Graduation and All That Jazz

Well probably the high light of this week was our graduation ceremony at the Guildhall in London on Tues. Arrived bright and early at 8.30am to be robed in a very handsome black gown with a gold and burgundy sash (and cap, of course). Most of my friends off my course came (we were all full-timers) and it was a very nice ceremony with full faculty parade, brass band and all. The Library and Information Studies class came right near the end so we had to sit through a lot of names before it was our turn. I had never been to the Guildhall before and thought it was a lovely building, full of history.





Back to the grindstone on Wednesday with my first Systematic Reviews workshop and a Learning Awareness Week stand outside the hospital canteen. I had two doctors sign up for the Systematic Reviews course, but only one turned up. He was very keen though and interestingly he had already done a systematic review recently. He wanted to know more about tracking down articles and making sure he everything written on a particular subject. So I ran through my presentation and we sat down and did a little literature search later on. I'm not sure how useful the course was to him but I did try to encourage him to ask the library to help out with his literature searches! He is coming along to the Reference Management and Finding the Evidence Improvers this week (one after the other, phew!).

Learning Awareness Week went pretty well - the stand outside the canteen on Wednesday attracted a fair amount of attention (lots of freebies!) and we got people to fill in slips of paper with their name, job title and something they wanted to learn or something they had learned this week. We then made these into a long chain, which is now hanging proudly on our journals shelf! On Thursday we had a drop-in session for people to make the most of their Athens accounts but in the end only had 2 takers. Still it was worth doing and all-in-all a good chance to get out and interact with some potential users. The most interesting and rewarding part of the week for me was meeting a patient who came up to our stand and wanted to know more about where to find medical information. We had a really good chat and I pointed her in the direction of NHS Evidence and NHS Choices, both excellent, free sources of information for patients and carers.

Another higgeldy-piggeldy week

This week has all been a bit higgledy-piggeldy with assorted training sessions, meetings and planning for Learning Awareness Week (with the very scary-sounding acronym of LAW) which runs all next week.

Monday started well with a slot on the staff induction, thanks to our friends in high places. My inductees weren't the keenest I've ever seen but two full days of IT, clinical governance, fire safety awareness and child protection is enough to put anyone off. Tuesday was my second critical appraisal: quantitative research course, which I was really nervous about as I'm still not convinced I entirely understand confidence intervals, p-values and odds-ratio diagrams enough to explain them to others by my little group of three were lovely and I felt the session was very positive.

Wednesday was spent mostly in town at a meeting at the Deanery to discuss a user needs analysis survey we are carrying out. I felt slightly intimidated being a lowly information skills trainer with barely a year's experience among the great and good of the London Deanery e-Kat team but they were all very nice and the meeting was constructive. We are using the JISC Strategic Content Alliance's materials to run the survey and came up with some good questions to ask our users.

Thursday was a 'bitty' day - preparing materials for my Systematic Reviews course next week, getting some ideas of activities for LAW and general library bits and bobs. And today was just mad. I think I mentioned in a previous blog about having to recruit volunteers to carry out the training session I planned for my FILE course. Well I managed to get 4 volunteers using the bribe of coffee and donuts but alas owing to various clinical commitments and suchlike they couldn't come all at once. So I had three dropping in through various times of the day which was all a bit higgeldy-piggeldy in terms of finding a free computer to train on, making sure I had all my various bits and pieces and doing it all in 20 mins!

But, it's all done now so I just need to get one feedback form back from one trainee then I can write it up, send it off and be finally done with FILE! Next week: systematic review course, MA graduation and adventures with LAW....

Library for Sale!

I'm afraid it's been a few weeks since my last post. Has been a bit of a rough few weeks really, mostly to do with job uncertainty and general fed-upness but I won't go into details as it's all a bit boring but it has made me reflect on the question of why are libraries, (or the concept of 'the library') so darn difficult to 'sell'?

