Sustainability has long been a priority for McGill and rightly so, as climate action is essential now given the rapidly increasing climate emergencies occurring globally. It’s fantastic that there is so much work happening in this area at our university. For example, McGill recently ranked in the top ten along with University of Toronto and University of British Columbia in the QS World Sustainability rankings. There is also excellent work being done by the McGill Office of Sustainability (MOOS). Two of MOOS’ major initiatives have won awards: their sustainability learning module and the sustainable workplace certification program. And, of course, the Sustainability Park, McGill’s revitalization of a portion of the former site of the Royal Victoria Hospital to create a state-of-the-art research, teaching and learning hub dedicated to sustainability and public policy, is getting closer to reality every day!
You might be more familiar with the Sustainability Park by its previous name: the New Vic Project. The new name was launched in the fall: Le Parc du développement durable McGill/McGill Sustainability Park. The new name heralds the exciting developments that are moving forward on the project.
To learn more about the project, consider attending the upcoming information session open to the entire McGill community this Thurs. Dec. 11 from 12-1:30pm. A recent What’s New for faculty and staff points to details about the meeting and provides information about how you may submit your questions in advance. You can also watch a short video to learn more about the project.
Since 2024, I have had the privilege to serve on a Community of Practice related to the academic aspects of the project. It has been really interesting to learn about the plans and to provide feedback to the project team, as well as to work with faculty, staff and students all across campus who are so vested in sustainability. As the McGill Libraries’ representative, I have helped to integrate the Libraries within the project.
So, what exactly does the Sustainability Park have to do with the McGill Libraries? Well, most notably, the McGill Libraries will open a Grand Reading Room in the space. This is the first time in my many years at McGill Libraries when we will be getting a new library space! Given how highly in demand our current library spaces are, with two million in-person visits per year (PDF booklet at: https://www.mcgill.ca/libraries/about/planning/strategic-priorities), we surely can use the extra space!
The Grand Reading Room will be located in one of the Nightingale Wings in the heritage portion of the site. With its large dual aspect windows, the space was originally a ward for patients. Dual aspect windows are windows that are on at least two walls of a space, which allows for natural light to enter and for there to be increased cross ventilation and outside views in multiple directions. The space had (and will continue to have) lots of natural light, which was helpful in the well-being of patients before there was electricity.
The reason the wards were called the Nightingale Wings was because of Florence Nightingale, the famous founder of modern nursing. In fact, she was even consulted on the design of these kinds of hospital wards, including those in the original Royal Victoria Hospital! (Table 1 at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1937586720931058). Her Environmental Theory emphasized the importance of clean air and natural light in speeding up patient recovery. Her “signature innovation [was] large windows that allowed cross-ventilation and abundant natural light.” (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-florence-nightingale-can-teach-us-about-architecture-and-health/). The design of the Grand Reading Room honours her legacy in its continued adherence to her foundational principles.
Nightingale was ahead of her time in understanding how much human health depends on a healthy environment – a message that certainly rings true today when what we need more than anything is a clean and healthy planet. In the Sustainability Park, researchers will study how best to deal with the most tackling issues of sustainability while practicing sustainability within its walls, in much the same way the wards Nightingale helped design were places both for healthcare research and for applying the research to treat patients.
Here is what one of the Nightingale Wings looked like when it was part of the hospital in 1897 and used for hospital patients:
Image: Ward D of the Royal Victoria Hospital and the staff during Christmas. (photo 1897). MUA PR023861. From: archives.mcgill.ca/public/hist_mcgill/nursing/nursing04_lg.htm
Here is what the future Reading Room looked like when I had the opportunity to go on a site visit in fall 2024:
Image: Taken by Tara Mawhinney.
Here is a glimpse of what the future holds for this important historical space when it opens as part of the Sustainability Park:
Image: Architectural rendering of the Grand Reading Room, courtesy of the Sustainability Park Project Office.
The library space will include study space and library staff on site, but no physical book collections. The space will be open to the public. However, as with existing McGill Libraries’ spaces, students are expected to be the main clientele.
To find out how the project is progressing these days, check out this sneak peek video of the Park as of Oct. 2025. If you pay close attention at the 2 minute 55 second mark, you’ll even get a view of how the Grand Reading Room space is coming along!
So, when will the McGill Libraries get to welcome you to the new Library space? The Sustainability Park will officially open in 2029, which might seem a long way off, but it will be here in no time. I hope that you will join the Sustainability Park project team on Dec. 11 to learn all about what they have in store for McGill!
As the liaison librarian for the Trottier Institute for Sustainability in Engineering and Design (TISED), I love it when McGill students and researchers ask me for help finding research related to environmental sustainability and climate action. My two go-to research databases for these kinds of questions are ProQuest One Sustainability and Scopus. The tips below on these databases will be particularly useful for students and researchers in TISED and in engineering but I hope people researching in other fields may find them useful too!
