It’s finally finished! This project typifies what happens to me when I work on something that I can’t finish in one or two sittings at the machine – it takes much, much longer than it should to complete. I have a tendency to pick things up and put them down, and rather than pick them back up I move on to other projects that were planned more recently. Which is a shame, because look at how lovely this quilt is! A few more pictures are here, with more to come once the sun returns.

The fabric for this, and the pattern – Piano Keys – were purchased at Spool Sewing in Philadelphia in April 2011. (Spool has since closed as a retail outlet, though they do still offer classes through their sister store, Loop.)

As is typical for me, I did not immediately begin sewing this quilt. I cut the pieces in August 2011, and began sewing it in November. I do know, thanks to a photo, that I finished the quilt top in January 2012.

As I hadn’t yet purchased batting, or fabric to back and bind it with, the quilt got set aside. In April 2012 I picked it back up again and started working on the quilt sandwich, which I finished in May 2012.

That was the most challenging part – getting the backing, batting, and top pinned together so I could quilt it. It took a lot of space, time and patience, and I did actually wish for the curved pins recommended in a quilting book I was gifted when I started the project. I lucked out and the dimensions of the top and backing fabric were such that I only had to cut the correct length of backing fabric.

For the actual quilting, I just did parallel lines, roughly an inch apart. The width varies, and they aren’t perfectly straight, as I did it freehand. Overall I’m pleased with the look, though I think next time I might try doing the lines diagonally. I did find that this size quilt (I did the smaller lap size) was about the largest my machine can accomodate for the actual quilting part, so if I want to do something larger in the future, I’ll have to find a longarm sewing machine to rent or borrow time on. I will also need to get a walking foot for my machine – while I made it work, it wasn’t ideal.

Once it was quilted, I had to cut things down a bit to line them all up properly for binding. At this point I do recall that I had to trim off some parts of the quilt top as things had shifted during sewing. I made a mental note at that point to start with a backing larger than the quilt next time around.

I started working on the binding in October 2012. I was originally going to do a hand-sewn binding, and started that – you machine sew the binding to the front, fold it over so the seam is hidden, and use some sort of quilting voodoo to hand sew the binding down on the back invisibly.  I got a little more than one side done using that method, which I simply found too time consuming. It was also a slow enough process that I had to spend time looking at every stitch that was slightly too long, which was driving me crazy. I decided to machine bind it, and finally actually did that yesterday afternoon.

I looked at several tutorials, and liked how the finish looked on the backside using this method, but as I am having some sort of tension problems that prevent me from doing lots of zigzagging all at once, I had to pass that up for now. In the end I just did a straight stitch, through to the front of the quilt, right at the edge of the binding on the backside. Looks just fine. This was stupidly fast once I sat down and did it.

Overall, this was an easy pattern to make, and I’ll probably do it again. The various pieces of the top came together quickly. You will want to label the different sections as you make them – they don’t fit together interchangeably, and I had to rip some seams out when I put them together wrong.

I also found that I wound up with extra rectangles cut. I had purchased 1/4 yards of fabric, so I’m not sure if this happens if you work with fat quarters instead. But you might want to count as you cut if you don’t often find a use for smallish pieces of fabric.

This is not a blue ribbon quilt where everything is perfectly straight and aligned – but I knew if I went for that, I would drive myself crazy. It is a quilt full of beautiful colors and patterns, and I learned that I can make a quilt without too much fuss, which was the entire point. I can see myself making this for a gift (a gift which I start very, very far ahead of time, but still.)

• Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloane
• Hotel Pastis, Peter Mayle
• Tenth of December, George Saunders
• Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Karen Russell
• Relish, Lucy Kinsley
• The American Heiress, Daisy Goodwin

Broccoli & Feta Pasta Salad – Easy and delicious. Mental note that this would be a great thing to do with the smaller heads of broccoli from my farm share. I didn’t add any protein to this one but as noted I think some chicken would do nicely.

Whole Wheat Couscous with Cherries and Arugula - Another very yummy salad. I made this with regular pearl couscous as I haven’t been able to find the whole wheat stuff anywhere I normally go. My only change was to use one (big) shallot instead of three – that’s a lot of onion. Make sure you mince it fine, the sharpness of the raw onion cuts right through the other flavors. I also skipped the step where you spread out the cooked couscous to let it cool – I just mixed everything together and once and let it wilt the arugula a little. Very tasty – I added a few shrimp (blanched in OJ, red wine vinegar and a little water) to bulk it up for dinner. White beans would also work well I think.

