WHSLA Members in good standing will be invited to vote on four open 2021 Board positions:
All members in good standing will receive an email the week of November 30 with their invitation to vote.
Thank you to the following WHSLA members for volunteering to run as candidates!
This surgeon mom has been improving her kids' fine motor skills using some extremely detailed Playdoh models. Fair warning, despite being made of Playdoh, it's still pretty gross.
Evaluating Information During Covid-19: Preprints, Retractions, Rumors, and more ...
Presented by Erica Brody and Hillary Miller, Librarians at Virginia Commonwealth University. This program was sponsored by he NNLM. Learn more and register to get MLA credit.
Description: In the midst of a global pandemic, every person has to balance the “need for speed” with the risks of moving too fast. Healthcare providers seek reliable information about treatments while making immediate life-or-death decisions. Researchers investigate biological mechanisms and interventions to combat COVID-19 and share their findings as quickly and responsibly as possible. And each of us wades through the flood of headlines and rumors for answers that will keep us safe. Looking at the case of hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19, we will explore the risks and rewards of different forms of information, from published articles to tweets.
Learning Objectives:
This was one of the BEST 1-hour webinars I've seen in a long time. Erica Brody and Hillary Miller addressed many of the questions I've been wrestling with this year as a health science librarian during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
Using the example of Hydroxychloroquine, Brody & Miller trace the timeline of when it first emerged as a possible treatment for Covid-19 in Jan - Feb 2020, to the point where people started demanding it from their health care providers, despite any real or conclusive evidence that it worked.
This whole evolving story of Hydroxychloroquine had me baffled as it was happening -- The research I had done clearly discounted it as a treatment for Covid, yet friends on Facebook and social media insisted that it worked, that "scientists were hiding the truth."
Brody and Miller put Preprints and Preprint servers in their rightful place in the hierarchy of evidence.
Further, they offer Tools & Tips for Navigating an Infodemic:
Tools:
Tips:
Carrie Papa-Schold was a recipient of one of the two WHSLA 2020 Professional Development Awards. Below, she tells us about her experience at a pre-COVID conference.
===============================
Thank you WHSLA for the grant towards attending the FYE (First Year Experience) Conference in Washington, D.C. on February 21 – 24, 2020. (Yes, just before Covid hit the US.)
In my current job at George Williams College (GWC) in
Williams Bay, WI, I am the Assistant Director of Academic Support and
Disability Services. I also help out
with the library as the “campus librarian”.
GWC is part of Aurora University in Aurora, Illinois where the Phillips
Library Director manages of all of the contracts through CARLi. We have a small library (located at one end
of a building on two floors with two fireplaces, 8 computers, three study
tables and seating for an additional 8 more students) that is staffed mostly by
student workers. https://gwc.aurora.edu/academics/library/index.html
In my role, in academic support, I am an academic coach
working with students who are underprepared for college. Most are from low income and first generation
families. The work with the freshmen class is what brought me and my supervisor
to the FYE Conference. The purpose of
the conference is to bring together educators and administrators to teach and
learn about enhancing the first year student experience. I was thrilled to find that about a dozen of
the presentations and poster sessions were on Information Literacy. I was fortunate to attend 3 of them.
Poster sessions (The
following was the one I was most interested in seeing and talking with the
presenter)
Information Literacy Misconception of Students in First-Year Experience
Courses. Michelle Keba. Palm Beach Atlantic University.