ProQuest One Sustainability
This is the leading sustainability database available through McGill Libraries. You can access it at: ProQuest One Sustainability. This database contains references to journal articles, conference papers, books and book chapters, case studies and more on topics such as environmental engineering, water resources, climate policy and environmental health. The database allows you to filter your results to limit to one or more of the three sustainability pillars: environmental, social and economic.
So, for example, if I wanted to find academic sources on cycling in cities and focus on the social aspects, I could type in: cycling and cities; once the results are displayed, I can choose the “social” filter, under the “sustainability pillar” category, from the left-hand column. My search results will include literature on topics like gender inequality in cycling, the lived experience of cyclists, motivations for cycling, recreational cycling and so on.
Another reason I recommend this database is that it has implemented a feature that maps its research content to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), thus allowing researchers to identify literature on many sub-topics within sustainability. The UN goals are 17 specific objectives that are part of a plan that all UN member states adopted in 2015 to reduce poverty, protect the planet and improve the lives of everyone. Research in addressing these goals is helping to solve real-world problems. ProQuest One Sustainability has added the goals into their database to raise awareness of research that is making a difference in the world by addressing critically important issues for humanity and the environment.
How does this feature work? The database highlights research that relates to each of the 17 goals by listing the goals on the database’s home page. When you click on a specific goal (e.g. “Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation”), the database lists the targets within each goal (e.g. “Target 6.1: By 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all”). You can click on “Find articles” to view the literature that addresses this specific target. In the image below, you can see what the “Find articles” link looks like in the database.
One strange quirk of ProQuest One Sustainability is that when you run a search using the default search box on the database’s home page, the database looks for your words anywhere in the description of the items in the database, including in the full text when available. This kind of search is different from most other research databases at McGill that only look for your words in the title, abstract and description of the items and not the full text, which gives a more precise and targeted search. What this means is that in ProQuest One Sustainability, you can get a lot of noise (irrelevant results) cluttering up your search. I recommend going to the “advanced search” and, from the dropdown menu, selecting this option to search instead: “Anywhere except full text.” This kind of search will help you retrieve more focused results and reduce the clutter.
Scopus
Another of my go-to databases for sustainability topics is Scopus and I’ll explain why. Scopus is a multidisciplinary database covering research on every topic you can imagine, and not limited to sustainability-related topics, like ProQuest One Sustainability. You can access it at: Scopus. What makes Scopus stand out in terms of sustainability is that it recently implemented a feature similar to the functionality in ProQuest One Sustainability that ties literature to the Sustainable Development Goals.
When you run a search, say for cycling in cities, Scopus has incorporated the goals within the description of literature that addresses one or more of the goals. Scopus will help you identify which research articles address the SDGs by indicating, under the “Impact” section of each document’s record, when the research relates to one or more SDGs. Scopus uses machine learning to help identify which articles discuss which SDGs. For example, in my Scopus search: cycling and cities, I found an article on promoting cycling to schoolchildren and after choosing the “Impact” tab, I found that the article mapped to “Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities.” Scopus also gives a summary of what each goal is about and why it is important. Here is what Scopus looks like in action:
Limitations
My hope is that both ProQuest Sustainability One and Scopus will make their mapping features even more useful by integrating a search filter for SDGs, much like the sustainability pillar filter within ProQuest Sustainability One. That way, it will be really easy to filter down from your list of results to only show the literature that addresses a specific SDG. For now, when you run a search in either of these databases from their main search boxes, this isn’t possible. In Scopus, we need to look through all the results in a search one by one to see if there are any SDGs mapped to the research articles. In ProQuest One Sustainability, only those articles listed under the special section on the 17 goals on the database’s home page will get you to research on any specific SDG.
For more information
I hope this gives you a glimpse into how you can use some of McGill Libraries’ best resources to find literature on sustainability topics. You’ll find other resources related to environmental sustainability on my TISED research guide at: https://libraryguides.mcgill.ca/tised and on the Environmental Studies research guide at: https://libraryguides.mcgill.ca/environmental-studies. For help on finding research related to any topic, McGill students and researchers can consult the list of liaison librarians. We’re happy to help!
To mark Climate Action Week taking place this week and spearheaded by the British Columbia Library Association, here are some interesting things that are happening related to environmental sustainability and climate action both here at McGill and further afield:
Do some reading! Various libraries have put together booklists on climate change including these resources:
The University of Toronto Scarborough Library has created a Climate Action Week Reading List with many book titles on climate change. The books in the “Fuelling Hope” section offer lots of good reading for getting inspired.
The University of British Columbia Library has created a variety of climate change booklists on different topics like climate-related books by BC authors, the history of climate science and action, books of hope from strong climate voices and many others.
The University of Waterloo Library has created a climate action booklist with subsections on topics such as sustainable development and innovations.
Join a climate café to share your thoughts and current experiences related to the climate crisis. There are many such groups including this free one offered monthly by the US-based Resilient Activist organization.
Learn more about climate change and the climate crisis by registering for the McGill Course: “ATOC 183: Climate and Climate Change” being offered this winter. Read all about the course in an interview dating from last year when the course first was offered.
