Lois G. Hendrickson

Background: History and health humanities instruction offers a framework for professional students to examine the arc and development of their profession as well as develop cultural competencies. Exploring ideas, themes, and health care practices and approaches through historical instruction can show students how culture influences health care and practice, therefore providing a context for further development of cultural competence skills. Case Presentation: This case report describes a collaboration among a dentistry course instructor, a liaison librarian, and curators of a rare book collection. Working together, this team offers an active learning class that examines the historical arc of the dental profession. We aim to have students use primary source materials to examine the experiences, research, and narratives of their profession. Discussion: Using a World Cafe with thematic tables allows students to safely examine rare materials and artifacts and have meaningful conversations about themes that are critical to dentistry’s past, present, and future. Students reported that engaging with artifacts and historical materials provided a different way to understand history and enhanced their learning experience. Engaging students in this work builds critical thinking skills that are essential to evidence-based practice.

Historic data in analog (or print) format is a valuable resource that is utilized by scientists in many fields. This type of data may be found in various locations on university campuses including offices, labs, storage facilities, and archives. This study investigates whether biological data held in one institutional university archives could be identified, described, and thus made potentially useful for contemporary life scientists. Scientific data was located and approximately half of it was deemed to be of some value to current researchers and about 20% included enough information for the study to be repeated. Locating individual data sets in the collections at the University Archives at the University of Minnesota proved challenging. This preliminary work points to possible ways to move forward to make raw data in university archives collections more discoverable and likely to be reused. It raises questions that can help inform future work in this area.

Purpose: Early exposure and surgical mentorship can augment interest in surgery. We evaluate the effect and feasibility of offering education and mentorship opportunities in surgery to premedical students at our institution through an undergraduate surgery interest group (USIG). Materials and Methods: We conducted a 1-year assessment of our USIG and reviewed its organizational structure, funding resources, media promotion, and educational activities. Our USIG hosted introductory-level surgical skills workshops, guest lectures by surgeons, and various facility tours. To assess participants’ interests, as well as the influences on them to pursue a surgical profession, we analyzed pre- and post-event questionnaires. Similar questionnaires were completed by medical students in our medical student surgery interest group to compare any differences in perception between premedical and medical students. Results: Our USIG currently has 378 undergraduate student members, with a higher proportion of women than in our medical student surgery interest group (P < 0.003). Neurosurgery was the most popular career choice among undergraduate participants. Participants reported the highest satisfaction with suturing and high-fidelity trauma surgery skills workshops. Undergraduate participants indicated that their intrinsic interest in the sciences is the highest motivation to pursue a surgical profession. Resident lifestyle and social obligations of a surgical career were actually positive influences for undergraduate participants; in contrast, medical students viewed those variables as negative factors. Conclusion: Our USIG was met with enthusiasm by premedical students and faculty alike. Participation strengthened premedical students’ interest in pursuing surgery and increased their understanding of the surgical profession. Early mentorship may positively influence premedical students’ perception of surgical careers. USIG is economically feasible and time-efficient; we encourage other academic institutions and educators to consider investing in similar interest groups.

Objective: The objective of this paper is to illustrate the importance and complexities of working with historical analog data that exists on university campuses. Using a case study of fruit breeding data, we highlight issues and opportunities for librarians to help preserve and increase access to potentially valuable data sets. Methods: We worked in conjunction with researchers to inventory, describe, and increase access to a large, 100-year-old data set of analog fruit breeding data. This involved creating a spreadsheet to capture metadata about each data set, identifying data sets at risk for loss, and digitizing select items for deposit in our institutional repository. Results/Discussion: We illustrate that large amounts of data exist within biological and agricultural sciences departments and labs, and how past practices of data collection, record keeping, storage, and management have hindered data reuse. We demonstrate that librarians have a role in collaborating with researchers and providing direction in how to preserve analog data and make it available for reuse. This work may provide guidance for other science librarians pursing similar projects. Conclusions: This case study demonstrates how science librarians can build or strengthen their role in managing and providing access to analog data by combining their data management skills with researchers’ needs to recover and reuse data. The substance of this article is based upon a panel presentation at RDAP Summit 2019.