This poster was of a study (not yet published) done by
Michell Keba at her institution using the methods from the research article Predictable Information Literacy
Misconception of First-year College Students (Hinchcliffe, Rand, &
Collier, 2018). The original study was
designed to determine if students either lacked knowledge versus misperceived
their information literacy skills using the “misconception inventory”. By identifying common misconceptions,
potential learning outcomes were developed to guide information literacy
instruction. The misconceptions identified
in the Hinchcliffe et al. (2018) article are:
·
Library
o
First year students believe they are supposed to
do their research without assistance
o
First year students perceive the library as only
a place to get books or to study
o
First year students believe that all library
sources and discovery tools are credible
·
Information Access
o
First year students believe that freely
available Internet resources are sufficient for academic work
o
First year students think Google is a sufficient
search tool
o
First year students believe that accessibility
is an indicator of quality
·
Research Process
o
First year students believe that research is a
linear, uni-directional process
o
First year students think that every question
has a single answer
·
Information Literacy
o
First year students believe that they are
information literate
Hinchliffe,
L., Rand, A., & Collier, J. (2018). Predictable Information Literacy
Misconceptions of First-Year College Students. Communications in Information
Literacy, 12(1), 4–18. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1183245
The New Library Session: Forget the Library - Focus on Information. Elizabeth Johns, Kristen Shonborn,
Kristen Welzenbach. Goucher
College. Tinyurl.com/fye20-goucher
Faculty request librarians to teach students about the
library and how to use it. What students
need is how to identify appropriate information sources from the internet to
library databases. This is a shift to
teaching students about information literacy to address the information era
abundant with credible and non-credible information.
Developing Interdepartmental Information Literacy Solutions: The First
Year Experience in the Misinformation Era. Kate Otto, David Lemmons,
& Sherry Larson-Rhodes. Marquette University.
Information is easily accessible through the library,
internet, and social media to name a few.
Students need to learn the value of good information versus bad. Information literacy efforts help to educate
students on how to locate, evaluate, and effectively/ethically use the
information they are accessing regardless where they find the information. Librarians play key role in leading
information literacy efforts.
There are three types of “information”.
1.
Misinformation – unintentional
2.
Disinformation – intentional, false, shared to
cause harm
3.
Mal-information – intentional, true, and harmful
This is a life-skill to be used throughout college and
career.
Education on information literacy can be achieved through
collaborative efforts on campus. The
first step is to define “information literacy” to ensure understanding between
faculty and staff. The Association of
College & Research Libraries Association (ACRL is a section of the American
Library Association) offers guidelines and a framework for information literacy
in higher education that can be used to guide initiatives in the college setting.
Outcomes from
conference attendance:
·
Gathering information on where information
literacy is being taught on campus to identify gaps in student learning
regarding information literacy
·
Created a module on information literacy that
has been incorporated into academic coaching
·
Developing a module for the senior seminar class
on how to effectively locate information post college when they no longer have
access to the subscription databases.
Respectfully submitted by:
Carrie Papa-Schold, MLIS
papaschold at gmail dot com
The Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) Book Club
If you are looking for some interesting non-pandemic reading over the holidays, this hour with the author could very well connect you with your next read!
Dr. Sullivan's main points for writing the book are as follows:
Visit The NNLM Reading Club for more info including the following:
Did you know NNLM has their own YouTube channel? Here you can find recordings from regional webinars and more.
I don't know about you, but I've got a bad case of Infodemic Fatigue, better known as Covid Mis/Disinformation Fatigue. When will this firehose of rubbish abate? Is this how Health Science Librarians burnout?
Hey WHSLA,
As many of you know, I'm currently in my second year of grad school so I can be a librarian when I grow up. Overall, it's been a good semester (only five weeks left!). But every now and then, usually when I'm faced with a major project, I'm hit with a wave of crippling self-doubt. You've all been through grad school. That's normal, right?
This week I finished up a project where I had to evaluate a proposed contract for e-resources and decide if it was a fair agreement for my imaginary library. Yikes. The next time someone asks me why you need a master's degree to be a librarian, I'm going to ask them how much they know about contract law. That probably could have been a class all on its own. An extremely boring class.
What was grad school like for you? Any great memories? Horror stories? Feel free to share them in the comments or email me at annie dot lipski at aah dot org and I'll add your experiences to a future blog post.
 |
| From https://imgur.com/gallery/lMNtxnO |
"Stories are how we make sense of the world."
Dr. Abraham Verghese wrote one of my all-time favorite novels: Cutting for Stone. Not only is Dr. Verghese a novelist, but also a practicing physician and Stanford Professor of Medicine.