Within the McGill Libraries, various units have been hard at work completing the university’s Sustainable Workplace Certification program. In fact, it’s one of the library system’s objectives to have all units certified at the bronze level or higher. Schulich Library is proud to have achieved bronze certification and is currently working toward silver. The new McGill Collections Centre opened in 2024 as a LEED gold certified facility and its staff have now earned platinum level in the university’s workplace certification program. You can learn more about the program and several other sustainability initiatives by checking out information from the McGill Office of Sustainability.
At the time of this writing, we are on day 22 of a U.S. Government shutdown. When the U.S. Government shuts down, most people think of national parks and travel delays. But the impact goes much deeper, into the systems that keep health sciences research and clinical practice running. Many federally-funded databases and information services discontinue updates or suspend operations, cutting off the flow of reliable information that healthcare professionals rely on to make clinical and policy decisions.
On October 1st 2025, when Congress reached a funding deadlock, disclaimers started popping up on many government websites, including health-related websites regularly used by librarians to support research needs. PubMed, the “National Library of Medicine’s free, searchable bibliographic database supporting scientific and medical research,”1 displayed this alarming banner:
The same banner can be seen on other websites, including MedlinePlus, an information hub for patient and their families, also maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM).
Because these tasks are mostly automated, citations are still being uploaded to PubMed, and articles are still being indexed. However, because the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has furloughed thousands of employees, according to Dyer (2025) the indexing of new journals has been suspended.2 But Dyer also notes that when the government resumes its normal activities, the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee – the group responsible for evaluating and approving journals for inclusion in PubMed – will no longer be operational. All 15 members of the committee were terminated by the Trump Administration earlier this fall.3
Another service that has been halted is document lending through DOCLINE, the National Library of Medicine’s official interlibrary loan request routing system. The banner on the DOCLINE homepage states that the NLM will not be fulfilling lending requests during the shutdown.4 Fortunately, participating institutions can still request and share materials among themselves. However, in the last few weeks, medical librarians have reported on the Medical Library Association’s listerserv that they are experiencing problems with DOCLINE, specifically that requests are not automatically rerouting as they normally would. As sometimes happens, when the NLM is the only library holding a particular article, requestors are left in the dark, unable to obtain material until government operations resume. For clinicians, researchers, and students who depend on rapid access to medical literature, even short interruptions like this can affect research progress, delay evidence-based decision making and disrupt patient care.
And just as librarians were beginning to adapt, finding solutions and supporting one another as we so often do, another challenge emerged. Last week we learned of the firing of all Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) library workers. In an earlier blog post on evidence-based medicine, we noted the importance of the CDC and their publication of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In an interview the Washington Post, former CDC librarian Gail Bang, said: “It’s hard — almost impossible — for the researchers to do valid scientific research without the librarians.”5 Every Library, an non-profit organization that supports libraries and librarians in the United States, has started a petition calling on the government to reinstate CDC library workers. The petition has been shared numerous times among health librarians.
The current government shutdown highlights just how fragile the infrastructure supporting health information can be. From suspended updates to PubMed and MedlinePlus, to halted interlibrary loan services through DOCLINE, and the recent firing of CDC library staff, the consequences are far-reaching. Librarians work tirelessly behind the scenes to mitigate these disruptions, but even our ingenuity has limits when those responsible for governance fail to reach a compromise.
Dyer, O. (2025). PubMed is running on autopilot during shutdown, but key independent committee has been abolished. BMJ (Clinical Research Ed.), 391, r2158. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r2158↩︎
This October, we join the McGill community in celebrating Queer History Month, a time to reflect on the contributions, histories, and ongoing advocacy of LGBTQ+ communities. During this time, we are reminded of the importance of visibility, inclusion and understanding across all areas of university life.
We are especially excited to highlight the Keynote Lecture, delivered by Kai Cheng Thom on Wednesday, October 22nd 2025. Registration is now open.
To complement this year’s events, the Schulich Library has curated a collection of books focused on LGBTQ+ health, from inclusive care practices and mental health, to intersectional approaches to wellness. The collection features a mix of scholarly titles for researchers and practitioners, as well as consumer health books written for the general public, reflecting the breadth of perspectives and experiences in LGBTQ+ Health. These titles are on display in the library throughout October and accessible online through our curated reading list.
You can continue to explore queer topics through our subject guides:
LGBTQ+ Health Guide: resources on inclusive clinical care, public health, research and consumer health.
LGBTQ+ Studies Guide: interdisciplinary resources on identity, activism and cultural representation.
LGBTQ+ Music Guide: explore the voices, sounds and histories of queer musicians and composers.
Whether you’re attending events, diving into our book collection, or exploring our guides, we invite you to celebrate Queer History Month with curiosity and reflection.
Science Literacy Week as a Canada wide event was paused in 2024 when the administration switched hands to the Canadian Association of Science Centres (CASC). We had a bit of a science literacy celebration this year, back in March, but we are happy to join in with CASC and other educators and organizations to ring in Science Literacy Week 2025, from October 6 – 12.