It is Adult Learners Week / Knowledge Awareness next week so of course we in the Healthcare Library are keen to get involved to promote our role in encouraging learning. But it has been beset with difficulties - even getting an all staff email out to advertise our activities has been denied and we have been relegated to the fourth or fifth piece down in the staff weekly bulletin. I sent my training courses dates out three weeks ago and still only have a few takers. We are still fighting to get a slot on the bi-monthly staff induction as well and although there has been a breakthrough at our site owing to good contacts, my manager is getting nowhere with the other site where he works two days a week. And just sometimes it feels no matter how much you provide, how well you deliver a service the users just want more, more, more....

Okay so I realise I am moaning on a bit but just what is it about libraries that is so hard to sell to our users? Is it the stuffy old Victorian image that still lurks around us wraithlike, despite our Twitter accounts, e-journals and the ability to convert your essay from single to double-spacing in seconds? Do our users harken back to bad run-ins with libraries from childhood - the scary librarian shhhhing them into oblivion? Or is going to the library an intimidating experience, reminding them of all the things they don't know? The classic excuse (especially for our busy doctors and nurses) is that there isn't enough time to go to the library. But I'm not sold on that one. Our job is to give the clinicians more time - we can run literature searches for them, track down the articles they need, point them in the right direction to find a piece of information to save them trawling through millions of Google results.

Free, high-quality information, when and where you need it. What is so hard to sell about that? And yet I'm starting to wonder maybe that's where the problem lies. You don't need to sell something that is free.

Now all of us working in libraries know our services aren't free - they cost a lot in terms of work, dedication and time as well as money. But our users might not always see that. They are getting something that costs them nothing. And although everyone likes a bargain, people tend to devalue things that don't cost them anything - it's just human nature.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this really - it's just a kernel of an idea forming in my head and I wanted to get it down before I forgot it. I'm by no means suggesting we should start charging for library services or make our users feel guilty by reminding them how much their service costs every time they come to the library desk but I think it may provide some kind of hint or clue into promoting and marketing our services. Defintely something to ponder on and may well become a running thread throughout my blog in future....

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....

Monday Morning Post...

This post comes a bit later than usual this week - it has been a very busy one with lots of training courses, my final FILE session and two late nights. I didn't even want to think about libraries this weekend!

The highlight of the week definitely had to be my session with the music therapists on Thursday. It's always a bit nerve-racking giving a presentation in someone else's workplace as you're never sure of the set-up. I was warned ahead of time about them not having Powerpoint 2007 so had to adjust the presentation slightly. Luckily 'Supercomputer' has the old versions of Office loaded on it so it's very easy to test compatibility. Looking at my presentation in old Powerpoint made me recoil in horror - the new version is so much more flexible and easy to use! In any case everything went very smoothly and the therapists were an excellent audience - interested, knowledgeable and very excited about all the resources available to them! I got a lovely email from the head of the department the next day and she even copied the Associate Director of Child Health and Development in!

The final FILE presentation on Wednesday went pretty well although I definitely underestimated how much I could do in 20 mins. My next challenge is to find 3 or 4 willing volunteers to do the presentation to again so I can write up my final report by 18th May....

My strict statistics regime for keeping record of training is going well so far and I'm getting better at the screening questions before the start of a training session. This week I have Critical Appraisal: Qualitative on Tuesday and on Wednesday I have a one-to-one on finding and evaluating good quality websites. Speaking of which it is nearly 9.30 so I had better head off and get to work!

Is spring finally here...?