Here he talks with Dr Zubin Damania (aka ZDoggMD) about The Power of Story and the current pandemic, and why it matters.
Do yourself a favor and recharge with this wonderful hour of hopeful, inspiring, thoughtful conversation about how pandemics transform society. You won't regret it!
The National Library of Medicine recently launched their Dream Anatomy Exhibit.
The interior of our bodies is hidden to us. What happens beneath the skin is mysterious, fearful, amazing. In antiquity, the body's internal structure was the subject of speculation, fantasy and some study, but there were few efforts to represent it in pictures. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century ad the cascade of print technologies that followed helped to inspire a new spectacular science of anatomy, and new spectacular visions of the body. Anatomical imagery proliferated, detailed and informative but also whimsical, surreal, beautiful, and grotesque -- a dream anatomy that reveals as much about the outer world as it does the inner self.
From Jennifer Schram, Mayo Clinic Libraries
=====================
I received a Professional Development Award for 2020 and had
planned on using it to attend MLA 2020 in May in Portland, OR. Registration and airfare had been paid when
things changed because this is 2020 and a pandemic hit. MLA moved the in-person meeting to August but
realized over the summer that an in-person meeting was not going to be possible
this year. MLA and the National Planning
Committee quickly switched gears and developed a virtual conference for the meeting
in August. My registration for the
in-person conference was exchanged for the vConference and CE Passport.
The conference actually opened in July with the opening
session and some different social events over the next few weeks. Paper and paper presentations were
pre-recorded and available on demand. In
the middle of August, the live sessions of the conference were held. These sessions included the vendor sessions
and virtual exhibit hall, Q&A sessions for paper presentations, the
different plenary speakers, and immersion sessions. I am still going through different sessions
and catching up on the many things I missed.
A common problem with the vConference is that attendees (myself
included), did not block off time for the sessions and attempted to work while
attending. Next year, I will definitely
plan to block off more time for the sessions.
The Janet Doe Lecture this year was by Chris Shaffer
entitled “The Move to Open: Medical Library Leadership in Scholarly Communication.” This talk started with an overview of the
history of medical librarianship, ILL, MLA and open access. A common problem over the years has been
access to information and rising costs.
In 2008, the NIH mandate increased open access and open science is the
next step beyond open access. Open
science is the movement to make science research and data accessible for all
according to UNESCO. The Foster taxonomy
can be found here. https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/taxonomy/term/100
Immersion Sessions
I really have enjoyed Immersion sessions the past few years
and made sure to attend several of those this year. One I attended was “Context is Everything:
Answering the Clinical Question for Nursing, Culture and Research.” This would have been a great session for a
librarian who was newer to medical librarianship. They gave an overview of Evidence-Based
Practice and how to frame a question into the PICO(T) (Population/Patients,
Intervention/Therapy, Comparison, Outcome, and Time/Duration) format. They showed the Evidence Pyramid and worked
through different scenarios with typical search questions one might see. Some tips for point of care searching were:
to listen to the end to fully hear the questions, don’t be afraid to ask more
questions to clarify, might think about a quick answer right away followed up
by more papers later, and to learn how to use your favorite tools well. When working with EBP the following were
suggestions for questions. How will the
information be used? Shared governance
project? Change in policy or
procedure? Is so, can you see the
current policy/procedure and the references used for that?
Another Immersion session I attend was “Part II:
Reenvisioning Data Visualization Services and Training: Data Storytelling and
Data Visualization Lessons for the Field.”
This session introduced me to different types of data
visualization. Data comics use data
driven comics that tell a story about data.
There are four parts to data comics: visualization, flow, narration,
words and pictures. Data visualization
is used in evaluation. There are also
four steps in the evaluation process and data visualization happens at any of
the steps.