The theme for the week is From Sea to Space. Check out our Science Literacy guide to learn more.
We were one of the first universities to join the cross-country effort to celebrate science literacy, way back in 2015, so I thought that it would be fun to dig up the old blog posts and events of the past.
In addition to lectures (I attended Prof. Lovejoy’s talk, Why the warming can’t be natural: Harnessing butterflies for climate closure, and it was amazing), workshops and tours, there were fascinating exhibits at the Islamic Studies Library on the History of Science in Islam, and at the Osler Library on Sanitizing style: Germ theory and fashion at the turn of the century.
We also launched Arduino and Raspberry Pi lending at Schulich Library, that was pretty exciting!
Visits to the hives at Macdonald campus and on the roof of the Schulich Library! And that was in addition to workshops, a hands on session with the Oculus Rift, and a Wikipedia edit-a-thon on women in science. There was a Science of Star Trek exhibit at Schulich Library, and Knowing Blood, Medical Observations, Fluid Meanings, at Osler Library.
This year also marked our first lecture by Dr. Joe Schwarcz, a Science Literacy Week regular, on Eating Right: The Facts and the Myths.
Sadly, our movie nights were not that popular (lessons were learned!) but the same cannot be said for exhibits and events around the theme of From Lab to Life. Who wouldn’t want to knit a petri dish with Let’s Talk Science @ McGill or “drop in and bust myths” at Redpath Museum? We got really techie with augmented reality and Raspberry Pi workshops, and a learn to code session with HackMcGill.
There were 4 different library exhibits, and the Music Library joined in with Phonomenal! Rare sides from the history of sound recording. You can still read more about it from their post at the time.
There was a Doctor Who exhibition, Traveling through space and time, at Schulich Library, and The World That You Know Through the Eyes of Muslim Geographers, at Islamic Studies Library. Some really important Treasures from the History of Science in Rare Books and Special Collections were also on display.
The timing was perfect, coinciding with a Public Astronight talk, ORIGINS: How the Earth Shaped Human History, and the Cutting Edge Lecture in Science: Can we halt global amphibian declines?
There was an exhibit in the Redpath Library building on the theme of the week, Oceans, offering different cartographic views of the oceans of the world.
We learned all about the Data Rescue: Archives and Weather (DRAW) project, and The Art of Explaining Science to Non-Specialists with Dr. Diane Dechief. We also had De-Stress + Sketch Online, SLW edition, with the folks from Visual Arts Collection, and a book club meeting for the book, Data feminism, by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F Klein.
Many of the 2020 offerings were back with the addition of some new workshops, like Chart Making in Excel: Going Further by Telling a Story with your Data. AstroMcGill also hosted an online event, Talking with Martians: A panel on red-planet research, and the Redpath Museum brought us an informative online Secret science spots of McGill.
The theme for the week was Mathematics and Prof. Rhonda Amsel did not disappoint with Stats-wise, a presentation on the ‘why’ of statistics. Dr Joe Schwarcz educated us on Analyzing Risk, and we had library workshops on Data Analysis in Excel, Charting numbers for understanding and communication, LaTeX, and Python.
I offered a workshop on spinning wool into yarn with spindles printed on library 3D printers, and it was a blast!
The theme in 2023 was Energy and we really brought it! There was fun with crochet, LaTeX, satellite and drone images, and repairing personal devices. We also learned what every Montrealer should know about earthquakes from Dr. Christie Rowe.
You can still visit the exhibits page to try out the Rare & Special Collections images digital jigsaw puzzles and colouring pages.
With Science Literacy Week on hold in 2024, we decided to have our own version in March of this year. Among other great activities, the Macdonald Campus Library launched their Seed Library that week and we had a fascinating tour of the Rutherford Museum and McPherson Collection with Curator, Prof. Barrette. This might sound wild, but we also learned about ancient Egyptian animal mummies from Prof. Reznikov!
The latest results from the WCOM 206 Excellence in Communication Award competition are in and we have two winners: Sophia Chen (Fall 2023 term) and Alan Fu (Winter/Summer 2023).
It has been such a pleasure to be part of the team that reads and ranks the undergraduate papers nominated by Communication in Engineering instructors each term. I have learned so much!
Now you can learn about the challenges of monitoring hormone levels for transgender and non-binary individuals, and about models to improve malignant brain tumour survival rates. These two were considered the best of their peer group and the full text of the papers have been added to the McGill Libraries’ repository, eScholarship.
Transgender and non-binary individuals may use Hormone Replacement Therapy as part of their gender transition. During this process, hormone levels are measured using immunoassays, which typically include estrogens, testosterones and progesterones. While commercial solutions can automate blood testing, the blood collection process itself is difficult., invasive, and prone to complications. Because hormone levels change throughout the day, a more robust testing solution needs to be developed. Lateral flow assays, a low cost detection device can be developed for quantitative readouts of hormone levels. However, low concentration of the hormones of interest present in the saliva means that this solution cannot currently be used as a diagnostic device. Future investigation is necessary on detection antibodies that are used for this solution. Intended audience: a biotechnical company considering research and development towards hormone monitoring.
Stagnant growth in malignant brain tumor survival rates indicates a need for more powerful models to advance tumor research and pharmaceutical testing. This paper comparatively analyzes three models: 3D cell line xenografts, genetically engineered mice models, and neoplastic cerebral organoids based on comprehensiveness, scalability, and accuracy criteria. 3D CLXs possess excellent scalability but are unappealing in all other aspects. GEMMs are favorable in the aspects of comprehensiveness and accuracy compared to 3D CLXs, but face issues regarding scalability. Finally, neoCORs outclass GEMMs in both comprehensiveness and accuracy while retaining modest scalability, leading this paper to conclude that neoCORs are the most viable model for future development. Future development of neoCORs, especially of assistive microfluidics devices, is strongly recommended.
We extend our gratitude to Ezra J. Teboul, our Master of Information Studies practicum student at Schulich Library over the winter term. In this guest post, Ezra offers some lessons learned from working with the Mossman Collection on the History of Science and of Ideas.
McGill’s libraries contain invaluable holdings for the historian of science. A researcher at the Canadian Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa, I was until June also in the Master of Information Studies at McGill. In my last semester (Winter 2025), I studied the contents of the Mossman Collection on the History of Science and of Ideas at the Schulich Library for Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, and Engineering. Completed with the patient supervision and many insights of April Colosimo, a big part of my project was dedicated to quantitatively assessing how the collection had evolved since its donation by Donald and Dorothea Mossman in 1974. This teaches us not just about science and how it has evolved, but also about the way history of science has been done (historiography). It’s important to understand both because science is done by humans and requires continual, active investment by the individuals and institutions it needs and affects to have a positive impact.
A graph of the years of publication of items included in the Mossman Collection in the History of Science and Ideas as currently listed in the McGill Sofia Catalogue.
This blog post illustrates how the Mossman can act as a good starting point for doing history and historiography of science and how these fields are interesting from an information access perspective because it is distributed across Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). But how might an undergraduate or junior graduate student interested in the history of science navigate the Mossman collection and the wider McGill catalogue to learn about this complex topic? Below I give an example of a research thread that starts in the Mossman collection before extending to the University collections at large.
The McGill Libraries, like many research institutions, use the Library of Congress Subject Headings for classification and access. The LCSH have a tree structure, with headings, subheadings, and call numbers of increasing specificity, not simply cataloguing every book but also linking them across branches of this knowledge tree.
History of Science, however, is a young field with very interdisciplinary practitioners: historians of course, but also scientists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, cultural and media studies scholars, etc. Many of its practitioners, like Karen Barad, start out in a technical field (theirs was quantum physics) before considering the history of those technical fields. It is also applied to almost every scientific, technological or medical topic: engineering, chemistry, mathematics, physics, biology… In that sense history of science is by definition always at least concerned with perspectives on the same technical topic: scientists, and how scientists’ view of their own work in their specialty has changed. I find it to be a particularly exciting, reflexive exercise that attempts to extend science’s inquisitive perspective (why is it like this?) to the people doing science themselves. But, from a practical perspective, it makes it difficult to categorize history of science and related publications.
Here is a graph of all the subject headings just included in the Mossman collection for the History of Science and Ideas. The blue corresponds to the contents of the collection in 1986, when a catalogue for the collection was made by the Schulich librarians. The red corresponds to the contents of the collection in 2025, when I collaborated with the McGill Libraries Collections department to do this study. To find every book on the online catalogue associated with the Mossman, look up the corresponding “uniform title.”
A graph of the LCSH headings for the items in the Mossman collection, for 1986 and 2025.
In this graph you’ll notice that most books are in the Science or Technology classes (LCSH classifications Q and T respectively) but there are 19 other headings as well. For a full list of the heading letters and their meaning, see Library of Congress Classification Outline. T, unsurprisingly, is technology, but science is Q and History is split across multiple headings: C, D, E and F (but it is notable to see that only very little of the Mossman items fall in any of these). The LCSH was first published in 1898, and this imbalance reflects the biases of scholarship in the United States at that point: a lot of academia was dedicated to historical research, while technology and science were only just becoming formal scholarly specialties. Engineering in the US and Canada had only had professional societies since 1852 with the American Society of Civil Engineers.
So doing history of science, is, from a bibliographic perspective, an interesting challenge. You can’t simply go to the stacks and find the right shelf. Books you will learn the most from may be shelves apart!
This is the value of collections like the Mossman, which used to show many of the best books on an interdisciplinary topic in the same location. With the increasing popularity of digital catalogue browsing, and the shift for the bulk of McGill collections to a robotic collections center, browsing the stacks is becoming a bit of a lost art—making all the more important the maintenance of specialized collections’ identities and purpose. If the much larger Osler history of medicine library has remained in its physical location on campus, the Mossman has been distributed across other branches, including off-site storage.
This makes the Schulich library a generous study space, but it means scholars have to trade luck in the stacks for clever digital browsing tactics. Indeed the Mossman—which over the years has included at least 6500 or so individual titles— mostly remains accessible somewhere in some form, and the rest of this post gives you a personal example of how you might access them and link them to resources from the rest of the collection.
Many of the references central to my own research are in or around the Mossman. My personal specialty is in the history of electronics, which mostly requires a knowledge of chemistry, elementary physics, signal processing, industrial manufacturing techniques, and computer science (and a few other things). One of my favorite books in the Mossman Collection is What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical Historyby Walter Vincenti (1990). Its call number is TL515 V44 1990. Here is how that call number is constructed:
T: Technology L: Motor vehicles. Aeronautics. Astronautics 515: History, General Works V44 1990: "Cutter" number and year. These are determined by each library for further subdivision
You can already see how some categories unrelated to history (e.g. “Technology: Motor vehicles. Aeronautics. Astronautics” will get a historical subheading (e.g. “515”). You can also see how some subheadings (e.g. “General Works”) are somewhat vague. Classification systems like LCSH can only get you so far when doing thorough literature reviews, and it helps to speak to other researchers and subject librarians for ideas of other headings and subheadings to consider investigating.
In my case, although aeronautics may only seem partially related to electronics research, it turns out that during the Cold War, a significant amount of electronics research was undertaken for various Air Forces, especially in Canada and the U.S. Furthermore, the rapid expansion of those countries’ industrial production capacity via machine shops was in no small part funded by defense contracts which financed private companies to supply the corresponding militaries. In that sense, learning about how aeronautical engineers produce knowledge maps very informatively to the way that electrical engineers consume and produce knowledge as well. This is made clear in David Noble’s Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, another landmark publication included in the Mossman collection. Published in 1984, it was therefore purchased by the Schulich librarians with the Mossman endowment, rather than by Mossman himself (since his collection was donated to McGill in 1974).
In Forces of Production, Noble traces the way that machining advances in the 20th century were in large part motivated by the exacting precision required to manufacture cutting-edge aircraft during the Cold War. Automated milling machines, now called CNC (computer numerical control) and CAD/CAM (computer assisted design / computer assisted machining) was an area of high research investment, resulting in dozens of electrical and electronic inventions which were easily exported (like some of the first analog/digital converter hardware architectures and prototypes) to a variety of other fields. Also in the Mossman, Forces of Production has the call number TJ1189 N63 1984:
T: Technology J: Mechanical engineering and machinery 1189: Numerical control of machine tools
Interestingly, TJ14 is a category for philosophy and history of machinery. The decision that lead a social history of automation to not be under this subheading are lost to the circumstance of the cataloguer at the Library of Congress that made that decision. TJ1189 is not an illogical choice, and this simply highlights that knowledge classification systems always contain ambiguities that can only be addressed through experience, rather than simple common sense.
From Noble’s book we may want to consider histories of shop machinery prior to the adoption of CNC technology. Here Mossman collection text, Robert Woodbury’s 1960 History of the Milling Machine; a Study in Technical Development (TJ1225 W6 1960) is another interesting reference:
T: Technology J: Mechanical engineering and machinery 1225: Machine Shops and Machine Shop Practice - General Works
From there we may want some additional context on the geopolitical conditions of the cold war and their impact on scientific and technological policies. Audra J. Wolfe’s Competing With the Soviets: Science, Technology and the State in Cold War America(2013)is a concise, clear and extremely informative summary of those exact topics. It is not in the Mossman collection, but it is clearly relevant to the history of science as a research discipline. From a collection development perspective, the Mossman is an interesting, specialized subset of the Schulich catalogue that does not include all the references which might fall under its purview (being tagged with the Mossman uniform title is more dependent on whether or not the Mossman endowment fund was used to purchase the resource). Furthermore, Competing with the Soviets call number is squarely in the sciences, as part of its specialized history subheading:
Q: Science 127: History, by region or country U: United States
T: Technology 23: History, Special Regions or Countries: Canada
Overall, this illustrates the LCSH system’s approach to classification of interdisciplinary topics. Although Jones-Imhotep work is clearly about technology, and T23 is a meaningful and helpful cataloguing heading for it, it is not entirely unrelated to science, and could easily have been part of the Mossman Collection, even as an ebook.
When doing a literature review for a new subject, it is always informative to keep track of the additional labels entries are tagged with, often drawing from multiple cataloguing systems. Cataloguing librarians know very well that only giving one label is rarely a fair representation of our complex thoughts and rich publications, and this is why additional labels are attributed to each entry. For example, with Jones-Imhotep’s book in the Sofia catalogue:
A screenshot from a catalogue record showing subject headings.
All of these are hyperlinked so that books with that tag are just a click away. Keep in mind, too, that history and historiography of science and its many connected disciplines are active projects with lively communities in constant change!
