Having just complained last week that it was a bit quiet it has suddenly gone busy again here in the Healthcare Library. Staff inductions have started up again and we also had a new intake of student doctors which can only mean library tours and presentations for all. We are also running a journal survey across all three sites and have had over 100 responses so far – much better than expected. I spent much time the week before last played about with our LMS so we could send out an email to all our users (who have email addresses). This will serve a dual purpose: catching people who are library members but not Athens users and seeing just how comprehensive (or not) our records are on the LMS. It will also test the capabilities of the LMS itself which is quite good at ingesting data but not so admirable at spitting it out again. Spent a while with the Senior Library Assistant experimenting and we eventually got it to run a report as a text document which I opened in Access, refined some of the data, saved as a text document again then opened in Word to insert the required semicolons needed for Outlook.
Of course when I sent my marvellous instructions to the Library Manager at our other site he sent back an email with a much easier way but the nice thing about my way is that we get all the bounced back emails, which the poor Library Assistant (and myself!) spent a few hours amending last week. It gave us a chance to clear out some old records as well so I think the experiment worked quite well...
I have attended a few meetings and training sessions the last few weeks including a CLIST meeting, a clinical governance training session (which I will talk about in a separate blog post) and the R&D Committee meeting. CLIST, held at the Bloomsbury Healthcare Library, is always a good chance to catch up with what has been going on with the other information skills trainers in London and my counterpart at another site library met afterwards to plan our critical appraisal session in October. We sent the communication out last week and already have about 8 takers! I have also recently joined the Trust R&D Committee and attended my first meeting last Friday where new proposals for research in the Trust were heard and matters around research were discussed. I found it very interesting, informative and highly professional, even though I didn’t understand everything discussed it gave me a sense of how the library could get involved in research at the Trust.
And finally, we have been in the news again – even hitting the BBC headlines last week! I have a feeling it's going to be a tough winter...
- Patients ‘at grave risk’ from poorly trained doctors (Independent on Sunday, 19 Sep 2010)
- Sidcup hospital to close A&E and maternity over the winter (BBC News, 22 Sep 2010)
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