Three Questions – Rebecca Meng

Next up in our Three Questions series, Rebecca Meng, Document Delivery Services Librarian.
 
What areas can you help MSK users with?
 
As a librarian on the Document Delivery Services team, I help people at MSK access scholarly materials that fall outside of MSK Library’s own specialized collection. Cancer affects the whole person, so the work and research going on at MSK covers a wide variety of disciplines—from nuclear physics to music therapy, machine learning to nutritional outcomes. It’s our team’s job to track down any resources needed to support research and evidence-based care.
 
What projects have you been working on recently?
 
Anyone who has used our services to request an article or book is familiar with ILLiad, the program we use to manage the flow of requests between our users here at MSK, our staff, and the other libraries and suppliers we work with. This year, ILLiad will be getting some much-needed upgrades—both behind the scenes, keeping our workflows efficient—and excitingly, on our public-facing webpages. We are working to customize the new ILLiad request pages for our MSK Library community. They will not only look nicer and more streamlined but will also be mobile-responsive and accessible.
 
If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?
 
Like many other city-dwellers who have been sheltering in place, I’d happily go almost anywhere right now. I’m especially looking forward to visiting family in New Jersey—not exactly a far-away land, but sitting in a suburban backyard eating a bowl of noodles prepared by my Dad is my current idea of pure luxury.

NIH/NLM Enters the Preprint Landscape via Pilot Project

In early May, I attended a webinar about preprints and PMC (PubMed Central). Kathryn Funk, the Program Manager for this full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM) shared information on a very timely initiative. Plans were about to be put into motion to launch a 12-month pilot project.

On June 9, 2020, the NIH Preprint pilot project kicked off with the intention of testing the feasibility of making preprints resulting from NIH-funded research available via PMC with related records in PubMed. This project supports NLM and their overall strategy to increase the visibility and discoverability of early NIH research results. According to NLM, lessons learned during this trial will inform the team on future efforts and next steps regarding preprints.

This launch comes at a time when the COVID-19 global pandemic has raised awareness and a growing interest in preprint servers as another communication channel for scientists to rapidly disseminate their research findings, avoiding the traditional peer-reviewed process and is why this pilot experiment will initially be focused on COVID-19-related preprints.

You can learn more about the NIH pilot project at the following sites:

If the links above have piqued your interest, additional resources can also be found by visiting the Preprints tab on the Library’s Open Access LibGuide.

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services