To learn more on the topics in this post, the articles below will provide you with extensive context and additional examples. They are all accessible through Sofia as well.
Barr, Zachary, Alex S. Ratowt, and Stephen P. Weldon. 2024. “The Isis Bibliography: Information Practices from Sarton’s Vision to the Digital Age.” Isis 115 (3): 491–502.https://doi.org/10.1086/731408.
Hérubel, Jean-Pierre V. M. 2006. “Clio’s View of the History of Science: A Preliminary Bibliometric Appreciation.” Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian 24 (2): 69–91.https://doi.org/10.1300/J103v24n02_03.
———. 2007. “Periodizations and History of Science: A Perspective and Approach for Collections.” Collection Management 31 (3): 59–72.https://doi.org/10.1300/J105v31n03_05.
Stone, Alva T. 2000. “The LCSH Century: A Brief History of the Library of Congress Subject Headings, and Introduction to the Centennial Essays.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 29 (1–2): 1–15.https://doi.org/10.1300/J104v29n01_01.
Whitrow, Magda. 1964. “Classification Schemes for the History of Science.” Journal of Documentation 20 (3): 120–36.https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026344.
If you have taken or are currently taking any kind of class in the health sciences at McGill, you will have probably heard about a term called Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) or Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM). EBP/EBM is about “integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from a systematic search.”1 As the librarian for Undergraduate Medical Education (UGME), I am embedded in the EBM portion of first year courses, where we often show students this diagram:
This a classic visual representation of Evidence-Based Medicine and shows how EBM sits at the intersection of three essential components:
Clinical Expertise: this refers to the clinician’s own skills, knowledge and past experiences in treating patients
Best Evidence: this refers to the most current and relevant research available, often from rigorous clinical trials and systematic reviews
Patient Preferences and Values: these refer to the patient’s own experiences, concerns, needs and cultural beliefs that they bring to the encounter.
If any one of these elements is missing or ignored, clinical decision making becomes less effective and the quality of care you are providing diminishes. That’s why it’s so important to consider the broader context, including how recent political shifts – regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum – have influenced the way we understand, access and apply evidence in healthcare today.
Since arriving in office back in 2016, the Trump Administration has issued executive decisions that pose a serious threat to one of the EBM elements – Best Evidence. And if you’re thinking that it doesn’t matter because we’re in Canada, think again. These decisions have implications on a global scale.
Politicization and Decimation of Public Health Agencies
Public health is a pretty self-explanatory concept – it’s all about the protection of people in the community, aimed at promoting healthy behaviours, preventing disease and protecting the public. In Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada and Health Canada work together to keep us healthy. The United States has several agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), among others.
When public health agencies and departments are politicized, the credibility of health recommendations can be undermined, leading to public mistrust, confusion among healthcare providers, and challenges in maintaining evidence-based practice.
In December of 2017, The Washington Post reported that the CDC was given a list of words that were forbidden, including “evidence-based” and “science-based”.2 I don’t know about you, but personally I don’t think a person who doesn’t trust the word science instills a lot of confidence. Back in the 2020, Trump-appointed HHS officials tried to block the CDC from releasing data in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) because the administration believed the CDC used language that could hurt the president’s chances for re-election.3 Thousands of public health officials rely on that report to inform their own practice and decisions in their communities.
More recently, in the early months of 2025, Trump gutted key health agencies, slashing funding and firing staff at an alarming rate. Newly appointed Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that 10 thousand jobs were being cut at HHS alone. Additional cuts were reported at the CDC, the FDA, and the Agency for Health Research and Quality, which lost half its staff.4
Among those who were unceremoniously fired was Carrie Price (not that Carey Price, Habs fans…), a Biomedical Librarian at the National Institutes of Health. Her post on LinkedIn went viral, with hundreds of librarians who work with clinicians supporting her and sounding the alarm about the importance of librarians for founding sound research.
Public health works best when smart, dedicated people — researchers, clinicians, librarians, and public health officials — have the tools and support they need to keep us safe. When funding gets slashed and expertise gets sidelined, it’s not just bad for science — it’s bad for everyone. Evidence-based practice relies on good information, and good information doesn’t just appear out of thin air. It’s built by teams of people working behind the scenes, often quietly and carefully, to make sure what you hear from your doctor, pharmacist, or public health office is actually trustworthy.
Changes in Research Priorities and Funding
Politics doesn’t just shape laws; it also shapes what kind of science is conducted. When federal funding priorities shift, so do research agendas at health agencies. One administration might pour money into a certain disease, while the next focuses almost entirely on another, or cuts programs altogether. An administration’s research priorities play a role in which questions get answered, which problems get solved, and which communities get left behind.
The Trump administration has never been a fan of climate change. The words themselves make people in the White House duck for cover. Through a series of executive decisions, Trump has pulled back climate change funding, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and rolling back pollution and fossil fuel regulations, a decision which has major implications for respiratory diseases and weather-related health crises.5
Another thing the Trump administration doesn’t like: gender. They have made it very clear that they will not be spending money on research related to sexual and gender minorities, putting the health of these groups at risk. All transgender-related research was halted at the NIH6 and suddenly, scientists like Theo Beltrán and Jace Flatt, who have spent decades dedicating their lives to these fields, found themselves in limbo.
