Wednesday, May 25, 2022

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

Delf Bintakies

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.

Delf Bintakies

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.

Thursday, May 19, 2022

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.



Wednesday, May 18, 2022

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:

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

    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?  

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

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.

 

Monday, May 16, 2022

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.

Sunday, May 15, 2022

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 ...

Saturday, May 14, 2022

NIH Data Management and Sharing Requirements - Roundup of Training Resources



One of NLM's prominent messages this year at MLA-22 was about preparing for the Data Management & Sharing Plan Requirements that go into effect January 2023.

NLM / NIH are seeking to strike a balance between data access vs. data protection / privacy.  We know there will be more innovation when the data is shared widely, but it needs to be balanced with keeping personal data secure. 

Patti Brennan gave the example of the current waste water studies tracking community rates of Covid-19.  Those samples contain personal DNA along with viral DNA of Covid/SARS-Cov-2.  How do we separate and secure the personal DNA data from the viral DNA data and make that available and useable by other researchers?  

Librarians in attendance asked NIH to provide templates or prototypes as examples of data management set plans.  They said they would provide guidelines, but not templates, because every data management plan will be different according to the data produced.

Key Points:
  • You don't have to be a statistician to [help a researcher] write a data plan.  
  • It's more thinking about how the data will be managed and shared.  
  • A DMSP is designed to be 2 pages or less. [Now--Doesn't that make it seem do-able?]
I am not a Data Librarian, and I'm still wrapping my head around how I can apply this in my health care setting, but wanted to set it down here for those who want to  ...

Learn More:

Data Clearinghouse https://sharing.nih.gov
    
    > The Data Clearninghouse is where you'll find the "meat and potatoes" of what will be required in January 2023, including more info on the following:
    
Data Management & Sharing Policy (DMSP)
    • About
    • Overview
    • Research Covered Under DMSP
    • Planning & Budgeting for DM&S
    • Data Management
      • FAIR Principles
      • Length of Time to Maintain Data
      • Metadata and Other Associated Documentation
      • Naming Conventions
      • Common Data Elements
      • Data Storage Format
      • Data Security
    • Sharing Scientific Data
      • Data Sharing Approaches
      • Selecting a Data Repository
      • Repositories for Sharing Scientific Data

Friday, May 13, 2022

Work Challenges and Inspiration among WHSLA Members: Featuring Deb Knippel

  



Michele: In March, I participated in a listening session with Erica Lake from the NNLM Region 6.
In preparation, I asked a few WHSLA Members for their candid answers to the following questions:

  1. What challenges do you face with work?
  2. What inspires you at work?
  3. What CE would you like to see the NNLM work up for us, esp. on the hospital side.

With their permission, I am sharing the responses here on the WHSLA Blog in a series with the hope that WHSLA Members will get to know each other better, share some great ideas and best practices, and realize that we may be facing a lot of the same challenges in a post- (Are we there yet?) pandemic world.



Deb Knippel, MS, is currently a Reference Librarian for Marshfield Clinic Health System in Wisconsin.

1) What challenges do you face with work?

    • Promoting library resources and services across a large geographical area or having a presence when there is no physical library.  
    • How to help employees understand how the library can support their work.  
    • Keeping up with technology. 

2) What inspires you at work?

    • Seeing projects you have assisted with come to fruition.   
    • Working with a content expert to build a libguide
    • Finding the perfect reference for a library user
    • Corresponding with Authors
    • Collaborating with a team
    • Completing a challenging Lit Search or copyright permissions request
    • Being part of a healthcare system full of so many talented people working together to keep people healthy

3) What CE would you like to see the NNLM work up for us, especially on the hospital side.  MLA seems to be doing more CE for the academic librarians these days, and NNLM is doing more outreach to public libraries now.  So what would be most helpful for those of us still working in hospital libraries?

    • Anything copyright! Hospitals/healthcare systems do not have the same copyright protections as an Academic Health Science Library so tips for providing staff education content that complies with copyright law.  Other topics such as reusing YouTube videos for internal staff education, good sources of images, how hospitals are managing their copyright permissions, copyright and the electronic health record and/or creating electronic forms, etc. 
    • A “New Hospital Librarian 101” type of online course or boot camp.  We have a new librarian and I have been coordinating her training but some of her responsibilities are in areas that I have limited skills myself. 


Thank you, Deb K., for sharing your work challenges and inspiration!

If you would like to participate and share your answers to these 3 questions in a similar post for the WHSLA Blog, email Michele Matucheski with your answers and I'll make sure it gets posted.  

Wednesday, May 4, 2022

Winners of the 2022 WHSLA Professional Development Award


 

Congratulations to the winners of the 2022 WHSLA Professional Development Awards:

  • Mini Prasad 
  • Claudia Noonan

 

Each of the winners will receive up to $500 to use towards conference costs or the costs associated with initial AHIP membership.  The award requires that recipients share what they have learned in a WHSLA blog post, WHSLA Wisdom Chat, or other means of transmission.   If they use it towards AHIP membership, they will serve as a WHSLA officer in the next two years.

 

 

We look forward to hearing what our award winners have learned or to a future WHSLA officer (or two)!

 

Dora Davis

WHSLA Professional Development Coordinator