NAHSL 2018 - Remaining Strong |
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Gaming with Nintendo Switches in the Library |
Matthew Noe, Collection Outreach Librarian, Harvard Medical School; and Allison Herrera, User Experience Researcher, Harvard Medical School |
Introducing relaxation or wellness activities and tools into the library is no longer a new idea, however these programs typically remain low-tech, such as coloring and mindfulness sessions. These options remain viable and popular with many communities, however survey results from our student populations indicated interest in further options, including the addition of video game consoles. To that end, we developed reservable, in-library Nintendo Switch program. This program developed over the course of 6 months, with two primary staff members coordinating its development. Conversations with colleagues in public library settings were vital, but it wasn’t possible to simply redeploy their programs. We seek to share here what the development process looked like, what considerations we made, what problems we encountered – both expected and unexpected – and our plans for gathering usage statistics and community feedback. |
Collaboration and Innovation: NNLM’s Nationwide Online Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon |
Karen L. Coghlan, Education and Outreach Coordinator, NNLM NER; Ann Glusker; Elaina J Vitale; and Franda Liu, NIH/NLM |
There is a growing trend in libraries of engaging their communities with information and open data by holding Wikipedia edit-a-thons. During Wikipedia edit-a-thons, participants learn about the culture and norms of this widely used online resource by doing hands-on editing of articles, improving citations and adding new facts. The National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NNLM) held a health-focused edit-a-thon utilizing librarians’ research skills towards making Wikipedia a better and evidence-based resource in promoting NLM resources. Participants were able to view a customized training from Dr. James Hellman of WikiProject Medicine prior to the one day event. On April 17, 2018 during the network wide online edit-a-thon, participants received online support from NNLM staff throughout the 12-hour event across the nation. At the end of the day, more than 700 edits were done in 111 articles focused on rare diseases. NNLM is planning similar events in future. This presentation will outline the planning process, marketing strategy, event details, evaluation, and future vision for this project. |
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The Librarian Comes to You: Being Resilient in Times of Change |
Jessie Casella, Clinical Librarian, Dept. of Veterans Affairs Central Western Massachusetts Healthcare System |
Background: Due to library space downsizing and a virtual library collection, the librarian sought ways to meet staff and promote library resources. This was complicated due to the large area of the main campus and several satellite clinic locations. Objectives: The librarian developed a marketing approach that included working with a small library space and being outside of the library. The objectives were to increase staff’s awareness of library resources and services the librarian provides. Description: Online events included information sessions on library resources and training on Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. Online scavenger hunts were held during National Medical Librarians Month and National Library Week to promote library resources and services. The librarian turned a closet into a small reading room and created a mobile patient resource cart. The librarian took part in hospital committees demonstrating skills that could assist each committee with their information needs and outreach work. The librarian also attended 10 outreach events on campus and in the greater community to promote the hospital’s work. Results: Increased visibility helped increase usage of library resources and services. Specific numbers will be available at the end of FY 17/18 in September. The librarian was invited to join another committee on campus due to the design abilities demonstrated in other committees. Conclusion: These outreach efforts have helped increase library usage and helped the librarian meet staff from many departments. Staff now request library services beyond literature searches. |
Investigating Research And Clinical Education Services In Regional Health Science Libraries |
Alexandria Brackett, Clinical Librarian, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University; and Caitlin Meyer, Research and Education Librarian, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University |
