The MSK Library has subscriptions to thousands of titles in medical and scientific research.  However, no library can have them all.  For those patrons who need access to research outside the library’s subscriptions, we offer an Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery service. In this month’s Do You Know post, I thought I’d shed some light onto this helpful and convenient service.

The Interlibrary Loan team here at MSK processes around 38,000 requests annually; both finding articles and books for our researchers as well as providing materials to researchers at other institutions.  Once a request is entered into our ILLiad Document Delivery System, it is given individual attention by one of our team members.

We confirm that the citation is correct, check for the item in our collection, and make sure appropriate attention is payed to copyright compliance.  Once we determine that the article is not available in our own collection, nor online through a free legal source, it is sent off through various channels to our lenders.  This is most often done through Docline, a system run by the National Library of Medicine for just this purpose.  We also send some requests through OCLC; a large network connecting libraries worldwide.  While there is sometimes a cost involved in these transactions, the library absorbs it as part of our service.

On the rare occasion that we are unable to track down an item, it is never because of lack of effort on our part.  We love the challenge of locating obscure and outmoded materials to help the MSK community reach their research goals!

So when you find yourself hitting the inevitable paywall, direct your browser to the Document Delivery Service.

The things people are doing with 3D printing – from robotic prosthesis to cookie cutters shaped like Yoda – never cease to amaze me.  We’ve mentioned some of the medical applications to the 3D printing in previous blog posts, but those have been in relation to human patients.  I thought I would look in the cuter side of the internet to see how 3D printing has been helping our fuzzier friends.

The plastic used in many 3D printers is ideal for creating beaks for birds who have birth defects or injuries.  Grecia the toucan (warning: graphic image), is due to receive a prosthetic beak after losing a large portion of his to human cruelty.  Another bird, a bald eagle named Beauty, received a custom-made, 3D printed beak to replace her broken one. Continue reading →

We’ve all been warned that what we put on the internet never goes away. But just because something is on the World Wide Web doesn’t necessarily mean that it will stay put. The term, “link rot” refers to hyperlinks that no longer connect to their intended pages. The intended resource may have been archived, deleted, or retracted; and the link previously pointing there is now useless. Users may be faced with a ‘404’ error, a blank page, or something completely different than they were seeking.

With the variety of information on the internet, this can mean loosing track of your favorite kitten picture or the citations given supporting Supreme Court decisions; it’s a bigger problem than many people realize. According to a study published in PLoS One, an estimated one in five academic articles published between 1997 and 2012 suffer from link rot.

Wikimedia Foundation [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons