Webinar: Advocacy & Strategic Planning for the Health Care Library

Michele Matucheski: I caught the following webinar this week, and wanted to share it with anyone interested.  The speakers go over some highlights from the forthcoming newly revised Hospital Librarian Standards from the Medical Library Association (MLA) and the newly revised Advocacy Tool Kit, neither of which has been published / released just yet.  Something to look forward to!

Webinar: Advocacy and Strategic Planning for the Healthcare Library

from May 24, 2022

Librarians play a crucial role in healthcare organizations. Your work impacts the entire hospital community, bridging the gap between information, data and practice. Amongst other services, you support your clinicians with evidence-based research so that patients receive the best possible care. Ensuring that the wider healthcare community is aware of your value is critical to receiving ongoing resources and support for your medical library. In this webinar, join leading librarian speakers from the healthcare community as they share advocacy initiatives at their own libraries and outline how they're evolving in response to current issues to better support their users.

Watch Recording

Featuring speakers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Valley Children's Healthcare, we'll cover important topics such as: Strategic planning post covid The impact of the library on patient care The importance of virtual and physical library support How to advocate for your healthcare library

Speakers Donna Gibson, MLS Director of Library Services, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Donna Gibson is the Director, Library Services for Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center and has been in this role since August 2009. She joined MSK in 2004 as Associate Director, User Services. Prior to this, she worked at Bristol-Myers Squibb in various roles, managing research libraries and information centers. Brian L. Baker, MLS, JD Library Services Program Manager & Literacy Program Coordinator, Valley Children's Healthcare Brian Baker started his library career as Director of the Fairfax Public Law Library in 1989. Following this, Brian had a 22-year career as a Law Librarian, including 9+ years as Director of the Law Library at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law. Brian also worked as a Prison Librarian for 18 months. He has now been working as a Hospital Librarian for over seven years.

Information Literacy Basics

 Well, if you read today's email notifying you there were new WHSLA blog posts, you know that I'm FINALLY about to graduate with my MLIS!!!  I meant to share this sooner, but I've still been sort of frazzled this week after wrapping up all my final projects.  This was one of them!  I had a lot of fun making this live action video for my Information Technologies class.  My goal was to show that you don't have to have specialized equipment to create an educational video.  I filmed this on my cell phone and edited it with an app called InShot.

Have You Heard of Seamless Access?

 

One of the most useful sessions I saw at the virtual MLA 22 Conference this month was a paper about SeamlessAccess.org:  

We're all in this together: So SeamlessAccess is a Thing, and the Browser is Changing, What Do I need to Do or Know?   by Linda van Keuren and Michelle Volesko Brewer.

Disruptions in access (ie, not being able to get to a fulltext article we've paid for, or being locked out of a subscription database) happen for a variety of reasons.  We've all seen these or similar access troubles in our own libraries.   It is one of the banes of Librarianship in this virtual age.

SeamlessAccess.org keeps tabs on the changing landscape of authentication as IPs become one of the more rare and problematic forms of authentication.  SeamlessAccess grew out of RA21 that first appeared in 2016, concluding that "federated authentication held the most promise for providing a robust, scalable solution for remote access to scholarly content."   

This is something I need to stay on top of (and I imagine many of you do, too!) as our IT makes changes where IP authentication will be harder and harder to maintain as the primary means to access our licensed library resources.   RA21 and SeamlessAccess make more sense to me than setting up proxy servers and making people keep track of yet another username and password.  We're already using it to sign into some products and services when they tap into ActiveDirectory, so it should be somewhat familiar to our IT Depts.

How it works:

1. Find a resource or service provided by your institution.
2. Click the "Access through your institution" button.  Sign in with your institutional ID.
3. You're in! Use the button to access more resources, privacy intact.

The speakers also brought up a new wrinkle that I had not previously considered would be an issue for us: The fact that internet browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge and others) will soon be making updates to improve privacy and security where they clamp down on the rampant use of cookies.  Unfortunately, they won't be able to distinguish between good cookies that help foster seamless access to library resources and the more nefarious cookies that want to track users for targeted advertising purposes.   

If you want to know more, check out the links below:

• About SeamlessAccess

The Learning Center at Seamless Access.org includes the following resources:

• FAQ on Browser Privacy Changes and Library Resource Access  - SeamlessAccess
• Web Browsers, Privacy, and Federated Identity - Seamless Access Blog

    Watch videos on:

• Access Apocalypse: Be Prepared for Anything
• How Federated Authentication Works
• Privacy, Attributes, and Why They're Important
• The Problem with IP Authentication

Did I mention it's FREE?  

I suspect products and services like LibLynx and Nomad use seamless access vs setting up expensive proxy servers, while OpenAthens and EZProxy use the same technology for authentication.   Those services can provide value-added user stats and remote access, which are not free.

What has been your experience with providing seamless access (Single Singon) for your library users and researchers?  Have you found a solution that works?  

Are You Missing the Nursing Journals Subset in PubMed? Here's the workaround ...

Last fall, PubMed eliminated the beloved Nursing Journals subset / filter, among others.  Read the announcement from the NLM Technical Bulletin.

For those of us who frequently search the nursing literature, this was a handy filter that is sorely missed in PubMed.  NLM did offer a workaround, by recommending that individuals save the following search strategy in MyNCBI and pull it up when needed.

Let us know if you've found something that works better ...  

Note: I tried to set this up as a custom filter in MyNCBI (hoping it would show up with my other frequently used filters) and be a 1-click solution, but the strategy is too long to work that way and is therefore ignored.  Better as a saved search strategy.

 

Emotions & Disease

 

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) recently redesigned the online presentation of its exhibition titled "Emotions & Disease." Held in the Library’s building in Bethesda, MD, 25 years ago, the exhibition explored the intersection of the mind & body. 

Circulating Now (from the Historical Collections of NLM) interviewed Esther Sternberg, MD, exhibition director, and Ted Brown, PhD, guest curator, about their work on the original exhibition and the continued relevancy of its message today.   Read more ...

Explore the online presentation of its exhibition Emotions and Disease and view the catalog of the original physical exhibition in NLM Digital Collections.

Hospital Postcards from The American Hospital Association

The former Kuks Hospital in the Czech Republic. Undated postcard.

Circulating Now (from the historical collections of The National Library of Medicine) recently featured an article by Ginny Roth about hospital postcards.  I know I have several older postcards from Mercy Medical Center in Oshkosh and St Elizabeth Hospital in Appleton in our local archival collections.  I wonder if they are part of this new collection?

This National Postcard Week, celebrated May 1-7 2022, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is pleased to announce its recent acquisition of a second collection of hospital postcards. Donated by the American Hospital Association (AHA), the collection builds on a previous acquisition donated by W. Bruce Fye and adds to the wealth of the Library’s visual material documenting the history of hospitals.

This collection consists of over 2,500 postcards and provides a visual record of primarily U.S. hospitals, sanitoriums, and other related buildings. In addition to the United States, 3 other countries are represented, Canada, the Czech Republic, and England. Prior to coming to NLM, the collection was part of the Center for Hospital and Healthcare Administration History, sponsored jointly by the AHA and American College of Healthcare Executives.    Read more ...