ABSTRACT. In 2015, two librarians at the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences at the University of Iowa turned their dreams into a reality and secured funding to build a zombiethemed evidence-based medicine game. The game features a "choose your own adventure" style that takes students through a scenario where a disease outbreak is taking place and a resident is asked to use evidence-based medicine skills to select a screening and diagnostic tool to use on potentially infected patients. Feedback on the game has been positive, and future plans include building additional modules on therapy, harm, and prognosis.

Every major health profession now provides competency statements for preparing new members for their respective professions. These competency statements normally include expectations for training health professions students in library/informatics skills. For purposes of this article, searches were conducted using various sources to produce a comprehensive 32-page Compendium that inventories library/informatics-related competency statements. This compendium should aid readers in integrating their library/informatics skills training into various health professions education curricula.

As with any shared format for serializing data, Primo’s PNX records have limits on the types of data which they pass along from the source records and into the Primo tool. As a result of these limitations, PNX records do not currently have a provision for harvesting and transferring rights information about HathiTrust holdings that the Kansas State University (KSU) Library system indexes through Primo. This created a problem, since Primo was defaulting to indicate that all HathiTrust materials were available to KSU Libraries (K-State Libraries) patrons, when only a limited portion of them actually were. This disconnect was infuriating some library users, and creating difficulties for the public services librarians. There was a library-wide discussion about removing HathiTrust holdings from Primo altogether, but it was decided that such a solution was an overreaction. As a consequence, the library IT department began a crash program to attempt to find a solution to the problem. The result was an application called hathiGenius.

In the past scientists reported summaries of their findings; they did not provide their original data collections. Many stakeholders (e.g., funding agencies) are now requesting that such data be made publicly available. This mandate is being adopted to facilitate further discovery, and to mitigate waste and deficits in the research process. At the same time, the necessary infrastructure for data curation (e.g., repositories) has been evolving. The current target is to make research products FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), resulting in data that are curated and archived to be both human and machine compatible. However, most scientists have little training in data curation. Specifically, they are ill-equipped to annotate their data collections at a level that facilitates discoverability, aggregation, and broad reuse in a context separate from their creation or sub-field. To circumvent these deficits data architects may collaborate with scientists to transform and curate data. This paper’s example of a data collection describes the electrical properties of outer hair cells isolated from the mammalian cochlea. The data is expressed with a variant of The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI), mirrored to provide the metadata and nested data architecture used within the Hierarchical Data Format version 5 (HDF5) format. Each digital specimen is displayed in a tree configuration (like directories in a computer) and consists of six main branches based on the ontology classes. The data collections, scripts, and ontological OWL file (OBI based Inner Ear Electrophysiology (OBI_IEE)) are deposited in three repositories. We discuss the impediments to producing such data collections for public use, and the tools and processes required for effective implementation. This work illustrates the impact that small collaborations can have on the curation of our publicly-funded collections, and is particularly salient for fields where data is sparse, throughput is low, and sacrifice of animals is required for discovery.

Semantic technologies are in the process of revolutionizing the way we store, access, and communicate digital information. It is vital that information professionals be conversant in the foundational concepts upon which these technologies are based. This article uses two implementations of semantic technologies, the semantic web and the semantic medline project, to introduce the key ideas of semantic technologies to readers.