about the cutting-edge projects and related information needs of NCI at Frederick researchers as I grow into my role at the Scientific Library.  I plan on focusing in the coming year on providing more current awareness services and trainings through the Library, and I’ll also provide more training and information resources related to finding, sharing, and managing research data.  As I gain feedback on these new trainings and resources, I hope to continue to tailor these programs to meet the diverse information needs of researchers and staff at NCI at Frederick.

LIBRARY ORIENTATION

Library Orientation sessions are held monthly on Thursdays from 2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. in the Library’s Technology Training Lab, Building 549.  The dates of upcoming sessions are January 9, February 13 and March 12.  We invite all employees to attend these sessions to learn about the many services and resources offered by the Library.  Registration is not required.

If you are not able to make it to our scheduled classes, our librarians can work with your schedule to provide one-on-one training at your convenience, either on the NCI at Frederick campus, at the ATRF, or via WebEx.  For questions, or if you have a suggestion for a class offering, please contact us with your thoughts.

RESOURCE OF THE MONTH WEBINARS

Each month the Library will feature a different resource and offer a 30-minute webinar to provide more information.  Watch for announcements about the resources highlighted in 2020 or contact the Library for more information:

JANUARY – COCHRANE LIBRARY

Learn about this regularly updated collection of databases designed to provide information and evidence to support decisions taken in health care.  Also learn how to effectively search the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews as well as other database resources to leverage health care information & ease decision making processes.

Thursday, January 23, 11:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.

FEBRUARY - BIOCYC

BioCYC contains comprehensive genome and pathways information for more than 14,000 microbial organisms and provides tools for searching and exploring those pathways and genomes.  In this webinar, you will learn how to search this resource to find pathways of interest, as well as genes, enzymes, and more.

Thursday, February 20, 3:00 p.m.  – 3:30 p.m.

MARCH – INCITES JOURNAL CITATION REPORTS AND ESSENTIAL INDICATORS

Learn how to identify and compare top journals in a research field using InCites Journal Citation Reports.  Also learn how to identify and compare top papers in a specific field, by specific authors or institutions, by country, or by journal using InCites Essential Science Indicators.

Monday, March 16, 12:00 p.m. – 12:30 p.m.

RESOURCE TRAINING

The Library’s instruction team is pleased to announce that the Winter 2020 Resource Training Schedule is available on the Library’s Orientations and Classes website.  Class dates and descriptions are also listed on the Events Calendar.  Registration announcements will be sent on the NCI at Frederick community listservs.  Several new webinars have been added to the schedule, and we are also pleased to announce another webinar on UPCOMING CHANGES TO PUBMED on Friday, March 20 at 11:00

TOOLS TO STAY CURRENT IN BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH (WEBINAR—NEW!)

Thursday, January 16, 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

ENDNOTE ESSENTIALS

Wednesday, January 22, 10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

MANAGING REFERENCES WITH ENDNOTE (WEBINAR—NEW!)

Wednesday, February 12, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

YOUR VIRTUAL SCIENTIFIC LIBRARY (WEBINAR)

Thursday, February 27, 3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

ENDNOTE ADVANCED: BUILDING YOUR LIBRARY (WEBINAR-NEW!)

Tuesday, March 3, 3:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

ENDNOTE ADVANCED: WORKING WITH WORD DOCUMENTS (WEBINAR—NEW!)

Thursday, March 19, 3:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

 UPCOMING CHANGES TO PUBMED (WEBINAR)

Friday, March 20, 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

SHARING YOUR RESEARCH THROUGH UNIQUE IDENTIFIERS AND AUTHOR PROFILES: ORCID AND BEYOND (WEBINAR – NEW!)

Wednesday, March 25, 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Cold Spring Harbor Protocols is an interdisciplinary source of research methods in areas, such as bioinformatics, protein science, computational biology, and many more.  It can be browsed by subject or searched to find a mix of cutting-edge and well-established techniques.  You can access it, along with several other protocol resources from the Library’s Databases List.

