Revolutions Under Way: Capture the Moment

Monday, May 21

Section Program 10:30-12:00

Susan Lessick from University of California-Irvine welcomes the audience to the NPC-sponsored-session, Revolutions Under Way: Capture the Moment. The session will highlight how five speaker groups extended the reach and visibility of their libraries by redefining their services and bringing the library to their users.

The first presentation is In Librarians We Trust: Building a Partnership with Practitioners for the Benefit of Patients. Angela Dixon, Mary Beth Klofas, Marilyn Rosen, and Julia Sollenberger are librarians at the Edward G. Miner Library, University of Rochester. Marilyn Rosen introduces the topic by reading a comment from the parent of a patient who never knew that the hospital had a library, let alone a library that could offer information to patients and their families. Mary Beth Klofas starts the presentation with the statistic that only ¼ of health information seekers consistently check Internet sources and currency (Pew Report, October 2006). Miner Librarians created a task force with a physician, a nurse, a social worker, and an administrator to implement an information prescription. Librarians also created standardized information packets on physician-identified topics. Resources used to create the topics: CLIC on Health, Genetics Home Reference, Medline Plus, Miner Library Patient Education Collection, and NORD. The successful pilot program lasted from June-December 2006 and averaged five requests per month during this time period.

Denise Hersey of Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University was next with her presentation Bringing the Mountain to Mohammed: Having a Librarian in the Operating Room Area. Hersey’s project began when an anesthesiologist in a focus group mentioned off-handedly that he wished their was a librarian in the OR area. So, Hersey jumped at the chance and set up regular “office” hours in the anesthesia workroom in the operating suite. She uses the computer and internet access in the work room and averaged 51 questions (mostly one-on-one) in 2.5 months. Most of the questions involved literature searching, RefWorks & EndNote, and PDA resources.

Hersey’s partnership with the anesthesia department has given her multiple opportunities. She built an information portal for the department and introduced them to Blackboard for their journal club; 19 courses are up and running. Hersey is now one of the gang and has even been asked to write an article for Current Opinion in Anesthesiology about the partnership.

Patrick McCarthy, the director of the Medical School Library at Saint Louis University, is the presenter for the next program, mostly developed by Donghua Tao entitled A New Liaison Outreach Program: Mobile Reference Services to the School of Public Health. The School of Public Health is located at a greater distance from the library than most departments on campus, and a mobile reference service program was implemented to better serve the faculty and students, focusing on literature search and reference instruction, identifying resources with full-text and customized information support. Overall reference transactions went up 28% as a result of this program; School of Public Health reference transactions went up 110%.

Cristina Pope, the director of the library at SUNY Upstate Medical University was next with her presentation entitled Books to Bedside, a unique cooperation between the medical library at SUNY and the Onondaga County Public Library System. As health science libraries generally have little to no general reading material, this cooperation brings general reading material to patients, their families, and clinicians. All public library books can be picked up or dropped off at the medical center library. This partnership has faced unique challenges, including a relatively small book cart that is too big to fit into patient rooms. A new Golisano Children’s Hospital is being built (2009) and will have a family resource center that will coordinate general reading and entertainment for children and their families in the hospital.

The final program for the session is Weill Cornell Medical College Librarian’s Millenials Find Treasure in the Library! helen-ann brown introduced the program and Patricia Mongelia detailed 2006’s medical school orientation. Using the seven core traits of the Millenial generation (special, sheltered, confident, achieving, team oriented, conventional, pressured) the librarians designed a treasure hunt complete with rhyming clues and a treasure map to highlight locations and services in the library. Students divided into teams to complete the hunt; each member of the winning team received a flash drive. The winning team finished in 17 minutes.

Posted for Andrea Griffith

Section Program: Turning Clinical Students into Evidence-Based Clinicians: The Medical Library's Role

This session, presented by the Dental Section in collaboration with EMTS, NAHRS, and the Medical Library Education sections and the Mental Health and Clinical Librarians/EBHC SIGs, explored the efforts of several libraries to integrate EBM instruction by the library into the curricula of their various institutions. The opening speaker was Connie Schardt from Duke University Medical Center where they have a fairly established EBM Curriculum integrated throughout the four years of medical school. Interested readers should also check out their EBM Librarian blog at http://ebmlibrarian.wetpaint.com.

The next presenter was Lauren Maggio who spoke about the experience of Boston University librarians to create an EBM session in a Dental School course. One thing that resonated from this presentation was their efforts of "librarian calibration": they involved the BU Center for Excellence in Teaching to improve the teaching and presentation skills of all the librarians who would be participating in the session. Kathryn Skhal from Hardin Library at the University of Iowa described the components of their "360 Degree Library Services" program including small group sessions, case-based "5-minute challenges," and electronic resource centers. They have plans to add their case vignettes to MedEdPORTAL in the future.
Mary Lou Klem from Pittsburgh has been working with the nursing curriculum, integrating a modular system of case-based online instruction built on a MySQL database. And Irena Bond presented the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy's evaluation of EBM knowledge and skills following instruction. In the closing words of her presentation, she stressed the need for new forms of rapid assessment of EBM and searching instruction learner outcomes.

