A busy October

It has been a very busy few weeks here in the Healthcare Library and I thought I would take a bit of time to reflect on a few things that have happened in the past weeks. My colleague and I did a session at another site hospital last week on critical appraisal, covering both quantitative and qualitative research (she did quan, I did qual) and it went really well! All the participants turned up, which is very unusual, and there was a good mix of doctors, nurses and allied health professionals.

I piloted an exercise found on the ever helpful CATNiP wiki called the “Qualitytative Street exercise” which basically used Quality Street chocolates to explain some of the concepts of qualitative research. Basically everyone had to choose their favourite, eat it then describe what they liked about the chocolate. These terms were written up on the whiteboard and then we put them into categories such as ‘taste’, ‘texture’ or ‘appearance’. We then had a discussion on such issues as focus group recruitment (e.g. nobody asked what the study was about before agreeing to participate!), why people might choose not to take part, how the data were “collected”, data saturation, how the data were analysed and the role of the researcher (how might their answers have differed if they knew I was employed by Nestle...or Cadbury’s?!) We got very positive feedback on the session overall and a few people mentioned they found the qualitative session particularly useful as they do not encounter much in their day-to-day work. I personally found listening to the quantitative session very helpful as it gave me ideas for what to add to my training course.

Our journal survey finished at the beginning of October but between one thing and another I didn’t get a chance to look through the results properly until Friday, when I had to send the results to my manager and the manager on our other site for a meeting on Tuesday about journal selection for the coming year. We had 151 responses in the end and it was very interesting going through the results. We received a lot of useful suggestions for how we could improve the service as well as a huge list of recommended journal titles. I do not envy the managers trying to decide which ones to take and which ones to discard! One very positive result was seeing how well the NHS resources are used – the majority of respondents said they used library.nhs.uk, HILO or MyAthens to access e-journals. The next favourite access point is Google which is not surprising really. Another interesting result was that only half of the respondents prefer electronic access to journals over print. 18% prefer print and 27% have no preference. The respondents seemed fairly satisfied with the provision of e-journals and print journals, ease of access and promotion and the top titles read at the Trust are BMJ, New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Nursing Standard, British Journal of Midwifery and Stroke. Some of the suggestions for improvement were a bit outrageous, such as having print copies of all journals at all three sites (exactly what we are trying to avoid!) and “electronic access via British Library services” (which if left to the devices of our users would wipe out our entire budget in a week) but others were very helpful such as targeted email services for specific subjects and coming to speak at team meetings and inductions. The survey certainly identified areas where further training is needed.

Finally I have been working away on my very first book review! An email went round a few weeks ago asking for volunteers to review a couple of books for the HLG newsletter. My manager forwarded it on to me and one of the books “Technology Training in Libraries” caught my attention so I got in touch with the person offering and volunteered to do the review. The book is part of the Facet ‘Tech Set’ series and was a very interesting read. I enjoyed the experience of writing up about it and will put the link to my review when it is published in the newsletter, hopefully next month.

I have been very busy with one-to-one sessions, especially as degree courses are starting up again. I had an Orthopaedics registrar in the other morning who wanted a very comprehensive literature search for his dissertation and I was grateful once again that a Masters degree is required for becoming a qualified librarian as the first thing he asked was whether I had experience in carrying out research. If I hadn’t done a Masters and gone through the experience of carrying out my research project I probably would have felt quite intimidated but as it was I could answer in the affirmative and he seemed quite impressed that a postgrad qualification was required for being a librarian!

Ash clouds and critical appraisal

Well there was a bit of drama in the Healthcare Library this week when my manager was caught up in the ash cloud mayhem and ended up being stuck in South Africa for over a week when he was only supposed to be there for 5 days. I think he's getting a flight out tomorrow and should be back with us on Tuesday, a week later than expected. To make things even harder on himself he's planning on flying out again on Friday, this time to Bulgaria! I bet you never thought librarians had such a jet-setting lifestyle....

I on the other hand had my feet firmly on the ground this week and had two group training sessions - one on Finding High Quality Websites (thinking I need a more catchy title...) and Critical Appraisal: Qualitative. The websites session ended up being a one-to-one as I didn't get many takers but there were four at the Critical Appraisal. I'd already run one of these back in early March so was feeling fairly confident but this one didn't go as well. The group was very quiet and then at some point one of attendees suddenly burst out complaining how qualitative research was all rubbish anyway as it was really down to personal opinion etc etc and although I tried very hard to steer it all back to the critical appraisal checklist it really never got back on track. At the beginning of every critical appraisal session I ask everyone how they would rate the article before appraising it and give them a choice of happy face, middling face and sad face. Weirdly the same guy who complained about qual research gave the article a middling face at the beginning and a happy face at the end! Maybe he was feeling bad about giving me such a hard time but it just made me even more confused...

Quite a few one-to-ones this week and one exciting outcome from one was the potential of being asked along to the Microbiology journal club to give a little talk on critical appraisal. I have also been trying to put together my dates for group training for the next 3 months - always very frustrating as I feel I'm picking dates and times out of the air and have no idea whether they fit in with people's work schedules. We also had a very inspiring talk on Map of Medicine at the London trainer's (CLIST) meeting on Thursday so am planning on sending out an email tomorrow encouraging people in the trust to give it a go.

Also coming up this week - another critical appraisal session, quantitative this time. Which I'm dreading even more now considering what happened this week. I also may be spending a bit of time out on the front desk as our library assistant is on holiday and I really must get my new dates out and do a bit of publicity this week. And apparently the D-Day for HLG conference bursaries is on Thursday so I will have my fingers and toes crossed for that. Oh and I really need to start thinking about thr the article I have been asked to write on Twitter for the Libraries for Nursing bulletin as copy must be in by mid-May! Looks like it's gonna be another busy one....