On Wednesday, May 9th, Houston’s Memorial Hermann Hospital provided a live Twittercast of a brain operation.  The operation was performed by Dr. Dong Kim, one of the world’s foremost neurosurgeons, who is best known for leading the surgical team that treated former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords after she was shot in the head at point blank range last year.  Dr. Kim performed the brain tumor resection surgery on an anonymous 21 year old woman as over 14 million people followed the live commentary on Twitter.  The woman had a benign tumor in her posterior right temporal lobe, which was removed by cutting a two inch by two inch window in the patient’s skull.

As Dr. Kim performed the surgery, a social media team lead by Dr. Scott Shepard kept the world updated by Tweeting every step of the procedure, as well as sharing brain operation facts.  Images and videos of the surgery from Dr. Kim’s fiber optic microscope were also uploaded to Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest, enabling the public to see exactly what Dr. Kim was seeing.  The surgery took about four hours to complete and was a success, with the patient awake and able to speak an hour after surgery.

This is not the hospital’s first foray into live social media coverage of a surgery; in February, the hospital also Twittercasted an open heart surgery as well.

View the links below to see the hospital’s Twitter feed of the event, as well as their YouTube and Pinterest pages complete with videos from the surgery.  Warning:  the contents are very graphic, so be prepared!

http://www.memorialhermann.org/locations/texasmedicalcenter/brain-surgery-live-tweet/

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4C0ED952B6354F91&feature=plcp

http://pinterest.com/memorialhermann/mhbrain/

Reported by:
Elizabeth Stellrecht
Temporary Assistant Librarian
Reference & Education Services

We are delighted that SUNY Chancellor, Nancy Zimpher, has awarded Dean Hendrix, former library faculty liaison from the Health Sciences Library to the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, a 2012 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Librarianship. Earlier this year, Mr. Hendrix assumed the new position of Assistant Director for University Libraries, reporting directly to Associate Provost for University Libraries, Austin Booth. Dean is well known to faculty, students and residents throughout the School for his over seven years of outstanding service providing reference, database searching, research consultation, and instruction services for faculty and students in every department.

In the words of Professor Christopher Cohan, Pathology & Anatomical Sciences, who wrote in support of Dean’s nomination for the award, Dean has provided “overwhelmingly positive” and “generous” contributions to the medical student curriculum as well as a “depth of understanding in medical informatics” and an “invaluable connection” between the medical community and the Health Sciences Library.

The Chancellor’s Award also recognizes Dean’s many additional professional contributions to the UB University Libraries and to librarianship regionally and nationally. Mr. Hendrix’s excellent scholarship has included outstanding articles published in core peer-reviewed journals, service on the editorial boards of four journals, and papers, posters and speeches presented regularly at regional and national conferences.

Congratulations to Dean for this very well-deserved recognition.

Gary D. Byrd, Ph.D.
Director, Health Sciences Library

Have you received manuscript solicitations from journals you’ve never heard of?  A web search may show that the journal has an editorial board full of well-known names and photos of the publisher’s buildings and editorial offices.  However, there is an increasing chance that the solicitation came from a dishonest publisher with a plan to take advantage of open-access and the academic pressure to publish in order to make money without furthering scholarship.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published this story about predatory online journals that exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing.  According to Jeffrey Beall, who writes the Scholarly Open Access blog, the primary goal of these publishers is profit, not the promotion of academic scholarship.  Problems with these publishers include:

• excessive and/or unclear fee structures
• spurious editorial boards
• publication without the author’s approval
• lack of peer review

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to tell if publisher or a journal is part of a predatory scheme without considerable research.  Fortunately, Mr. Beall’s blog maintains a list of suspicious publishers and individual journals.  Consulting this blog prior to submitting a paper to an unfamiliar journal may save trouble, money, and the loss of your scholarly effort.

Salk Institute scientist Ronald Evans (only the second Salk scientist to be chosen for the distinguished prize) has been selected as the recipient of the prestigious 2012 Wolf Prize in Medicine, Israel’s highest award for achievements benefiting mankind. According to the Wolf Prize jury, Evans was selected for his discovery of the gene super-family encoding nuclear receptors and elucidating the mechanism of action of this class of receptors.

“The Wolf Prize is a great honor conferred on only the most excellent scientists and artists in the world,” said Salk presidentWilliam R. Brody. “The Wolf Foundation award was developed to further their historical mission: philanthropy that supports working for the betterment of humanity. Ron’s work embodies that vision.”

The Wolf Prize is awarded by the Wolf Foundation. The prize has been awarded annually since 1978 in six science fields: Agriculture, Chemistry, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics, and an Arts prize that rotates annually between architecture, music, painting and sculpture.

I am writing this post as both the Director of the Health Sciences Library and as the new, temporary HSL Liaison to SMBS.  Dean Hendrix, who previously served as Liaison to your School and communicated to you via this Blog, has taken on an important new assignment as the Assistant Director for University Libraries with a new office in Capen Hall on the North Campus.

We will be forming a search committee this month to identify and interview candidates for the new, permanent HSL Liaison to your School, but until that person is recruited (we expect by the beginning of the Fall 2012 semester), I will be serving as your Liaison.

If you have question, concerns or suggestions about the Health Sciences Library or the resources available to you via our website or on HUBNET, please feel free to contact me directly by email (at gdbyrd@buffalo.edu ) or telephone (at 829-5720).  My office is located in Room 161 on the ground floor of Abbott Hall on the South Campus.

Gary D. Byrd, PhD, MLS
Director, Health Sciences Library
Temporary HSL Liaison to the School of Medicine & Biomedical Sciences