·
Understanding-GIS, graphic recording, mixed
mapping
·
Collecting-sticky notes, dot voting
·
Analyzing-dash boards, spectrum graph, network
mapping
·
Communicating-infographics
Data storytelling is a process of transforming data into
understandable information to affect a decision. There are seven types of data stories: change
over time, drill down, zoom out, contrast, intersection, factors, and
outliers.
Data visualization should be reproducible.
A great deal of decision making comes into play with data
visualization. Some questions are: how to group, what story to tell, what
connections to highlight, what data to use, what format, what background
information, how simple/complex? There
are some ways to make the data visualization reproducible. Data management should be done. Save the data and record the steps. Mention what software was used for the data
visualization. The last step is collaboration
by creating an overview of the project and clarifying rights and citation
information.
The third Immersion session I attended was “You Can Do It:
Developing Your Research Identity within Health Sciences Librarianship.” The takeaway is that many of us are doing
research even when we do not really realize we are doing research. We were encouraged to go beyond the
survey/questionnaire. Develop a research
agenda. Think about the study design-the
strategy to answer your research question.
The research method is how you will implement that strategy. Some questions to ask to get started.
How to pick a topic?
Think about what you are already doing….or is there a new idea you have
been thinking about trying? Some
examples would be in teaching maybe assess a new educational intervention. For collection development you might be
looking at usage or user experience on a new platform. For services one might look at a space use
study or patron survey.
Once the research is finished, sharing is strongly encouraged. Ways to share your research include published
papers, conference papers, lightening talks, and posters.
The fourth Immersion session I attended was “Improving
Ourselves and Improving Care: A Hands-On Workshop to Address Unconscious Bias
in Health Sciences Literature and Health Sciences Library Systems.” Unconscious bias is attitudes or stereotypes
that affect our understanding and decisions in an unconscious way. They can be favorable or unfavorable and are
without awareness. Unconscious bias is
related to racism, microagressions and cognitive bias. For further exploration it was recommended to
read Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good
People and take the The Implicit Association Test (IAT) at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
Implicit bias affects health sciences libraries in several
ways. One way is that there are racial
disparities in medicine. Examples were
given about childbirth, pain control, and not recommending rehab for traumatic
brain injuries in people of color.
Certain medications might be damaging or ineffective to certain ethnic
groups/races. There is also bias in the
underrepresentation of people of color in clinical trials. Unconscious bias appears in libraries in
things like catalog records, discover systems, controlled vocabularies and
hiring patterns. The reference interview
can also be problematic as one makes assumptions about that patient or the
research question. Two sources suggested
for culturally diverse health information are https://ethnomed.org/
and http://spiral.tufts.edu/ in addition to Medlineplus.gov and resources
from the NNLM. To address unconscious
bias we need to assess our personal biases and consider what databases,
resources and terms we are using to answer research questions.
Jennifer Schram, Mayo Clinic Libraries
Join the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) for the 2020 NIH Rural Health Seminar: Challenges in the Era of COVID-19. The seminar will bring together researchers, medical practitioners and others to explore topics in rural health. Learn and explore the impact of COVID-19 on rural populations, systems and workforce issues, and community engagement to respond to the pandemic.
Date: Thursday, November 19, 2020
Time: 1 p.m. – 5 p.m. ET
Location: NIH Videocast
This seminar will provide an opportunity to engage and explore important issues of rural health. Sessions include:
Register for the seminar online. The event will be available on NIH Videocast and archived for those unable to attend in person. To join the conversation on social media, please use hashtag #RuralHealth. Learn more.
November 11, 10:00am
The Importance of Librarians in Building Health Literacy through Partnerships and Programs
November 17, 2:00pm
NNLM Reading Club Presents:
Bill Sullivan, PhD, Author of Pleased to Meet Me
Research Data Management On Demand is made up of four stand-alone classes that introduce principles and practices of research data management. There is no particular order or progression in which to take the classes. Expect to spend up to four hours on each class learning through tutorials, videos and hands-on activities. The individual classes are:
1. Open Science and Data Science
2. Data Curation and Documentation
3. Data Security, Storage and Preservation
4. Data Sharing and Publishing
