McGoogan News

Mark Darby, instructor in the UNMC College of Nursing, will present at McGoogan Library’s next speaker series on April 11 at noon. Darby will present on his book “Pharaoh’s Midwives.”

This event will be virtual. Registration for the Zoom event is required.

Darby has been a nurse for almost 40 years and is certified in family and mental health as a nurse practitioner. He is the co-leader of the UNMC College of Nursing’s creative writing project and has been editor of “Journal of Nurse Jocularity” for the past eight years.

Darby self-published “Pharaoh’s Midwives” to answer the question: Are the Hebrew midwives in Exodus 1:15-21, named Shipporah and Puah, Hebrew or Egyptian? And why does that make a difference in the context of the racial tensions of society today?

The McGoogan Health Sciences Library is hosting an author reading on March 30 at noon with Amy Haddad, PhD.

Dr. Haddad will be reading from her poetry collection, “An Otherwise Healthy Woman.” The event will be hybrid, with limited in person attendance in the Wigton Heritage Center atrium and availability on Zoom. Registration is required for the Zoom link.

Dr. Haddad’s book will be on sale and a signing will take place after the reading.

Dr. Haddad is a poet, nurse and educator at Creighton University, where she holds the rank of professor emerita. Her poetry and short stories have been published in the American Journal of Nursing, Janus Head, Journal of Medical Humanities, Touch, Bellevue Literary Review, Pulse, Persimmon Tree, Annals of Internal Medicine, Aji Magazine, DASH and Oberon Poetry Magazine, along with the anthologies “Between the Heart Beats” and “Intensive Care: More Poetry and Prose by Nurses” from University of Iowa Press and “Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies” from Kent State University Press.

Her poetry chapbook, “The Geography of Kitchens,” was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. The University of Nebraska Press is publishing her first poetry collection, “An Otherwise Healthy Woman,” in 2022. She is an alumna of the UNMC College of Nursing.

The McGoogan Health Sciences Library will hold UNMC’s first Living Library event on March 24 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. All individuals at UNMC and Nebraska Medicine are welcome to participate.

The event is held in partnership with the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Criss Library and co-sponsored by the UNMC Office of Inclusion.  

Living libraries are events where individuals act as “living books” and event participants “check out” those books for 30-minute conversations. The purpose of a living library is to provide a safe space for difficult conversations that may not be easily held in day-to-day life. The selected living books have agreed to be open and honest regarding their unique experiences. The books available for check out at the UNMC event have experiences including abuse and navigating an unexpected diagnosis. For a full list of the books and their story topics, please visit the event webpage.

Those wishing to participate and check out a living book are required to register to spend time with the book in advance on the Living Library event webpage. Participants may check out a living book of interest for a one-on-one conversation, or they may choose to register with a small group with a maximum of three people. Everyone is encouraged to bring questions for the selected book.

Individuals located at UNMC’s distance campuses are encouraged to participate in the event; certain times during the event will be reserved for Zoom participants. Zoom appointments will be limited due to technology constraints and are reserved solely for distance campus participants. Further registration information for virtual appointments can be viewed on the event webpage.  

To view the book catalog, register with a living book, get more information on Living Library events, and watch teaser trailers, visit the UNMC Living Library webpage.

Students, we heard your request! Two individual study rooms (room 6070 and 7003) are now equipped with monitors that can be used with your laptop. We have several types of cord adapters connected to the monitor and ready for you use. This is a pilot offering, so please let us know what you think.

For questions or concerns, please contact askus@unmc.edu

The McGoogan Library is posting a series of articles regarding new methods of scholarly dissemination.  

A preprint is a version of a research manuscript that is disseminated prior to the peer review process. Preprints are frequently posted in an electronic format and often made available to the public on a preprint server such as bioRxiv or medRxiv. Most preprints are assigned a digital object identifier (DOI) so that it is possible to cite them in other research papers. Preprints are often associated with a push towards Open Access (OA) as well as efforts to expedite the dissemination of scientific content.  While preprints have been around for several decades, the COVID-19 global pandemic has led to a dramatic increase in the number of publications archived in preprint servers. A 2020 Nature article entitled “Will the pandemic permanently alter scientific publishing” explores the potential impacts of preprints on the scholarly publications’ life cycle.  

Pros of archiving preprints include: 

• fast dissemination/discussion of research results 
• feedback from the research community prior to submission to a scientific journal 
• earlier documentation of the originality of research based on DOI 
• exposure of research to a potentially larger group 
• availability of articles that might otherwise not be published 
• availability to researchers without library access 

Cons of archiving preprints include:  

• dissemination of inaccurate information 
• misuse of preprints by media and news outlets 
• contribution to “information overload” 
• refusal of some publishers to publish items that have been archived as preprints 

For more information on preprints, see our research guide.  

This article was reproduced from the Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.