The interlibrary library loan request pages and article access may not be available during a planned maintenance by our vendor. Intermittent access may occur starting at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, December 20 and ending at 3:00 a.m. on Sunday, December 21.
The main service interruption is planned for the first several hours of the maintenance window with possible intermittent service unavailability through the duration. The vendor is committed to fully restoring full access as quickly as possible but, due to the complexity of this maintenance, the window may extend beyond the anticipated schedule. If issues are encountered, please try again later.
In the event that the interlibrary loan website remains inaccessible beyond what is expected, email urgent patient care request information to illdept@unmc.edu and the request will be processed on Monday, December 22.
Dr. Mark Gilbert Oral History Interview, McGoogan Health Sciences Library, April 4th, 2025. Dr. Virginia Aita Oral History Interview, McGoogan Health Sciences Library, January 30th, 2024.
What can happen when a University of Nebraska at Omaha senior interested in the arts works in Special Collections and Archives at McGoogan Health Sciences Library? For student worker Grace Spaulding, it meant discovering a fascinating collaboration that shaped her capstone project. Below, Grace shares her journey from transcribing interviews to exploring historical medical illustrations—a prime example of student research in action.
Written by: Grace Spaulding
As a senior at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) and a student worker in the Leon S. McGoogan Health Sciences Library, I wanted to focus my capstone thesis on one of the major projects I worked on for the last four years at University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC). While working on transcriptions for the UNMC Oral History Program, I learned about the collaboration between Dr. Virginia Aita and Dr. Mark Gilbert. Their partnership brought art and medicine together in ways that changed how we think about care.
I transcribed the oral history interview for Dr. Aita and was immediately intrigued. When it came time to start my thesis project, the McGoogan Library gave me the opportunity to conduct an oral history interview with Dr. Gilbert and learn more about their work from an artist’s perspective. This research led to my thesis: Medical Illustration Pictured Through Visual Culture. This studyexplores how medical illustration, from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, functions not only as a tool for scientific education but as a cultural system that shapes how societies visualize, interpret, and value the human body. The illustrations that are featured are all housed within the Rare Book Collection at UNMC. The perspective of both Dr. Gilbert and Dr. Aita played a large role in my research.
Dr. Aita, Professor Emerita at the UNMC College of Public Health, has a background in ethics, palliative care, and health humanities. During her career, she worked to integrate humanistic perspectives into medical education. Dr. Gilbert is a Scottish artist and researcher who is internationally recognized for using portraiture to explore clinical experiences. Together, they worked side by side to use art to reveal the lived experience of patients and caregivers. Portraits of Care highlights human experiences with care within UNMC’s community. Dr. Gilbert created portraits of people receiving chemotherapy, transplant recipients, mothers in childbirth, head-and-neck cancer patients, nurses, chaplains, and hospital staff. These portraits captured perspectives of what it means to give and receive care. They illustrate struggles, relationships, and resilience, and reveal aspects of caregiving that are often hard to put into words. Dr. Gilbert completed his PhD at UNMC, focusing on depictions of medical care and his dissertation, The Experience of Portraiture in a Clinical Setting,is housed in the UNMC Digital Commons.
UNMC served as more than just a setting for this project. The campus opened resources, clinics, and communities to the arts. The support for qualitative research through these portraits led to exhibitions that shared the works with both public and professional audiences. By taking part in this process, the University of Nebraska Medical Center community helped develop arts-based methods of inquiry in medicine.
This important work was featured in prominent medical journals including, AMA Journal of Ethics, International Museum of Surgical Science, and the Journal of Medical Humanities. Another form of preservation is through the McGoogan Library’s Oral History Program, where UNMC Archivists preserve the voices of faculty, staff, and collaborators. Oral history interviews with both Dr. Aita and Dr. Gilbert are publicly available through their online collections. The oral history initiative creates an archival home for reflections on projects like Portraits of Care. This ensures that current and future researchers will hear directly from those who created, witnessed, and participated in this work.