Dulce de Leche Ice Cream - Delicious and super easy. I actually didn’t put the pecans in but should have, it would’ve been very very good. I used dulce de leche leftover from when my gentleman caller made a dessert for us one evening. His method is to boil a can of sweetened condensed milk, which seemed to work pretty well. Basically you just bring a pot of water containing your unopened can up to a boil, then simmer it for a couple of hours. The internet tells me you can also take the milk out of the can and bake it in a covered dish as well.

Banana & Coconut Milk Steel Cut Oatmeal - I just used this recipe as a suggestion, following my own procedure and using the coconut milk for part of the water I normally use. I included the spices and vanilla as well, but omitted everything else. I put the bananas on right before serving. This was good but mostly I smelled/tasted the nutmeg, so I’m not sure the coconut milk brought much to it.

Kale Salad with Pecorino and Lemon - This was tasty – the kale wilts down quite a bit so you can use a much smaller bowl than you’d think, especially if you dress it in stages as you chop. It was very lemony, which I liked, and I think would be a great side with a rich meal – in fact I brought it to a party where the main dish was pulled pork.

Slept at: The Sheraton Boston, attached to the Prudential Mall and the Hynes. I enjoyed the standard Sheraton experience, including Starwood’s thing where you can get points for declining housekeeping. (More places should do this!) I don’t always get to pick my hotel, but I think Starwood properties are my jam from here on out when I do.

Ate at: I had a lot of options for lunch when I arrived on Saturday, but I wound up at Thai Basil on Newbury Street, where I enjoyed some spicy panang chicken. There were some other places I was interested in, but I had neglected to consider that for the two days I was free at lunch, it would be the weekend – thus brunch, and a lot of Newbury Street’s brunch spots are very busy. Dinner that evening was at JJ Foley’s, an old haunt that I was glad to revisit, with a few local friends.

Sunday I was lazy and had breakfast at the hotel. Lunch was at the Wagamama inside the Prudential Mall, as I didn’t really have time to potentially deal with finding a place that wasn’t overwhelmed with people at brunch. I wound up ordering a few small things and enjoyed it – they were pretty empty. Sunday evening I went out for dinner at the Back Bay Social Club, which I very much enjoyed. I wasn’t feeling great for much of this trip and so I skipped a drink with dinner, which was a shame as they had a very interesting cocktail list. I did enjoy my meal, which was salmon cooked in parchment, with a nice lemony wine based sauce.

Monday was a busy day – breakfast was at Au Bon Pain after my 7am presentation, where I learned that they sell oatmeal – very good to know since I don’t care for Starbucks’ oatmeal anymore. For lunch I was over behind Kenmore square and went to Basho with a small group – we all ordered one of their lunch bentos, which came with a nice miso. I forget exactly what I got – I think two kinds of sushi? – but they had plenty of options. They also have a really lovely, calming atmosphere. Monday evening I went to Cafeteria Boston, which was fine. I was getting sort of a weird vibe – it came across as an upscale place, but if you looked closely (at the decor and food) clearly it wasn’t. It took me a while but I eventually figured out that they’re going for the student market – someplace that seems nice but isn’t expensive. That’s fine, I had a good enough meal, and the waiter was friendly.

Tuesday morning I walked over to Pavement Coffeehouse, which used to be Espresso Royale Cafe. There were a few ERC’s scattered around the city, one of which was smack in the middle of my undergraduate campus. I have very fond memories of ERC and like to stop by when I can. Pavement is still great, but definitely has more of a focus on upscale coffees (delicious cappuccino). I also wandered into LA Burdick, where of course I picked up some chocolate mice. For lunch I ventured up to Mission Hill and met some folks at Penguin Pizza, which I enjoyed. Their pizza slices are huge.

Travel: I took the T around town – getting between the Back Bay and the airport does involve two transfers, which is kind of a hassle, but overall certainly not a big deal. The Silver Line bus from the airport is free, but at least in Terminal E, they do have fare machines – they’re tucked out of the way, though, past the currency exchange in what looks like no man’s land. My Charlie Card from when I lived there had expired, but I had time to stop by the card office in Downtown Crossing and got the funds transferred from that to a new one very easily & free of charge. Annoyingly, they weren’t able to do the same with the paper farecard I’d used in October, which had somehow lost its ability to be read by the machines. If I’d been able to present the credit card I made the purchase with they could have helped me (that account was closed due to fraud) but without that, I was out of luck. I decided to assume there wasn’t much left on it anyway.