Background/Introduction: Two early-career librarians visited health sciences libraries in the region to investigate the delivery of education services to both clinical and research populations at academic medical libraries. This project was sponsored by an internal grant through the university library system. Objectives: • Develop a deeper understanding of the profession by interviewing librarians in similar positions and observing their practice. • Form a regional network with librarians at other universities – making inroads for future work together on projects and other contributions to the field. • Develop and distribute best practice models with our colleagues at both the medical library and the university library system for resource promotion, online learning delivery, and more. • Inform the restructuring of the medical library’s education program. Description: This project consisted of site visits to regional health science libraries that included: facility tours, meetings with librarians that have similar roles to our positions, meetings with library administration, and participating in on classes. Results: The researchers visited eight libraries in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York. During these visits, the researchers learned about issues and trends in library workshops, web presence, marketing, institutional context, hospital interaction, reference, systematic reviews, and data. The information was synthesized to teach our colleagues about best practices and emerging trends as well as inform the researchers’ continued practice. Conclusion: The researchers identified commonalities and unique programming at each institution. The researchers also learned about regional support among fellow medical librarians and potential collaborative opportunities. |
Assessing the Information Needs of Nurses in Rural Hospitals |
Virginia Trow, Administration, Hunter-Rice Library and North Country Hospital Library Service Program, Samaritan Medical Center |
OBJECTIVE/PURPOSE: Design a more effective service program around a critical patron segment. We needed to revamp an outdated circuit program. We believed the best approach was to meet the needs of our largest patron segment, frontline nurses. Instead of making decisions based on our well-reasoned assumptions and knowledge of the nursing profession and "recommended" resources, we decided to go direct to the nurses, ask questions and listen, and solicit structured feedback to better inform our new program design. METHODS/DESCRIPTION: Conduct a Nursing Information Needs Assessment INTERVENTION: We settled on a two-pronged approach: 1) a set of structured interviews with nursing management and key nursing stakeholders; and 2) an information needs assessment survey to gain broader input from a large population of nursing staff. RESULTS/OUTCOMES: Meetings, though difficult to arrange, were useful, collegial and revealing. The online survey generated 264 responses and has yielded excellent data on resources most frequently used and preferred, areas of need, sources desired, and information seeking behaviors. CONCLUSION: Just initiating the process of asking our patrons directly, listening, and engaging them in a dialogue about their needs has helped us build trust, buy-in, and provided more information to validate our decisions about service design. It has also helped us position ourselves in the role of information consultant and adviser, and as their partner in solving information needs and problems. We think this is the kind of relationship that will enhance and support our professional credibility and relevance with our patrons and administrators. We need to revisit and repeat this process regularly and make it clear to our patrons that their concerns and their requirements are important to us, that we are actively listening and soliciting their input, and that these are the elements that determine what services we provide. |
Co-Creating Library/Social Services Partnerships: A Statewide Collaboration |
Michelle Eberle, Consultant, Massachusetts Library System |
Background: The Massachusetts Library System (MLS) surveyed public library directors about their interest to work collaboratively to facilitate library/social work partnerships for services such as social service referral, support for immigrants, and staff training on topics like poverty, diversity, and social justice. Over half of the library directors expressed interest to explore this topic and share their experience. The survey results led the MLS to expand the scope of the project from social work to social services. Description of Project: The MLS recently hosted a variety of workshops to support members including Mental Health First Aid, a Compassion Fatigue webinar, and a Mindfulness for Librarians workshop. MLS held forums throughout the Commonwealth to engage members in co-creating approaches to support the social service needs of our communities. In response to the forums, the MLS is developing a Social Services Resource Guide for Massachusetts Librarians. Results/Reflections: The forums resulted in a partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health. In collaboration with the Department of Mental Health, the MLS coordinated staff trainings at four urban public libraries to provide librarians with de-escalation skills to better serve persons experiencing mental illness and homelessness, and connect library staff with their local Eliot Services Homeless Outreach Coordinator for patron referrals. Four additional libraries are scheduled to host trainings. Conclusion: Massachusetts librarians now have access to training and resources to support patrons in-crisis experiencing homelessness and mental illness. There is an urgent need for this training due to the prevalence of homelessness, mental illness, and substance use disorder. This presents an opportunity for health sciences/public library partnerships. |
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Are Resource Sharing Statistics A Reliable Metric To Determine The Impact Of Journal Cancellation? |
