Medical Library Education Section’s New Voices in the Air: Hearing the Next Generation of Medical Librarians

May 21, Section Programs 3:00-4:30

Joanne Gard Marshall, Past MLA President and professor at the School of Information and Library Sciences at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, introduces the topic and the first speaker, Elizabeth La Rue from the University of Pittsburgh, School of Nursing. Interestingly, La Rue has a PhD in Library Science but her faculty appointment is with her institution’s School of Nursing. The title of her program is A Study on the Adoption of a Web Page Content Assessment Tool: SPAT. SPAT is a pneumonic, easy-to-use tool to use in analyzing the validity and reliability of web sites and resources.

S=site
P=publisher
A=audience
T=timeliness

Does the tool work? That answer to that question gave the presenter her dissertation topic and after studying a group of CDE’s (certified diabetes educators), the author found that SPAT has made a positive impact on the way her population group reviews Web-based information.

The next presenter is Marty J. O’Neill of the Health Informatics Program at the University of North Texas, Denton with his presentation entitled: Technical Concerns of Using Extended Character Sets in Creating Bilingual Chinese/English Health Information Pathfinders. O’Neill detailed the technical issues associated with creating websites (in this particular case, library pathfinders in Chinese), particularly the issues associated with using languages that have extended character sets. After much study, O’Neill found that numerical character references (NCRs) were chosen to represent the Chinese characters.

The final presenter in the session in Mellanye Lackey with her presentation, An analysis of evaluation activities planned in NN/LM outreach subcontracts 2001-2006. Lackey is an NLM 2nd year fellow, spending the year at UNC-Chapel Hill Health Sciences Library. She discusses the importance of evaluation, how evaluation shows a project’s worth in quantitative and measurable terms, but also discusses the barriers to successful evaluation, including lack of time, money and knowledge about evaluation projects. Lackey analyzed 150 records in the NLM’s database of outreach projects, particularly which evaluation methods were used in outreach efforts.

Posted for Andrea Griffith