He’s a very engaging speaker – I admit that I didn’t expect to make it through more than 5 or 10 minutes, and I wound up watching nearly the entire thing – 90 minutes – all but what I assume is the Q&A at the end. He talks about memes and torrenting and kickstarter all kinds of interesting and relevant stuff. Basically he’s pointing out all the ways that our culture has shifted, building a foundation so that you can see a way forward for libraries. It’s a reminder that the types of information people want is changing forms – people still want to learn things, but increasingly the information they want is not necessarily contained in a book, or easily learned from one. I’m not doing a good job of putting my finger on this, but I think what he did is take a giant step backward from where a lot of articles about makerspaces in libraries start and explaining the “why?” of this shift, rather than just saying “people want to make stuff! 21st century skills!” etc etc.

Anyway, he doesn’t really talk about libraries until about 0:50, and even so the next 20 minutes are still pretty general. It’s not until about 1:07 that he gets into really library-specific stuff, but he’s talking about very interesting things. His library’s summer reading game is now online and has quests and badges. They circulate synthesizers and other crazy instruments, in a semi-secret way. It was a great talk, and I encourage you to watch it. He gave a shortened version of this talk at the Maryland Library Association’s conference recently, and I really wish I’d been there to see it.

Abstracts here

Systematic Review Reporting Quality in General Medical Journals: The Influence of Librarian Authorship
Melissa Rethlefsen, AHIP, Ann Farrell, and Leah C. Osterhaus Trzasko

2011 – Institute of Medicine (IOM) standards for systematic reviews. 15 standards just for searching. One is “work with a librarian or other informationist. So what is the impact of having a librarian on a systematic review team? And does the level of librarian involvement also improve the review? Hyphothesis – yes, would be higher quality.  Better able to help shape direction of search question, strategy and reporting.

Developed a short form (capture level of participation and search strategy), checklist (based on 15 recommended standards from IOM) and a scale (Modified the PRESS – Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies).

Three levels of librarian participation: No/Unclear, Mentioned/Acknowledged, Author.  And is the search replicable – does SR contain the line by line strategy for at least one of the databases used.

Looked at JAMA, BMJ, Lancent, PLoS Med, Annals of IM. 2008-2012. Two reviewers used short form and checklist to review their assigned articles.  Then came to consensus either among the two reviewers or all four reviewers.

630 SRs analyzed. 275 had replicable searches. 7% had librarian author, 23% mentioned/acknowledged. With lib as author, over 60% were replicable. No librarian, less than 40% replicable. Librarian authored SRs also met more standards (average 2 more).

Compared to no librarian involvement, with a librarian author the SRs were more likely to meet 8 different IOM standards. Vs mentioned, more likely to meet 6 different IOM standards. [Sounds like she is referring to particular standards in these numbers]

Limitations – definition of SR still nebulous. No/unclear may mask LIS contributions – hard to tell if there were common names, only first initials, etc. Raters also could have used more training. IOM standards are controversial.

Observations – searches were difficult to locate. Missing, broken links, etc.

Future – going to use another rating measurement, expand journal selection. Also want to look at ways to preserve and present systematic review search strategies. Having a standard would help.

Implications – librarians should ask for authorship so better able to help formulate questions, search methods, presentation of searches, etc. Know about the IOM standards and be ready to help advise.

Q&A/Comments:

-Didn’t contact authors to confirm if they had a librarian’s help, and level of involvement.
-Trends in numbers of authors? Haven’t really looked at that. Did notice that certain groups always include a librarian, but others don’t.
-“cheater” systematic reviews – the ones students have to do in 6 weeks. Lots of variation in what was considered a systematic review. Need to get involved with journal publishers about this – other standards are needed
-there are some other terms – comprehensive review, quick review, etc.

A Collaborative Approach to Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Instruction
Mark P. MacEachern and Whitney Townsend, Liaison Service Librarians at U Michigan Med Library

Integrated vs standalone instruction. Moving towards a model of integrated instruction. Librarian is coming into the curriculum at established points, rather than making them come to the library for a standalone session. “They don’t know what they don’t know.”