Lindsay Barnett, Collection Development & Scholarly Communication Librarian, Yale University; and Melanie Norton, Head of Access and Delivery Services, Yale University |
Background: The Access and Delivery Services and the Collection Development departments at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library have a cooperative relationship in terms of incorporating statistical ILL data into collection decisions. Budget pressures resulting in journal cancellations have made the need for data-driven decision making more acute. However, a question has arisen as to how accurately ILL statistics for journals reflect scholars’ needs in relation to library collection building, which inspired this project. Objective: The researchers hope to determine if borrowing statistics after the cancellation of a subscribed journal reflected the same level of use compared to when the journal was active in the collection. Methods: The researchers gathered Interlibrary Loan (ILL) borrowing statistics for a control list of titles cancelled in fiscal year 2017/2018 and analyzed them against COUNTER JR1 statistics for the same period of time to determine if interest in a journal remained consistent post-cancellation. Results: This study is ongoing and in the early stages, however; preliminary results indicate that ILL borrowing statistics are significantly lower than anticipated based on documented usage while the journal was part of the collection. These results indicate that potential users are not taking the additional steps to obtain articles through ILL that the library no longer subscribes to. Outcome: Statistical data with no context cannot reliably capture user behavior and librarians should consider the incomplete nature of these metrics when anticipating user need. |
Professional Skills for the Modern Student: How Librarians Developed and Taught a New Elective Course for Medical and Dental Students |
Marissa Gauthier, Research & Instructional Services Librarian, UConn Health Sciences Library; Richard McIntyre, Emerging Technologies Librarian, UConn Health Sciences Library; Jenny Miglus, Research & Instructional Services Librarian, UConn Health Sciences Library; Teri Shiel, Information Desk Head/Research & Instructional Services Librarian, UConn Health Sciences Library; and Wendy Urciuoli, Research & Instructional Services Librarian, UConn Health Sciences Library |
In the Fall of 2017, a group of librarians at the UConn Health Sciences Library were exploring new instruction opportunities and decided to offer an elective on professional skills for first and second year medical and dental students. Our objectives were to become more involved with the Medical School’s curriculum, make more connections with students and faculty, and to represent the library and librarians in a new way. Our planning and ideas became “Marketing You,” a one-week, five-day course that taught students professional social media management strategies, how to write cover letters and resumes, how to design presentations and posters, and public speaking. Each session was two hours long and covered one professional topic with pre-class readings and media, in-class activities, discussion, and real-life examples. Students gave 10 minute presentations on the final day about what they learned over the week and what changes they made to their existing social media accounts, resumes, posters, or presentations. The course was taught in February-March 2018 and received great reviews and feedback from the six students who took the class. All students who took the post-class assessment rated it as being educationally beneficial, found the course content helpful, and enjoyed working with librarians. We benefited from the experience of honing our teaching skills, developing curricular materials, and learning more about the various course topics. We plan to offer Marketing You again in February 2019. |
Organizing Centennial Resources Using Dataverse |
Jessie Casella, Clinical Librarian, Dept. of Veterans Affairs Central Western Massachusetts Healthcare System |
Background: The hospital is preparing to celebrate its centennial and the librarian had been asked to help gather materials. While many items were found, there was not a way to systematically organize and locate the items. Objectives: Many items were collected for the hospital’s centennial including hospital publications, scrapbooks, photos, and newspaper articles. The Librarian sought out how best to organize these items and make them findable for staff as well as members of the local historical societies. Description: After reviewing repository options, the librarian used Harvard’s Dataverse to create a catalog that can be accessed by staff and local historical groups. Hospital published materials as well as newspaper articles related to the opening of the hospital were cataloged in Dataverse. Each item was tagged with metadata. Images and hospital publications were uploaded to be accessible directly from Dataverse. When copyright allowed, newspaper articles were also uploaded directly to Dataverse. Results: The outcome is a searchable resource of the hospital’s centennialinformation that is currently still being added to. Standard naming conventions for newspaper articles proved to be challenging with multiple people scanning microfilm. Having a clear naming convention at the start would have saved time at later stages. Conclusion: This project allowed the librarian to demonstrate to leadership team members that there is more to library services than books and literature searching. The work of the historical research committee is appreciated by the hospital’s leadership team. |
