Designing a library: everyone on the same page?

Excerpts are presented from an interview by the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association buildings projects editor with four academic health sciences library directors: one who had recently completed a major library building project and three who were involved in various stages of new building projects. They share their experiences planning for and implementing library-building programs. The interview explores driving forces leading to new library buildings, identifies who should be involved, recalls the most difficult and exciting moments of the building projects, relates what they wished they had known before starting the project, assesses the impact of new library facilities on clients and services, reviews what they would change, and describes forces impacting libraries today and attributes of the twenty-first century library.

Postattentive vision

Much research has examined preattentive vision: visual representation prior to the arrival of attention. Most vision research concerns attended visual stimuli; very little research has considered postattentive vision. What is the visual representation of a previously attended object once attention is deployed elsewhere? The authors argue that perceptual effects of attention vanish once attention is redeployed. Experiments 1-6 were visual search studies. In standard search, participants looked for a target item among distractor items. On each trial, a new search display was presented. These tasks were compared to repeated search tasks in which the search display was not changed. On successive trials, participants searched the same display for new targets. Results showed that if search was inefficient when participants searched a display the first time, it was inefficient when the same, unchanging display was searched the second, fifth, or 350th time. Experiments 7 and 8 made a similar point with a curve tracing paradigm. The results have implications for an understanding of scene perception, change detection, and the relationship of vision to memory.

University of Wisconsin IAIMS planning: organizational challenges within a faculty governance model

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Health Sciences Schools are currently in the planning stage of developing an Integrated Advanced Information Management System (IAIMS). The planning phase of this project attends to the unique opportunities that are found at the flagship campus of a large state university system. Statewide teaching and research initiatives and accelerated campus-level capital development challenge the planners to create an IAIMS plan that anticipates an emerging health science environment. Additionally, UW-Madison has an organizational culture with a strong tradition of faculty governance, which provides a very desirable and flexible decision-making environment for a cross-discipline collaborative information management initiative. Development of a shared IAIMS vision conflicts with a governance model that most directly supports intradepartmental decision-making. The challenge presented here for an IAIMS initiative has less to do with hard wiring a technical infrastructure and more to do with increased stakeholder cooperation in a highly decentralized organization with autonomous information systems.

Finding the evidence

Powerful new electronic resources have greatly enhanced the ability of physicians to find current evidence to answer clinical questions. CD-ROM databases and World Wide Web access via the Internet provide convenient, up-to-date, easily searchable reference material for practicing physicians. The MEDLINE database is now available free of charge through Internet Grateful Med and PubMed on the Internet. Physicians can focus a literature search to retrieve studies that use methodology consistent with good medical evidence. Once the citations are in hand, physicians have several options to retrieve the full text of the relevant articles.

A repeated dose-response study of methazolamide in glaucoma

Twenty-two patients with open-angle glaucoma were given weekly courses of methazolamide at different dosages. Mean intraocular pressure reductions of 3.3, 4.3, and 5.6 mm Hg were achieved at dosages of 25 mg, 50 mg, and 100 mg of methazolamide every eight hours, respectively. Maximal intraocular pressure lowering was still present nine to ten hours after administration. The mean reduction in outflow pressure for all eyes receiving a daily dosage of 300 mg was only 31%, but this included eyes (17% of the total) that demonstrated less than 13% reduction in outflow pressure, despite similar methazolamide serum levels. Eight patients subsequently received acetazolamide, 250 mg four times a day for a week. The effect of this dosage of acetazolamide on pressure was between the effects of 50 and 100 mg of methazolamide three times daily.