One point for this instruction is in a pediatric clerkship for 3^rd year medical students – session on how to use them in clinical prax. By then have had a lot of instruction on primary literature. Two part session – librarian leads first part covering what systematic reviews are, when they should look for them, how to find them. Second part is physician-led – small group activity. Given two different SRs on a topic that come to different conclusions. Students work through a checklist and evaluate the SRs. Discuss whether they would integrate the info into their clinical practice.  Librarian chimes in on search strategies, etc.

Why collaborate on these? Integrated into existing series of sessions they get. Reminder on how to locate them once they’re out in the clinic. They also get to watch a physician and an information professional collaborating – two experts working together to solve important problems.

Graduate Medical Education – there’s a slide deck available for all librarians to start from when doing instruction on SRs. Allows to introduce additional resources to them at a critical time. Gives librarians a foot in the door with the residents and fellows who are working on these projects.

Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program – 2-3 year fellowships, MDs and MPHs. Clinical Masters in Research students also join in on this. Work with a librarian on training to conduct an SR – walk through the whole process in detail in two two-hour sessions. Again encourages them to work with a librarian and makes a librarian more available to them. Useful repetition for them to get it again.

Epidemiology course – one week graduate level summer course. Students have to create a SR protocol that they will theoretically later complete. Mark teaches the search component of the course. Helps students see importance of running a strong search – they see how the search impacts the analysis they can do. (All materials for this course are in open.michigan repository – http://open.umich.edu/education/sph/epid757/summer2011 ). As a result of this collaboration this particular faculty member has always brought in a librarian for his SRs, librarians have been written into grants too.

Q&A/Comments:
-do you have a policy about how much you work with them? They’ll push the envelope. When do you say you have to step back? They don’t have an official policy that he knows – up to individual librarians to set those boundaries. Also do a lot of consultations that don’t actually lead to a systematic review.
-yes, co-author on some of them.
-pressure for librarians to integrate. How did this come about?
-Someone in audience had a class where one group of students read the IOM standards and came to find a librarian. Then all the rest of their classmates came to see her. She contacted prof to give a heads up, and was then integrated from there.

An Interdisciplinary Collaboration to Teach Systematic Review Methods
Claire Twose, Assoc Director for Public Health and Basic Science Info Services at Welch Library @ JHU
Lori Rosman, Peggy Gross, Donna D. Hesson, Julie M. Adamo, Tianjing Li, Ian Saldanha, Swaroop S. Vedula, and Kay Dickersin

Graduate epidemiology class intended to teach how to do SRs and Meta Analysis in 8 weeks. All four librarians for this school are involved in the course in some way. Librarians have actually been involved with the course from the beginning in the ‘90s. Very popular course.

Small groups of students given list of SRs that need to be updated by faculty. Then go through all the steps of doing an SR. protocol, searches, download, de-dupe, etc.

Informal librarian involvement in the beginning. 30 minute lecture in class, then come to research lab time to circulate. Prof did theoretical part, librarians did nuts and bolts. Faculty graded search strategy.

In last 3-4 years, librarian has become a team member rather than a guest lecturer. Support is now more formalized – also shifted to online lectures. Participate in class planning and feedback to students. More than just one in-class presentation, office hours. Roadmap document and other handouts.

Increase in satisfaction with course from evaluations. Also can see a “clear improvement” in search strategies over the last year. Indirect faculty learning – they read all the librarian comments on the students’ search strategies. Also lots of benefits to the librarians! Reviewed strategies together to learn more themselves. Also research opportunities to collaborate and co-author posters and papers with faculty.

Future – will continue to be an 8 week course. Try to reduce searching load for students though – libs will try to do some research on contributions of each database to the SRs. Going to create more online presentations and tutorials.

Q&A/Comments
-working on data to see what these students are doing in terms of publications after the class.
-librarians involved in a two-week chunk of the course, when they’re doing the search component
-grading the search strategies (10 of them) – took 8 hours to grade them all, total. Graded on criteria they were given to follow (using PRESS tool for this). Wrote comments back with suggestions for terms, etc.
-why EndNote vs RefWorks? Her experience – they are downloading thousands of citations from each database. Need to upload somewhere, remove duplicates, create unique sets, etc. RefWorks – interact with a server every time you make a change, slow process. Suspect that was why.
-anecdotally, seems these students are more likely to involve a librarian on SRs and other research in the future – this shows them the value.