An assessment instrument mentioned by several of the speakers was the Fresno Test. In addition, a systematic review of instruments to evaluate education in evidence based health care was published in JAMA in September 2006.

The Krafty Librarian's MLA 2007 Blog

For more posts related to MLA events and programs, visit The Krafty MLA 2007 blog brought to you by the Krafty Librarian, Michelle Kraft and several volunteers.

A Great McGovern Lecture

This morning MLA attendees in Philadelphia listened to Arthur Caplan, bioethicist from the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, a man with a list of credentials so long that Laurie Thompson lost her place as she was reading them in an introduction Caplan said he wished "his mother had been here for."

The subject of Caplan's talk was "Peer Review in Science and Medicine: Does It or Can It Work?" In his talk, Caplan offered a description of conflicts of interest and how they affect scientific publishing. He provided several examples to illustrate conflict of interest, the need to disclose conflicts, and the problem of peer review:

* A center who produced a study which found that Walmart's low wages costs California taxpayers $86 million in health care and public assistance -- the center was found to be funded in part (10%) by organized labor.

* Positive results bias resulting from industry funding of scientific research. For more information, the reader is referred to this 2006 JAMA article by Ridker and Torres.

* The Korean cloning scandal , the authors' failure to disclose financial interest in the AtriCure/atrial fibrillation studies, and the manufacture of data by a Norwegian oral cancer researcher.

Possible politically-motivated bias was discussed with regard to an article published in JAMA related to fetal pain. This article was criticized because the authors were found to be pro-choice and/or have ties to abortion clinics. The question was raised: how much information do need to know about authors? How much disclosure is necessary?

His message to librarians was to get involved in and add our voices to this issue. Solutions mainly related to "beefing up" the peer review process (compensation for reviewers, disclosure for authors as well as editors -- see recent JCI article, more statistical analysis of data/need for statistical expertise, publishing of the actual peer reviews online, and anonymity of reviewes for a limited time. He proposes a more transparent process, and promotion of understanding of the scientific processs itself -- that "scientific truth comes through verification and attempts to falsify" findings.

A scintillating question and answer period followed and Caplan encouraged attendees to communicate with him via
email.

CE - Writing for Publication in Peer-Reviewed Journals

This course covered the journal article publication process. Including the rationale, particpants, journals, rights, ethics, submission and review of the article. Also discussed was how to choose a topic, the approach of writing the article and the different types of articles. The actual writing process was also covered. The ways of gathering information, organization of notes, writing of the 1st draft to revision and the abstract.

I learned a lot in this course but won't bore you with all points, only a few... Remember to write your article first, and your abstract last. Short and concise writing is best - always. Only submit your article to one journal at a time. Even though chronological organization sounds easiest, it is the hardest to write. Organize your thoughts (an outline works great!) before putting pen to paper. Use graphics wisely. Watch out for too many prepositional phrases.

And last but not least...

Life is too limited in length... er, Life is Short!

~Angela Anderson
aander@lsuhsc.edu

Dine Arounds - Monk's Cafe, err uh Warsaw Cafe

Hello everyone at MLA! Please take note of the Dine Arounds available at MLA. As a first time MLA attendee it was nice to go out to dinner with fellow librarians. You can sign up for dine arounds near the registration desk. My colleague and I had signed up for the Monk's Cafe dine around last night, but our group arrived late to the restaurant and thus they cancelled our reservation. Nonetheless, we wound up at Warsaw Cafe right down the street. Good food and maybe 15 minutes walking distance of the Marriott.

~Angela Anderson, guest blogger
LSUHSC-Shreveport
http://sassysystems.blogspot.com

Wear Your Dancing Shoes Tuesday Night!

Come one come all to the first ever “MLA mini-ballroom dancing with the stars!” This will be part of the Tuesday night MLA reception.

Clive and Suzanne Phillips, links to their bios below, will spark the festivities with some group dance sessions followed by an exhibition or two. Come see world class professionals first hand, wear your dancin’ shoes and/or your most comfortable shoes or socks.

If you do not have a ticket for this reception, they may be purchased at the MLA Registration. There are options for both adult and child tickets.

And, we will have a photographer!

Here are the links to the bios and to more info about the studios. No doubt there is a local studio near you. Join us as we all learn to dance together…and/or just have fun!

Clive: http://www.dnywestchester.com/CliveBio.htm

Suzanne: http://www.dnywestchester.com/SuzanneBio.htm

Here is the link to Dance New York studio: http://www.dancenewyork.com/stand_alone2.htm

Here is the one for the Westchester studio: http://www.dnywestchester.com/

Even one for those dancers in Iowa: http://www.dnyia.com/

See you there!

Posted for Diana Cunningham