Snapshots of innovation.

The new and evolving technological ecosystem of modern day life has opened exciting new possibilities for health sciences librarians to create and innovate. Almost nothing resonates as vibrantly as the opportunities posed by the never-ending need to integrate technology both inside and outside the library. Technology offers health sciences libraries incredible opportunities to create, organize, and disseminate knowledge to advance their core missions in transformative ways. Libraries are consistently early and aggressive in recognizing and seizing these opportunities. With this column, Virtual Projects begins its second year of describing real-world implementations of exciting new technologies or applications in health sciences libraries that expand the range, reach, and depth of services across the user landscape. The six virtual projects featured in the column have been selected by an expert panel and serve as “snapshots of innovation” to illustrate how health sciences libraries are recognizing and embracing new, potentially transformative opportunities. Each report provides a brief narrative description of the project, technical background information, and a contact person for readers who would like to follow up for more information. As educational paradigms are shifting to include online learning environments, new virtual learning platforms offer increased opportunities for libraries to create and collaborate. The University of Virginia provides a compelling piece describing next-generation bioinformatics tutorials in a library-curated, collaborative web portal that leverages library technology and metadata expertise to make content easily accessible and searchable for their biomedical research community. A new collaborative approach for real-time digital reference is described by Kaiser Permanente librarians who recently implemented a multi-library, shared online reference platform that uses analytics data for performance measurement, enabling continual improvement of reference outcomes throughout Kaiser Permanente. The critical role that librarians play in indexing, literature searching, and the development of user interfaces is highlighted in the report on the Directory & Repository of Educational Assessment Measures (DREAM), a project where library and educational faculty worked together to produce a unique, peer-reviewed online educational resource for health sciences educators across the country. Health sciences libraries are also working hard to make library resources and services “discoverable” in user workflows. The “decentering” of library resources and services is the focus of the Cleveland Clinic report, which describes the deployment of content-specific access to online knowledge resources and services within the electronic health record (EHR) system to anticipate clinicians' and patients' questions and provide automatic links to relevant, library-curated resources and services. Visiting the discovery side of library services, the report from the University of Calgary on an intriguing interactive information visualization project provides a playful, open-ended, and pleasurable exploration of a valuable and historic rare book collection, a digital parallel to the serendipitous, browsing experience that users encounter while strolling through the bookshelves of an actual library. Additionally, libraries are increasingly hosting services that support creativity and production, such as video studios, digitization facilities, and publications services. In the spirit of sharing all things new and exciting, a report is provided on the recent “makerspace” experience at the University of Florida, deploying new three-dimensional (3D) printing tools to enable learning, knowledge creation, and innovation across departmental boundaries. These virtual projects are excellent examples of brave librarians seizing new opportunities and exploring innovative approaches to enrich and revitalize their own libraries by integrating discovery, enhancing learning, and catalyzing innovation. Please consider sharing your own innovative virtual project in a future column to inspire and encourage others. Submissions, suggestions, and questions should be directed to Susan Lessick at ude.icu@kcissels. Library-curated web interface for Open Helix bioinformatics tutorials Submitted by Jeremy Bartczak, MA, MLIS, University of Virginia In the summer of 2013, the University of Virginia (UVa) Claude Moore Health Sciences Library (CMHSL) purchased access to a set of tutorials produced by Open Helix . The set of more than 100 tutorials specialized in teaching genomics and bioinformatics tools and resources. This collection was acquired for the CMHSL Bioconnector website in collaboration with both the UVa School of Medicine's Bioinformatics Core and the Division of Biomedical Informatics. Open Helix provided two options for accessing its content: Subscribers could navigate tutorials via keyword and category at the Open Helix website, or the entire archive could be downloaded for local presentation. CMHSL opted to download the archive and provide enhanced navigation using descriptive metadata, curated taxonomies, and an Apache Solr search index . Each tutorial is presented as a suite featuring video content, PowerPoint slides, and a list of practice exercises. After surveying the tutorials, staff designed an element set to describe them in CMHSL's Drupal web content management system , which included information such as title, summary, subject, a link to the resource that the tutorial taught, and the creator of the related resource. The Drupal taxonomy tool was used to create controlled vocabulary lists for both the subject and resource creator fields. Because of the breadth of subject matter, a list of thirty-eight subject terms were compiled from Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus, and the Software Ontology using the National Center for Biomedical Ontology's (NCBO's) BioPortal ontology browser . Resource creator names were searched first in the Library of Congress name authority file and controlled locally if no record existed. Titles and descriptions were copied verbatim from the Open Helix website with permission. After metadata analysis and entry, staff uploaded the actual content of the tutorials and linked it to each description. The CMHSL web development team used the popular Drupal Views module to structure descriptions and present the searchable tutorial interface. Simply stated, the Views module can be used to create and query structured information, filter results, and provide customized displays of retrieved content. This module allowed a set of fields to be established for recording descriptive metadata, as well as displays for individual tutorials or retrieval sets while users search. As a final step, an Apache Solr search platform was added to boost Drupal search functionality, which enabled full-text searching, faceting across elements, item count display within filters, and a resource recommender mechanism. The completed CMHSL Open Helix tutorial page launched in November 2013. Technology and metadata infrastructure for the project provided a powerful search interface and straightforward user experience. Drupal's user-friendly functionality allowed a metadata librarian to partner with a web team to seamlessly implement content and design elements. By downloading the Open Helix archive, CMHSL was able to incorporate and brand these informative resources in a collaborative library web presence. Discoverability of this “siloed” content is a concern. Plans are underway to use Drupal plug-ins to publish resource description framework attribute (RDFa) and Schema.org micro-data formats. This will hopefully enhance discoverability via search engine optimization and metadata ingestion into the UVa online catalog. Jeremy Bartczak, MA, MLIS, ude.ainigriv@t4btj, Metadata Librarian, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 800722, Charlottesville, VA 22908-0722