What Happens after: Outcomes of a Systematic Review Course
Linda M. Hartman, AHIP – Reference Librarian at U Pitt, instructor for workshop on SRs for librarians
Barbara Folb, Mary L. Klem, Melissa A. Ratajeski, AHIP, Ahlam Saleh, Charles B. Wessel, and Andrea M. Ketchum, AHIP

Systematic Review Workshop – Nuts & Bolts for Librarians. 2.5-day workshop with MLA CEs attached. Study design, co-investigator, project management, etc.  class started out as a self-study for her institution.

Survey.  Why? MLA CE survey didn’t answer all the questions they were interested in re: what people learned, any change in institutional processes, etc. 113 respondents, pretty evenly distributed between all the 8 workshops the timeframe covered. Also did a supplemental survey – survey logic was set up incorrectly! 80 people completed that.

Knowledge – what are they learning from our class? 19 questions to assess retention of key points – high percentage of people got almost all questions right. No trend regarding how long ago they took the class.

Professional Practice – how many SR searches have you worked on since the class? Most 1-5, and mostly academic health sciences libraries. Some people had 40-50 searches they worked on. Question was maybe ambiguous – you do several searches for one SR. grey lit – had that module of course made an impact? 70% of people had.

Authorship – 63% asked for it, 76% of who asked were granted (22% didn’t know yet).

Peer Review for a search? Controversial topic – standard on this now, but about 1/3 of respondents took the class before the standard was published. Those whose primary duty was doing SRs were most likely to do this. Also if you’re in a small library you don’t have the resources/colleagues to do a peer review.

Confidence? – 70% agreed or strongly agreed that they could confidently do a high quality SR search.

42% changed the services for SRs offered at their institutions after the course. Have improved search quality and documentation, have added it as a formal service offered. Expanded training and tracking services for SRs.

Administrators are supporting this process (about 20% of those who took survey were administrators)

Next up, prospective study on this – pre, post, and 6 months out.

Q&A/Comments:
-re: peer review – have you considered a network of people who have taken the class and can help with peer review? PRESS forum – can peer review and have your own searches peer reviewed.

Abstracts here

Scholarly Video Journals to Increase Productivity in Medical Research and Education
Dr. Moshe Pritsker, CEO and cofounder of Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) – online video journal for biological and medical research.

Personal story – 2003 in Priceton, working on PhD. Asked to reproduce an experiment from a published article. Doesn’t work. Others are asked, also doesn’t work. Typical story – 9 of 10 tries you can’t make it work. Sent to Edinbugh to the original researchers to observe their methodology. Great experience, but is this transatlantic trip really what we have to do to learn new methods in the 21^st century?

Traditional articles don’t work. Why? Text-based explanations of procedures people want to learn/replicate. Very short video can replace an entire paragraph. What seems complex in text is revealed to be simple in video. Slows learning curve. Researchers are “busy reinventing the wheel instead of busy curing cancer.”

Each article has a video that explains how the experiment is done. Step by step demonstration of the experiment.  “In general it is not possible to learn surgery from a text.”

Publishing 50 articles each month. First and only video journal indexed in Medline & PubMed. Neuroscience, bioengineering, others;  just added sections on applied physics, chemistry; new sections coming on behavior and environmental science.

Ran through numbers on subscribers, traffic, usage stats, etc.

Videos are professionally filmed and edited by JoVE staff. Lots of technical effort and experience needed. They have a network of videographers who can go out to the labs to film researchers in their own labs.

Scientific publication hasn’t changed much since the first article in 1665.

Q&A/Comments:

-Anonymous peer review – same as other journals.

-Open Access? Deposit in PubMed with 3 year embargo. comply with the regulations & mandates around Open Access re: research funding, though. JoVE is only subscription, though, video production is very expensive. $10k/video.

The Pace of Change in Practice-Driving Medical Knowledge in New Models of Publishing
Dr. Brian Alper, founder & editor in chief of DynaMed and medical director of EBSCO Publishing.