This collaboration between Dr. Aita, Dr. Gilbert, and the larger UNMC community is more than just a set of portraits. It provides a record of stories, reflections, relationships, and narratives of care. This serves as an example of how a medical center can foster innovation between art and healthcare. The work done at UNMC shows exciting interdisciplinary connections and ensures that the experiences of patients and caregivers alike are recognized as both a method of inquiry and a depiction of humanity.
SHARING Clinic faculty volunteer, Ricki Otten, and student volunteer Kaitlyn Walton, process laboratory samples at the Leavenworth clinic location. Image courtesy of UNMC Strategic Communications
Written by: Carrie Meyer
The idea for a student-run free health clinic at UNMC emerged in the late 1990s, championed by then-students Sharon Stoolman, MD, and Christopher Connolly, MD. On September 10, 1997, with 80 UNMC students and 25 physicians, the SHARING Clinic opened at UNMC’s South Omaha location. Opening night, they treated 10 patients. Since then, SHARING clinics have expanded to four entirely student-led clinics and have treated thousands of patients.
For almost 30 years, UNMC’s SHARING clinics have served Omaha with high-quality, low-cost preventative health care, where students applied knowledge to help real people, and where health care professionals mentored students and built relationships with their community members. Hundreds of UNMC volunteers, both faculty and students, serve thousands of community members with high quality services including examinations, laboratory testing, imaging, prescription medications, physical and occupational therapy, and mental health services, all free of charge.
The newest exhibition installation in the Wigton Heritage Center explores the origins and impact of UNMC’s student-run clinics. The physical and online exhibitions explore the various clinics, historic milestones of SHARING, and highlights 20 oral histories recorded to preserve the origins and impact of student-run clinics here at UNMC.
Libraries, by definition, are sustainable spaces by promoting the use, return, and reuse of materials, but McGoogan Heath Sciences Library is taking it a step further.
The library provides white board markers and highlighters for students to use, and while they aren’t quite reusable, they can be recycled! On any regular day, roughly 205 white board markers are available for use around the library in study rooms and on mobile white boards. AskUs staff make regular rounds throughout the library to replenish supplies and tidy the space. During this process, old, dry markers are identified, collected, and diverted from the regular trash.
So far, the library has saved almost 8 lbs of old markers and highlighters from being thrown away! These expired items will be sent to the Office of Sustainability to be recycled through the TerraCycle program. The library also provides microfiber erasers and cloths for white boards that are washed and reused, further preventing waste from entering the local landfill. These efforts are keeping the library, campus, and the community just a little cleaner during Campus Sustainability Month and all year long.
On October 22 from noon – 1 p.m., McGoogan Health Sciences Library will host a panel discussion of UNMC based journal editors in observance of International Open Access Week. The editors will discuss their experiences starting and maintaining an open access scholarly journal. Panelists will represent three journals that are hosted in the McGoogan Library’s DigitalCommons@UNMC repository.
Graduate Medical Education Research Journal (editors: Chandrakanth Are, MBBS, MBA, FRCS, FACS and Premila Leiphrakpam, MBBS, DGO, PhD)
Innovations in Health Sciences Education Journal (editors: Elizabeth Beam, PhD, RN and Maha Farid, MBBCH, MS, PhD)
Translational Science in Occupation (editors: Nancy E. Krusen, PhD, OTR/L and M. Nicole Martino, PhD, OTR/L)
DigitalCommons@UNMC is an institutional repository provided by the McGoogan Library. Scholarly works of UNMC faculty, staff, and students are represented in this open access platform that is searchable in Google and Google Scholar. The journal platform within DigitalCommons@UNMC contains full editorial and peer review management, as well as an analytics dashboard and is available to the UNMC community members wishing to publish a recurring open access journal. For more information, contact Heather Brown at hlbrown@unmc.edu.