Not Everyone Can Make an In-Person Workshop: An Argument for Online Tutorials |
Paige Scudder, Research and Education Librarian, Dartmouth College |
Many librarians find themselves losing classroom time, squeezing themselves into someone else’s schedule for a quick consultation or struggling with low workshop attendance. The creation of online tutorials provides patrons with an additional entry point towards valuable information they need, helps supplement library workshops/consultations, and combats the high help threshold that has been created by the “just google it” phenomenon. This presentation will discuss the creation of tutorials for implementing online workshops at Stonehill College, a brief review of online tutorial best practices from the literature and other things to consider when moving towards online tutorials. |
Long Night Against Procrastination |
Alyssa Grimshaw, Access Services/Clinical Librarian, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University |
Objectives: To create a fun and productive atmosphere to help students fight procrastination and get work done before finals week. Description of Program/Project: In the week before finals, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library and several other Yale Libraries hosted a LNAP. Students are asked to check their cell phones at the door. The event runs from 7pm-12am. Every 90 minutes, we interrupt the students and serve them snacks and play funny videos, this helps break up the night and helps recharge them to stay productive. Results/Reflections: 75 students attended the Fall 2017 event and 60 students attended the Spring 2018 event. Students wrote out a survey letting us know what projects they were working on. Lessons Learned: Medical campus students were much more serious than our undergrad population, they preferred no funny videos. We also learned the insomniac cookies will make donations for events like this, which allowed us to use our budget on more healthier options. Having student workers available to help with the spring event allowed our evening librarian to offer reference assistance during the event. Conclusion: LNAP was very popular with the students and look for to continuing the event in the upcoming year! We are currently undergoing an extensive renovation, so will need to use an alternative space for this years events. We hope that this does not decrease interest! |
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Building a Library Carpentries Consortium |
Kate Nyhan, Research and Education Librarian, Yale University |
How can libraries remain strong in an ever changing landscape of new software and research skills? Get involved in “The Carpentries” by teaching software code and improving researcher’s data toolkits! The Carpentries (Software, Data and Library) can serve as a core programmatic element for libraries to invest in. The New England Software Carpentry Library Consortium, or NESCLiC for short, has brought together library staff from seven academic libraries: Yale, Harvard, Tufts, Dartmouth, UMass Amherst, Brown, and Mt. Holyoke. NESCLiC shares the costs and benefits that go along with Gold Tier membership, but the Consortium also allows staff from the different areas of academic librarianship and technology, including the digital humanities, statistics, high performance computing, sciences, engineering, medical libraries, and data services, to work together on Carpentries initiatives in their libraries. The group's goal was to create a network of Carpentries instructors in New England, to share instruction, and ultimately, to develop new lesson material. Sharing the membership between the seven libraries allowed NESCLiC members to pilot the Carpentries approach together, rather than separately, and to lower the costs for each institution. All 15 founding NESCLiC members recently completed instructor training in the Winter of 2018 and have been busy teaching carpentry workshops at the following institutions: Yale University, Southern Connecticut State University, Berklee School of Music, Dartmouth College, and are excited to teach at Brown University and Harvard in the fall! Moving forward, NESCLiC plans to extend their membership to other academic institutions and help onboard additional certified instructors. Learn how the instructors are staying involved in this consortium, building their own carpentry skills, giving back to their communities, and collaborating around New England (and beyond)! |
Rural VT School Nurses Health Information Needs and Barriers |
Stacy A. Wein, Copley Hospital; and Betsy Merrill, Northeast Vermont Regional Hospital |