How quickly does what we need to know change due to new evidence or guidelines? In med school realized he couldn’t memorize everything, so focused on learning how to organize and find info. Half of what is taught in med school is wrong – we just don’t know which half. What it is to practice medicine keeps changing – we learn more every day.

DynaMed – evidence based reference tool – monitor & appraise the evidence-based literature. Change their content as needed. Walks through their overview section.

How quickly does the core evidence we rely on for practice change? In 1.5 years, 75% of topics they examined for this analysis had a change in the overview due to new evidence, 60% due to new guidelines. Some of this is due to new focus on changing guidelines to be more evidence-based. Lots of revision in guidelines now.

Tricked into Submission: Health Sciences Librarians’ Role in Fighting Predatory Publishing and Spamferences
Paul M. Blobaum, prof on library faculty at Governors State U. Also health & human services librarian

Abstract was due a year ago. Had a goal of conducting a study in time to report results here. Instead have just the beginnings of a larger research project.

As a librarian, concerned with quality information in the literature, especially consumer literature. Also on tenure & promotion committee. Noticed trend of faculty getting tricked into publishing in low-quality journals. Saw a need to help establish legitimacy of publications and making choices for good journals to submit to.  Also noted that faculty are really behind the times on open access – some think that means it’s vanity publishing, or otherwise not credible

Shows a letter of solicitation he got from a publisher that seemed fishy – addressed him incorrectly, not his area of study, English-language issues. Shows another that had been sent to a colleague. We know to delete these. Unspoken idea that faculty do not always realize it’s a scam.

Beall’s Scholarly OA website: http://scholarlyoa.com/ – criteria for identifying predatory publishers.

How to ID credible journals – look at the major indexes and their criteria for inclusion, ie MedLine. He has also developed a checklist.

Some of the predatory practices – online, pay-to-publish model. Logo or acronym may be similar to a legit journal that doesn’t have a good online presence. No real meaningful peer review. Often international in scope, claim to be indexed but in the fine print they note they’ve just applied, or the fine print will note that the indexes are things like Google Scholar or DOAJ. Often promise quick turnaround times – tempting to someone who has been turned down 2-3 times already.  Poor grammar and language use indicating no editing work happening. No connection with a scholarly society or with the community of scholars in general. No editor column can be a warning sign – so there’s no way to communicate back if you see something published with a  bad methodology, for example. Editor and publisher are often the same person. Not following various standards set by scholarly societies and publisher groups.

Important to emphasize that perfectly reputable publishers may also share some of these criteria! For example, quick turnaround.

Spam conferences – claim to index proceedings, but nowhere to be found. He got a solicitation from one conference two years in a row – colleague did extensive search of proceedings databases and didn’t find anything. Was able to identify it as a ripoff of an IEEE conference.

Q&A/Comments:

-We’ve seen ID theft of researchers just being randomly listed on editorial boards. Some without even being contacted, others listed even after they say no. Creates (perceived) conflicts of interest for them sometimes.

-Researchers aren’t doing the kind of due diligence they’d do when selecting a contractor to fix their roof. Why? Boggle.

-Sometimes these journals are not necessarily scammy, just start-ups that are trying to build credibility. Opportunity for follow up research?

-Working on new departmental publishing guidelines that encourage faculty to consult with a librarian early on about where to publish.

Creating a New “Gratis Open Access” Family Medicine Research Journal
Laura A. McLellan, MLS, on the staff of Annals of Family Medicine at Case Western

This presentation focused on the establishment and history of this journal, which was not particularly relevant for my interests. Hence the very sparse notes.

Journal was born when a group looked at existing options for family medicine publishing and saw that there was not much, and what was out there was changing focus. Most focused on reviews, office practice, or shifting to more specialty coverage.

Submissions go through initial inspection and if they make it through that, get 2-3 peer reviewers assigned. Assoc editors look at reviews and make decision re: accept/reject. Supplemental materials online. Also have public-friendly summaries called “In Brief.”

Indexed in MedLine, EMBASE, PsycINFO, PubMed Central

Overall an interesting talk from an engaging speaker, though on the Twitter backchannel there was some chatter about how relevant it was to medical librarians. General theme was the importance of getting accurate, science-based information out, but no explicit connections to librarians. His focus was more on the end product, the narrative that carries the information in a way that the public will pay attention to, not so much on how that science is identified and gathered. This is certainly relevant to anyone who is trying to communicate technical information to an audience unfamiliar with it – for example, teaching students how to use databases, etc. Personally, I don’t think it’s a bad thing if the keynotes at a conference aren’t laser-focused on how the speaker engages with librarians and libraries – it’s a good way to find new ways of thinking about how we do what we do.