So what does this have to do with evidence-based medicine? A lot, actually. EBM depends on having high-quality, up-to-date research to guide decisions. But if certain areas of science aren’t being funded, that evidence might not exist in the first place. If climate-related health risks or gender-related topics aren’t being studied, clinicians are left with gaps in the evidence and that makes it harder to give patients the best possible care. If the research isn’t there, the “best available evidence” part of EBM starts to fall apart.
Inconsistent Guidelines
A clinical practice guideline is a set of evidence-based recommendations designed to help healthcare professionals make informed decisions. They’re developed by experts, who systematically review the best available evidence to help guide clinicians to what’s most likely to work, what to look for, alternate options, etc. They help with the standardization of care in that they ensure that patients receive consistent and high-quality treatment no matter where they are and who is treating them. But what happens when these guidelines collide with politics?
Reproductive healthcare is a prime example. Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, clinicians in many U.S. states have found themselves caught between evidence-based recommendations and restrictive state laws. In some cases, treatment for miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies has been delayed out of fear of legal repercussions, even when the medical guidelines are clear and the patient’s health is at risk.7
Organizations like The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the World Health Organization (WHO) continue to publish guidance that supports timely, patient-centered care, but in politically charged environments, following those recommendations isn’t always possible. The result is a broken system where the quality of care can depend more on geography than science, a situation that undermines the very foundation of evidence-based medicine.
While these developments are happening south of the border, they still have implications here in Canada. Canadian clinicians and researchers often rely on U.S.-based studies, guidelines, and collaborations. When reproductive health research is restricted or politicized in the U.S., it can slow progress for everyone. Even though abortion remains legal in Canada, access varies widely by province, and we’re not immune to political pressure. These moments remind us how important it is to protect evidence-based guidelines and ensure healthcare decisions stay grounded in science, not ideology.
Final Thoughts
At the heart of it, evidence-based medicine is about trust — trust that the research behind our care is solid, that guidelines are grounded in good data, and that health decisions are made with patients’ well-being in mind. Librarians are a big part of that picture: we help students learn how to find reliable evidence, support clinicians in staying current, and quietly make sure the information pipeline runs smoothly. When politics starts to mess with science, things can get murky.
The good news is that there are still a lot of people, from researchers to clinicians to librarians, working hard to keep the evidence strong and the science honest! Even when it might seem like we’re on shaky ground, the foundation of EBM is still standing — and we’re here to help keep it that way.
Sackett, D. L., Rosenberg, W. M., Gray, J. A., Haynes, R. B., & Richardson, W. S. (1996). Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn’t. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 312(7023), 71–72. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.312.7023.71 ↩︎
Sun, L. H., & Eilperin, J. (2017). CDC gets list of forbidden words: Fetus, transgender, diversity: Agency analysts are told to avoid these 7 banned words and phrases in budget documents. Washington, D.C. ↩︎
Dyer, O. (2020). Trump appointees tamper with renowned CDC publication, claiming that scientists are trying to “hurt the president”. BMJ: British Medical Journal, 370, 1–2. ↩︎
Looi, M.-K. (2025). Trump’s 10 000 job cuts spark chaos in US health services. BMJ (Clinical Research Ed.), 389, r682. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r682 ↩︎
Wagatsuma, K. (2025). Implications of President Trump’s Second Term Executive Orders on Global and Public Health. International Journal of Public Health, 70. https://doi.org/10.3389/ijph.2025.1608402 ↩︎
Kozlov, M. Exclusive: Trump White House directs NIH to study’regret’after transgender people transition. Nature. ↩︎
Roper, K. L., Robbins, S. J., Day, P., Shih, G., & Kale, N. (2024). Impact of State Abortion Policies on Family Medicine Practice and Training After Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Annals of Family Medicine, 22(6), 492–501. https://doi.org/10.1370/afm.3183 ↩︎
Want to learn about all the exciting research that McGill students in engineering are doing on sustainability topics? Tomorrow, attend the Sustainability Changemakers Showcase, an event at the Faculty Club highlighting graduate student research on sustainability. It is being hosted by TISED, the Trottier Institute for Sustainability in Engineering and Design, where researchers and students are working to become a hub of green innovation and a centre of excellence both locally in Montréal, Québec and worldwide. The event is open to the public. To register and learn more about the speakers, please consult the registration page . To get a sneak preview of the speakers in action, you can check out brief talks they gave on their research last December.
If you’re interested in joining these researchers in designing the green solutions to engineering problems that our world needs, TISED is now accepting admissions to their new masters in Sustainability in Engineering and Design program. The deadline for fall has been extended until Apr. 1 for US candidates and June 21 for Canadian ones.
Attend tomorrow’s talks and learn all about what TISED graduate student work looks like in action!
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