Recently I completed a class in Community Health Engagement with Margo Malachowski, with a project component; this has now morphed into a larger community project inspired by Jennean Batten, Margo Malachowski and Betsy Merrill (NVRH). Through conversations with rural school nurses, it is apparent there is a lack of time to prepare lesson plans and a need of support for reliable medical information. This provides an opportunity to reach out through information discovery training, providing support and services to facilitate meeting nurses’ needs and breaking down identified barriers. Stakeholders in the broadest sense are our community members; rural school nurses often provide a quick children’s consultation. We propose to survey school nurses at their 2019 VSSNA conference, identify their needs and potential barriers to information. Based on survey results, we will match needs with available resources including NNLM and MLA resources and others, develop trainings and structured activities at schools and medical libraries, introducing school nurses to resources. We plan to develop this as a pilot study targeting school nurses of the rural Northeast Kingdom of VT. We will determine sustainability within the NEK and facilitate the VSSNA in their vision, mission and goals (http://www.vssna.org/about-us.html). Funding is grant driven. Anticipated outcomes: 1. Outreach with VT Department of Health Public Health Nurse liaisons for school nurses 2. Include school nurses in ongoing relationship with health science libraries 3. Support school nurses within the scope of their duties 4. Empower school nurses as facilitators for continuing change in their communities: |
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Librarian Support Of Evidence-Based Practice Scholar Program For Hospital Nurses |
Alice Stokes, Library Assistant Professor, Dana Medical Library, University of Vermont |
Background/Introduction: Evidence-based practice (EBP) is key to improved patient outcomes, higher quality care and reduced costs. Many practicing nurses report a lack of competency in evidence-based practice skills. Objectives: The University of Vermont Medical Center implemented an Evidence-Based Practice Nursing Scholar Program in 2016 to expand and support bedside nurses’ knowledge of EBP. The nursing liaison librarian at the Dana Medical Library collaborated with the EBP Scholar Program director to provide education and reference support throughout the 9-month program. Description of Program/Project: Librarians developed and delivered 9 hours of group instruction on formulating clinical questions, literature searching, citation management, abstract writing, and research poster creation. Participants met with the liaison librarian as needed for individual instruction and reference consultations throughout the program. Results/Reflections: Participation in the scholar program has provided the liaison librarian an opportunity for in-depth and longitudinal support to more than 20 nurses in the first three years of the program. These nurses have used their EBP knowledge to improve practice on their home units and continue to contact the liaison librarian for EBP resources. Many participants have presented posters on their projects at a regional Nursing Research Symposium. This program has strengthened ties between the hospital nursing research department and the library. EBP Scholar Program graduates have acted as mentors for peers and as advocates for the library. Conclusion: Working with nurses on a long-term project was satisfying for the librarian and allowed for deeper instruction than typical one-shot education opportunities. On-going participation has increased awareness of the library and the liaison librarian among hospital nursing staff. |
Evidence-Based Medicine Co-Opted By Conflicts Of Interest: An Update To Dr. Goldacre's Book Bad Pharma |
Catherine Moore, Manager of Library Services, Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital |
Presentation of examples of the expanding influence of pharmaceutical companies on the medical literature which has corrupted the notion of Evidence-based medicine: 1) many formerly prestigious print journals now have fake covers on them that are actually drug ads; 2) Medical Education Communication Companies (MECCs) are continuing to produce fake articles; 3) online journals refer to an online site for a list of the authors’ conflicts of interest instead of including them in the pdf of an article; 4) UpToDate continues to have authors with many conflicts of interest and they are no longer in your face; 5) most books still don’t include the authors’ conflicts. |
Using Qualtrics To Create Self-Assessment Driven Research Workshops |
Caitlin Meyer, Research & Education Librarian, Yale University – Cushing/Whitney Medical Library |
Background: The library has a longstanding involvement in the PA program research curriculum, particularly preparing students to write their theses. Librarians had previously met with each student for an hour in December. This was unsustainable and we needed a new, more efficient way to meet user needs. Objectives: * Maintain an excellent level of service in a more sustainable way * Adequately prepare PA students to perform literature searches in different databases, organize the extracted information, and use EndNote. Description: Students took a self-assessment survey to determine what skills they needed to improve and then registered for one of six scheduled workshops. Workshops were tailored to the survey responses of the people in the room and each session was slightly different. Results: * 91% participation in the survey; 78% of students found the format helpful * Librarians spent 12 hours instead of 40, but students left with the same tools Conclusion: The format was successful and will be used again this coming December. We are also experimenting with using a similar format for our Advanced EndNote classes at the library. |