First outbreak he investigated was in Boston – fell in love with science. Views his role on NBC news as a public health role. Tells stories now instead of doing powerpoints.

Head of terrorism preparedness and emergency response for CDC (took the job right after Katrina hit). Jan 2009, In Israel. Why is the public here so well prepped for disasters? We’re not in the US. Hour after he arrived, war with Gaza started. Expected to be sent home, but wasn’t. Philosophy is to just keep going.

Asked by Obama transition team to be interim director of CDC. Told CDC needed major changes. Too much focus on low-probability events (terrorism, pandemics, etc) – need to focus on more common health issues (obesity, diabetes, etc).

Bird flu – H5N1. Flu is “a nightmare disease…it has ways of avoiding our immune system.” Different strains for different species. Panemic -> new strain that people don’t have immunity to. H5N1 would occasionally jump from poultry to people in places where ppl had very very close contact, then rarely jump to caregiver. So lots of $ to manufacture vaccines quickly, planning, exercises, etc. Then heard – two cases of swine flu (H1N1) in CA, TX. CA ppl unrelated, TX no pig contact. Simultaneously severe pneumonia in Mexico, US and Canada helping to test.  Canada confirms it’s H1N1. Get outbreak responses going via White House.

Importance of words in communication – different words get different responses.

Started planning response. Containment not possible. Take aggressive action – “you only get one chance to get ahead of it….if you go out hard, you can always dial back your response.” Frequent, transparent communication, with actions based on best available science. What are the facts, what has history shown us? Direct dollars and people at actions likely to have the largest impact.

Decided they would not turn down a single interview request. Communication is key. Conflict communication – “be first, be right, be credible.” But there’s a tension. So part of the message is “things are uncertain, we will let you know as things change.”

At a White House briefing – with John Brennan and Janet Napolitano. But almost all questions went to Bresser. Going well until Fox reporter repeatedly asked “could this be terrorism?

Week later – looking highly deadly in Mexico. Had hospital data but not data from community – always see patients who are sickest. What about milder cases? Briefing for cabinet and President. Obama greets and says – “every department has a role, and our actions need to be based on the best available science.” Sec Clinton asks – difference between seasonal & pandemic flu? Showed him that political leaders don’t know these things. Same types of questions and concerns from reporters and neighbors – need to translate the science into clear explanations.

Ended with NBC News clips on pneumonia vaccines in Africa and sports injuries in children. Final thanks to medical librarians as a huge resource throughout his career.

• The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge
• Daughters of the North, Sarah Hall
• Black-Out, Connie Willis
• Heads in Beds, Jacob Tomsky
• Garlic and Sapphires, Ruth Reichl

Lemony Chickpea Stir Fry
Another easy meal. Make sure you chop your tofu into small pieces – about the size of the chickpeas. Since I’m making this in the winter, I used 3 cups of cubed butternut squash I’d stashed in the freezer in the fall, and about 2 cups of kale just to bulk it up some more. This was pretty good but next time around I’m going to first marinate the tofu in something citrusy, fry it until golden, and then proceed. I also won’t try to get the chickpeas to brown as that didn’t seem to work for me, so they were a bit mushy.

Roasted Garlic and Potato Soup
Very simple soup. I messed with the proportions, using three large red potatoes, and doubling everything else. I also subbed half and half for about half a cup of the milk, just to add a little creaminess, since I use skim milk.

Earl Grey and Honey Muffins
I was actually partway through making the early grey muffins recipe in one of my cookbooks when I came to a screeching halt – my regular yogurt had gone bad (and then some) and I didn’t have anything else I could substitute. Because of this I have one major difference in what I did vs what this recipe instructs – I used way more tea (4 tablespoons) and steeped it longer – not sure exactly how long, but I’d say maybe 10-15 minutes total steeping time. They are absolutely delicious and have a wonderful tea aroma.

Coffee Coffee Cake Muffins
These disappeared at the brunch I brought them to. I didn’t have any espresso powder so I skipped that step, and as a result I felt like they lost some depth. I did use a vanilla bean, which gave them a nice aroma.