We do more than teach about grants and funding at the Library. We also secure them for our own projects. The UT Southwestern Medical Center Library has recently secured two awards from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, South Central Region (NN/LM SCR) for special projects.
The first is a $25,000 Historical Preservation and Digitization Award. This money will be used to purchase equipment to complete a project entitled “Dallas Medical History: 1890-1975”. The project involves scanning 500 photos from our collection that will be made available online, plus creating a special web exhibit of the 50 most important photos.
The second is a $6,500 Express Outreach Grant to purchase equipment to assist with consumer health community outreach. Outreach librarians and Library staff will demonstrate resources and provide information assistance at the Health Professions Recruitment and Exposure Program (HPREP) for minority high school students and their families from the Dallas Independent School District.
These projects have been funded in whole or in part with federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. N01-LM-6-3505 with the Houston Academy of Medicine – Texas Medical Center Library.

NIH grant holders know that manually entering citations into eRA Commons can be difficult and confusing, but on July 23, 2010, manual entry is going away! The NIH has found a more efficient, accurate, and easier way for eRA Commons users to manage their professional bibliographies, associate publications with their grant awards, and ensure compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.
eRA Commons users are now required to sign up for a free My NCBI account from the National Center for Biotechnology Information. This account will allow you to import citation information from PubMed, PubMed Central, and NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS), as well as helping you keep track of NIH Public Access Policy compliance by color-coding the articles according to their status in the NIHMS. Principal Investigators (PIs) will also be able to use their My NCBI accounts to delegate the responsibility of updating their bibliographies to assistants.
What Do I Have to Do?
1. Establish a My NCBI account, if PI does not already have one.
2. PI must link the My NCBI account to his/her eRA Commons account.
3. As of July 23, 2010, Commons will no longer support manual entry of citations. All new citations must be added through My NCBI accounts.
4. As of October 22, 2010, all citations previously entered manually into Commons will be removed from the Commons system. Therefore, move citations into the My NCBI account so they will show up on the PI’s professional bibliography and can be associated with future annual progress reports.
Please see the official NIH notice for more information and step-by-step help for setting up and using a My NCBI account.