After a rather dull Easter weekend and greyish start to the week it feels like spring may finally have arrived and with it (hopefully) comes feelings of fresh beginnings and new starts. I'm not sure how much spring fever has infiltrated my work this week so far but I had a good meeting with my counterpart in one of the other three site libraries of the Trust this week about keeping records of the work we do. As a result I now have a shiny Excel spreadsheet with separate worksheets for one-to-one sessions, group sessions, training or meetings I have attended and best of all...Athens stats. I have not been very good thus far about keeping full records on my training and have come to regret it when my manager comes demanding statistics, statistics, statistics because the local primary care organisation wants to cut funding or the Trust wants to know it's getting it's money's worth from the library services....If nothing else it helps me remember what the heck I've done the last few months as try as I might I just cannot recall people's names, job titles or what I trained them on even just a few days later. Must be old age setting in...
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This week's 'Wednesday Workshop' was on electronic care pathways as a number of products have sprung up in recent years and nobody seems to know about them! The two I concentrate on in this course are CKS (mainly primary care pathways) and Map of Medicine (for primary and secondary care). I can no means pretend to be a clinician but if I were I would find these programs rather marvellous as they walk you through, step-by-step each part of the patient journey from initial assessment to diagnosis, treatment and follow-up. Certainly any time I've trained on CKS or MoM people have found them very useful. I need to think of ways to "sell" this course that will get people interested. Any ideas, please send them on!
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Had a rather lovely one-to-one session with a local dentist this week as well. It was the first time I have done a guided search session on a medical history topic and the results were quite interesting! The dentist is currently building up a document collection on 'biomechanical trauma' in dentistry and is very interested in all things libraries. I have been charged with the tasks of finding the origin of ISSNs and who produces DOIs and instead of hitting Google I might just go through my library school notes and see what I can find.
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Another busy one next week with a 'Staying Up-to-Date' group session on Monday, my final FILE presentation on Wednesday and (one I'm really looking forward to!) an information searching session with a group of music therapists on Thursday!

Managing References and Other Things...

Well this week saw the launch of my new information skills workshop 'Managing Your References', which was very well attended and much lively discussion was generated. Who would have thought managing references would be so controversial? But they are, especially when university degrees are on the line! The workshop started out with thinking about why we might want to manage references in the first place and what we might want to use references for, then moved on to different styles of referencing and managing. It was the referencing styles that seemed to get everybody's goat and where there were the most questions. And I have to ask myself really - just why are there so many styles of referencing? Harvard, Vancouver, Chicago, Turabian, APA, MLA, ACS....the list goes on and on and on. And it's so difficult to get a definitive answer about any of them. My basic advice to my trainees was to find out what style your university or the journal you are writing for prefers and use that, otherwise Harvard is a safe bet. But whatever style you choose or is chosen for you, stick to that one and that one alone.
I then talked a bit about reference management software, which none of my trainees had used before. I had hoped we would have got a subscription to RefWorks before this workshop took place but that seems a dim and distant hope now in our world of NHS budget cuts. We have Reference Manager on all of our library PCs but I find the program is clunky and unwieldly to use. Plus if you don't have it loaded on your own machine you can't use it at home! So for the practical session I got the trainees to register for CiteULike, a lovely little online programme that uploads RIS files, allows manual, URL, ISBN and DOI entries, creates a neat bibliography in a range of different styles and basically does most of the other things a reference management program should do quickly and easily online wherever and whenever you want. Plus there is nothing to download and it's free!
The first task I had set for the trainees (besides setting up a CiteULike account) was to enter a reference manually. I had assumed this would be quite an easy task to ease the trainees into using the site but was surprised how flumoxed they were by entering things like author, title and year into separate fields. I suppose as a librarian I am used to such things from cataloguing books and registering members and it was a sharp lesson on the importance of controlled fields - making sure you have all the fields entered uniformly. Importing references with an ISBN, DOI or URL or even better as an RIS file makes it all so much easier as the hard work has already been done by the database indexers! (Thanks guys....)
The workshop seemed to go down quite well though and it was an interesting topic to present.
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Preparation for that took up the first half of my week and the rest of it was spent getting geared up for the next few weeks which are full of training sessions, inductions and meetings. Looking at my schedule on Wednesday afternoon made me wonder if I might have some sort of mental health death wish. I am hoping to get the majority of my FILE presentation done this weekend so I can concentrate my efforts on the staff training sessions but the next few weeks are definitely going to be hairy....
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And a bit of good news this week was that we finally got the date for library school graduation! May 18th shall see me walking down the gilded aisle at London's Guildhall in my cap and gown to mark the end of a VERY long year!