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Presentation
Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Medical Library Program to Support Biomedical Research in the Omics Era
MLA 2016 (2016)
  • Rolando Garcia-Milian
  • John Gallagher, Yale University
  • Janis Glover, Yale University
Abstract

Objectives
Design and implement a sustainable program that supports biomedical research at Yale University. Our program responds to the challenges posed by omics (e.g. genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, etc.) technologies, identifies the role and place of the Yale Cushing/Whitney Medical Library in the high-throughput omics research cycle, and is based on the organizational culture of the institution.

Methods
Key challenges posed by omics technologies on preclinical and clinical research are: rapidly generating high amount of diverse omics data; integrating these diverse data; exponential increase in the biomedical literature and databases; use of pathway and network-based methods to analyze and visualize information; and low reproducibility of preclinical research and its translation into the clinical setting, among others. Based on these challenges, a program was designed and implemented to support biomedical researchers including faculty, clinicians, grad students and postdocs in three areas: instruction, services, and resources/tools. Program evaluation consisted of carefully recording statistics for each of the three main components; feedback was elicited, collected and analyzed. Based on feedback, a grassroots community, “End-user Bioinformatics Network" (EBNET) and its advisory group, was also created with the mission of collaborating on the professional development and research support of its members.

Results
During the first 19 months of the research support program, 43 training sessions were directly provided or hosted by the medical library. A total of 1035 individuals have attended these sessions out of 1720 registered, including 296 waitlisted. Topics of training included: Natural Language Processing tools, genome browsers, networked data visualization tools, enrichment analysis, genetic variation resources, etc. Based on user feedback, the library began providing institutional access to proprietary bioinformatics software for the functional analysis of high-throughput data (e.g. MetaCore and Ingenuity Pathway Analysis, TRANSFAC, Human Gene Mutation Database)
 
Conclusions
Yale Cushing/Medical Library has created a program that supports biomedical research in the omics era from an end-user perspective.  This program fills an identified gap in the high-throughput data life cycle in terms of data annotation of research results, and hypothesis generation/narrowing. This presentation will discuss on the strategies used to implement this program.
Disciplines
Publication Date
Spring May 15, 2016
Location
Toronto, CA
Citation Information
Rolando Garcia-Milian, John Gallagher and Janis Glover. "Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Medical Library Program to Support Biomedical Research in the Omics Era" MLA 2016 (2016)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/rolando_garciamilian/12/
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY-NC International License.