Author Archives: Donna

Preparing the Annual Library Budget: Thinking Strategic, Thinking Value

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As I prepare my budget for 2016, the challenge is always to align the content we renew/purchase so that it reflects the research and medical activities of our user community. Scholarly journals tend to take a fair portion of our allocated content funds and considerable time is spent each year (and during the year) monitoring their use, identifying new research journals, and looking to see where research dollars have been assigned/diverted within the organization. Continue reading →

Investigational Drugs, IBM Watson, Cancer Drug Costs and Awards

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A selection of recent news items about MSK and staff….

  • Treatment of tenosynovial giant-cell tumors, a rare disorder of the joints, with an investigational drug (PLX3397) resulted in a prolonged regression in tumor volume in most patients.  The findings from this phase 2 trial were published in the July 30 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.  Lead author is William Tap, MD, Chief of the Sarcoma Medical Oncology Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering. (ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01004861)
  • IBM Watson has come a long way since gaining fame in 2011 when it was able to defeat two human champions on the TV game show, Jeopardy. Now, Watson EMR Assistant support physicians by providing additional information “…through a process of collaborative problem-solving during which the computer recommends treatment options and explains in natural language what it found in the patient and the literature that led to its conclusions.”  Memorial Sloan Kettering is mentioned. Continue reading →

Data Sets – A New Form of Scholarly Communication?

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Scholarly Communication is a term that represents the overall process by which scholars (researchers) publish in order to share the outcomes of their research.  The scholarly communication continuum includes many aspects such as discovery, dissemination, and preservation of the intellectual output.  We are also seeing less formal textual communications to include blog posts, tweets, videos, computer code, and data sets. Continue reading →