A current perspective on medical informatics and health sciences librarianship.

OBJECTIVE: The article offers a current perspective on medical informatics and health sciences librarianship. NARRATIVE: The authors: (1) discuss how definitions of medical informatics have changed in relation to health sciences librarianship and the broader domain of information science; (2) compare the missions of health sciences librarianship and health sciences informatics, reviewing the characteristics of both disciplines; (3) propose a new definition of health sciences informatics; (4) consider the research agendas of both disciplines and the possibility that they have merged; and (5) conclude with some comments about actions and roles for health sciences librarians to flourish in the biomedical information environment of today and tomorrow. SUMMARY: Boundaries are disappearing between the sources and types of and uses for health information managed by informaticians and librarians. Definitions of the professional domains of each have been impacted by these changes in information. Evolving definitions reflect the increasingly overlapping research agendas of both disciplines. Professionals in these disciplines are increasingly functioning collaboratively as "boundary spanners," incorporating human factors that unite technology with health care delivery.     

Relics,replicas and commemorations

Several replicas of Watson and Crick's demonstration model of DNA built at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in 1953 exist, but where is the original? Once the object of intense discussion but soon superseded by more refined models built at King's College London, it slowly fell to pieces and was eventually disassembled. Twenty years after it was first constructed, some of its pieces resurfaced at Bristol. By that time, the value attached to the original incarnation of the double helix had changed substantially, and the Science Museum in London commissioned a replica of the model, with some of the original parts built into it. The model was hailed as 'the nearest there is to the original'. It has since served as prototype for further replicas. Meanwhile the spidery model of DNA has become the ultimate icon of 20th-century life sciences, and more pieces supposedly belonging to the original continue to appear at auction.     

The Rise of Modern Sport in Fin de Siècle São Paulo: Reading Elite and Bourgeois Sensibilities,the Popular Press,and the Creation of Cultural Capital

In the period between 1890 and 1910, British sport flourished in a rapidly modernizing Brazilian city. São Paulo boomed as a coffee export centre for the global market, growing into the second largest metropolis in Brazil. New businesses and industries developed and thousands of immigrants from around the world migrated to the expanding South American city. Along with the flow of new residents came new ideas, new attitudes, and new lifestyles. British sporting customs particularly attracted the attention of São Paulo’s wealthy elites and expanding middle classes who saw in these habits the potential to advertize their commitment to modern ideals of civilization and order. The new British-style sporting clubs that sprang up in São Paulo conferred the cultural capital that the leadership castes needed to gain and maintain their hegemony in the city’s rapidly changing social landscape. São Paulo’s press circulated these new sensibilities and revealed that the city’s sporting enthusiasts both reproduced Westernized norms and re-signified athletic sensibilities to fit Brazilian social patterns.