Medical Library in the 21st century

Opening Access to collections

HINARI Access to Research in Health Programme

HINARI partners with publishers around the world to deliver scholarly health information and content (articles, books, and databases) to people in developing countries who otherwise could not afford these resources.  The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library plays an essential role in supporting HINARI by helping update publisher content in the HINARI database. HINARI is headquartered at the World Health Organization in Geneva and is part of the Research4Life (R4L) series of programmes that also includes AGORA (agriculture), ARDI (applied technology), and OARE (environment). Yale University Library is a Founding Partner in Research4Life, starting with the launch of HINARI in 2002.   

AMEEL

The Arabic and Middle Eastern Electronic Library (AMEEL) is a freely available digital collection of information for the study of the Middle East, including its history, culture, development, and contemporary society. The Medical Historical Library contributed scans of a number of early Arabic and Persian manuscripts to AMEEL, including colorful images from the lovely 11th-century Persian manuscript, Farah namah, also known as Ajayib al-dunya (Wonders of the World). The Arabic and Persian manuscripts can also be found via Yale's digital discovery tool, Findit.

The Medical Heritage Library

In 2009, the Medical Historical Library joined Harvard, Columbia, the National Library of Medicine, Johns Hopkins, and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia to form the Medical Heritage Library (MHL).  The MHL is a digital curation collaborative among several leading medical libraries dedicated to promoting free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. The MHL began digitization of monographs in 2010 with a grant from the Sloan Foundation. Work on the MHL project has continued with funding support from collaborating institutions, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Council on Library and Information Resources.  The Medical Heritage Library website is the gateway to the collection, and has resources including tools for research and blog posts on objects within the collection. Yale's collections in the MHL can be found here.

Expanded Library Services and Programs

Consultations and Classes

The Curriculum & Research Support (CRS) Librarians teach a variety of classes on topics such as techniques for evidence-based medicine, bibliographic database management, and using genomic databases and tools.  Librarians also travel throughout the Medical School, Hospital system, and West Campus for one-on-one consultations.  They act as Personal Librarians for medical students and Department Liaisons for the Medical School, and do much more. 

Teaching with collections

Librarians, curators and staff within Cushing/Whitney Medical Library teach classes and give tours using the Library’s extensive physical and online collections.  Collections include books, periodicals, posters, prints, drawings, instruments, medals, and other ephemera related to medicine and science. 

Evidence Synthesis

Medical librarians partner with faculty, trainees, and researchers on evidence synthesis projects, including systematic and scoping reviews. Evidence syntheses are comprehensive, unbiased, and reproducible reviews of prior studies, following a detailed protocol. With the exponential growth of biomedical literature, the need for comprehensive, reproducible searches is paramount in research today.

Librarians contribute to these projects by identifying appropriate databases, translating research questions into search strategies, providing guidance on creating bibliographies and citations, writing the search methodology sections in articles, and peer-reviewing searches. Library staff provide ongoing crucial technical support and organizational help in these intensive reviews. The results include publications in high impact-factor journals, citations, and influence on clinical practice, research agendas, and policy. 

Bioinformatics and Data Services at the Library

The Library expanded into greater support for Bioinformatics research with the hire of Biomedical Sciences Research Support Librarian Rolando Garcia-Milian in 2014.  The Medical Library plays a key role in the data life cycle, as a repository of databases and tools that are important in the study of the “omics”-genomics, proteomics or metabolomics. Databases and tools licensed by the library include MetaCore and Ingenuity Pathway Analysis, Partek Flow, and Qlucore Omics Explorer, among others. Garcia-Milian also teaches workshops on using these licensed and open genomics information resources. Numerous collaboration projects with Yale researchers have resulted from these services: https://library.medicine.yale.edu/bioinformatics/training-collaborations/ 

A data services program was initiated at the CWML in 2018 when the library’s inaugural data librarian was hired. This data services program now offers training and one-on-one help sessions, that help biomedical researchers learn the skills they need to conduct research in computationally robust and data heavy environments. The data services program also connects the library to other groups across the Yale Medical community, including IT, the research cores, the Yale Center for Medical Informatics, the Center for Biomedical Data Science, and the Center for Biomedical Innovation and Technology, and others.

Geospatial analysis holds growing importance in biomedical and public health research. Researchers can apply geospatial analysis and visualization tools to data on disease and social determinants of health to discover critical findings in health policy, health care site analysis, environmental health, program evaluation, and more. The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library facilitates this research through consultations and training sessions, as well as campus licenses of ArcGIS, SimplyAnalytics, PolicyMap, SocialExplorer, and georeferenced datasets.

New Spaces in the Library

The Library has continued to “re-envision space” since the addition of the Information Room in 1990.  The Conn Center, the Library’s main computing classroom, was dedicated in 2004; the Betsy Cushing Whitney Group Study Center, with three distinct study spaces, was added in 2010, as was the Cushing Center, the home of Harvey Cushing’s Brain Tumor Registry.  In 2014 the Computer Resource Laboratory was rebranded  as the 24/7 Computing & Study Space in recognition that library users need access to specialized workspaces, equipment, and software around the clock.  In 2018-19, the Library underwent a massive renovation, removing, relocating, and renovating older areas and adding classroom and study spaces in support of the Medical School's larger education mission.

The Cushing Center

Japanese students touring the Cushing Center

The Cushing Center is the home to the Cushing Brain Tumor registry, an immense archival collection of over 2,200 case studies that includes human whole brain specimens, tumor specimens, microscopic slides, notes, journal excerpts and over 15,000 photographic negatives dating from the late 1800s to 1936. The collection began in 1902 when Dr. Harvey Cushing discovered one of his specimens was misplaced by the Johns Hopkins Pathology department. To avoid future misplacements, Cushing decided it was safest to retain the specimens himself. The registry documents the history of neurological medicine from its beginning.

The collection resides in the lower level of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. The space is designed to give visitors a unique experience showing Cushing as a surgeon, author, collector and bibliophile.  The Center also provides a space for the many patients Cushing operated on, providing some aspect of their stories through photographs and specimens on display. The Cushing Center opened on June 5, 2010.