Category: Teaching

I am doing so much EndNote training these days! So. Much. It’s actually pretty enjoyable, though. EndNote is a citation management program (there are lots of them out there, see Zotero, Mendeley, Papers, Reference Manager, etc.), which is an application that lets you keep track of what you’ve read, organize the reference or PDFs of the papers themselves, and then insert those citations into a paper. It can update your bibliography according to style type on the fly. As you’ll know if you’ve ever tried to create a bibliography by hand, this is incredibly useful.

I like teaching EndNote more than most of my other subjects because it’s practical–I know that when I send someone off into the world with more EndNote knowledge, that’s going to help them in a concrete way. If I teach a student how to use a database, that may be helpful…or they may never use it again. Everybody likes productivity tools, though.

A colleague and I are also working on a systematic review. I’ve never done one before, but I’m learning a lot. You have to do a huge amount of reading before even beginning to understand the question that the review is trying to investigate. This is actually pretty fun, as it turns out. Then you have to come up with an exhaustive search and think of ways to replicate that search across different databases (this part is not so fun). We’re embarking on the next step, which is abstract reviews, next week. It’s interesting to see the whole process in action, it’s very (wait for it) systematic.

Recently, I moved across town. Moving is so stressful and exhausting, but I’m closer to most of my friends now and live in an actual house instead of an apartment. Perks! Next up on the list is getting a new-to-me car to replace my aging, beloved miata.

I have not posted here since October! This is because my job has become very, very busy. I’m my library’s trainer for EndNote, Zotero, and Reference Manager (although people here only seem to want to learn about EndNote), which takes up some time. I’m also training nursing students on CINAHL, and learning a lot about genetics. The most interesting thing I’m doing these days is answering clinical questions for various physicians and researchers–this involves doing a thorough search of the medical literature and summarizing the most relevant and important articles. In order to do this well, I’ve been reading about what goes into making really solid experiments and how to tell when articles are leaving out important details when reporting the results of those experiments. To be clear, I don’t think that the authors are being dishonest! I think it is sometimes hard to tell what your own project may be missing, or how you *should* have set it up in an ideal world versus how you actually did set it up in the real world. It’s interesting, seeing research in action.

I’m also spending a fair amount of time learning about our Special Collections, which is fantastic fun. The history of medicine is so strange and fascinating, especially the local history here in the south and in Nashville in particular. I’m looking forward to designing an exhibit later this spring, as well. In the meantime, I’m spending time familiarizing myself with the collection, which includes all manner of medical texts from the 1500s onward. I’m particularly fond of our copy of Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica, which is a second edition.

I’ve been teaching myself how to use CINAHL, the database of nursing and allied health literature from EBSCO. I’m not doing it because I am inherently interested in the database, but I’m learning it so that I’ll be able to teach a class on it. A class that’s this afternoon, gulp.

But you know what? CINAHL is actually pretty interesting. There are of course some things that I don’t like about it, but overall I think it’s built in a way that makes sense, and it can be used by people who are Good At Computers as well as by people who have to work, dammit, and can’t spend a lot of time learning a particular database.

While I am a pretty bush league teacher at the moment, I like teaching. And I’m pretty good at picking up something quickly in order to be able to teach it to other people. That’s a skill I didn’t even know I had until I recently started learning EndNote/Zotero/Reference Manager–I’m the new trainer for those programs at my library.