Join the Scientific Library in February and March to learn about key data science concepts by watching a series of six recorded webinars, participating in discussions, and attending a capstone panel discussion. During the Winter Webinar Series and Capstone Panel, Watch a series of six recorded webinars from the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Guide to the Fundamentals of Data Science Series on topics ranging from data sharing and reproducibility to data workflows and pipelines, with discussions after each webinar to connect these data science concepts to your current research at NCI at Frederick. A capstone panel discussion will be held at the end of the series with members of the Advanced Biomedical Computational Science (ABCS) group to discuss their experiences with use of data science in biomedical research.

Each webinar will be shown four times each week, two times at NCI at Frederick, Building 549 on Mondays and Tuesdays and two times at the Advanced Technology Research Facility (ATRF) on Thursdays and Fridays. The webinar series will begin on Monday, February 3 and will conclude on Friday, March 13. You may bring your lunch to this program. Each webinar will begin at 11:00 a.m. and run approximately 60 minutes, with a 10-minute discussion after.

The Capstone Panel Discussion will be held on Tuesday, March 24, beginning at 12:00 p.m. in the Scientific Library’s Technology Training Lab in Building 549, with online access through WebEx available.

Complete information on the webinar series and capstone panel is available from the Winter Webinar Series webpage.

Current Awareness Services and Resources from the Scientific Library: Email Alerts, RSS Feeds, Daily Science News, and Upcoming Webinar

   Do you need to stay up-to-date on the most recent articles about a specific biomedical topic, from a specific journal, or by a specific author?  The Scientific Library can help you stay current on any topic in your field through a variety of current awareness services, including email alerts, RSS feeds, Daily Science News, and an upcoming webinar to teach you about tools to stay current in biomedical research.

Current awareness services available through the Scientific Library include:

• Email Alerts: Library staff can help you set up email alerts based on searches in PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and other databases that can run daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, depending on the database.
• RSS Feeds: RSS, which stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, can be used to view recent updates from multiple sources in a single location.  Library staff can assist you with setting up RSS feeds based on searches from PubMed and Scopus and viewing these feeds through the RSS reader tool on Microsoft Outlook. 
• Daily Science News: The Daily Science News Service is an email service to help NCI at Frederick employees stay current with science and medical news.  The topics are wide-ranging and come from a variety of sources.

You can learn more about how to request these services by visiting the Scientific Library’s Current Awareness Services webpage.

Also learn more about current awareness services and tools by attending the upcoming webinar TOOLS TO STAY CURRENT IN BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH on Thursday, January 16, 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.  During this webinar, learn how to stay current through email alerts, RSS feeds, biomedical journal podcasts, social media, webinars, seminars, and scientific meetings. Contact Public Services Librarian Joelle Mornini (Joelle.Mornini@nih.gov) to register for the webinar.

If you need a quiet, isolated place in which to work, the Scientific Library has Quiet Study Rooms in both of its locations. Four Quiet Study Rooms are located in the Library in Building 549.  Each room has desk space, a phone, and a computer. Two rooms also offer a table and chairs, with a large white board in one room.  One Quiet Study Room is available at the ATRF Library and is equipped with study carrels.  A computer was added to this room in response to a suggestion from a Library user.  This room also offers a white board, TV, and DVD player. 

The Quiet Study Rooms may be used during regular Library hours. They can be reserved in advance, or used with a walk-in request, if available. You may contact the Library to check availability before you arrive.

There were clues everywhere that the 19th Annual Scientific Library Book & Media Swap would be a success.  Early evidence of that fact was the number of wrapped “mystery” books used to advertise this year’s event that were chosen by employees at the Library’s booth at the Farmer’s Market.  It appears that this encouraged more employees to participate.  In fact, both the number of employees and the number of donations to this year’s Swap showed an indisputable increase, with many first-time participants.  On the opening day of the event, Wednesday, October 30, curious readers lined up to canvass the various book categories for new reading material.  Their search continued, after the Library staff relocated the books to the Library where they could browse throughout the month of November. Finally, the Swap was opened to all employees for participation.  It is no mystery, while the Library staff organizes this annual event, the success of the Book & Media Swap is really employee driven.