Work Challenges and Inspiration among WHSLA Members: Featuring Michele Matucheski

  

Back 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.

Michele Matucheski, MLIS, AHIP, is currently a Medical Librarian for Ascension Wisconsin Health Care, based in Oshkosh, WI.  

1) What challenges do you face with work?

• Being visible in an essentially virtual environment.  I'm still trying to figure out how to do it well.  I have the Ascension WI Library Blog and write articles regularly, and send out a monthly newsletter targeted to physicians and providers, nurses, rehab and others.  I also send welcome emails to new physicians and providers.  And the eTOC service remains popular.  We no longer get to participate in orientations, so I am always looking for new ways to reach people about Library Services.  Networking certainly helps, but that is fluid and everchanging with near constant turnover, and trying to keep track of who's who.  In the past, I could make a lot of connections and foster partnerships in the cafeteria or the hallways, but the physical library and hospital is a ghost town these days, which makes working the matrix a bigger challenge. 
• Initiatives come from national Ascension with local people implementing, but who no longer research topics themselves.  We have made some in-roads by joining the national Ascension community for Infection Preventionists, where we have been welcomed and chime in when and where appropriate.  The pandemic has been an exciting time to be part of this group!
• Teaching - I used to do some EBP sessions with the Nurse Residents.  That was a lot of fun, but that program has been re-vamped and the Librarians are no longer part of it, so I'll need to find another outlet for that! 

• In the coming year, I will need to transfer 43 LibGuides into a new content management system (CMS).  We are switching to TDNet because SpringShare is not able to handle the complicated contracting process that large organizations like Ascension require. [Sigh!]
• That change also necessitates moving to a new linksolver / A-Z List, which means also going through the process to integrate the new linksolver into PubMed again -- all while keeping up with the regular daily research, work and renewals. 

• I'll also need to implement a Discovery Search Engine (TDNet) on top of transferring 43 LibGuides in the same year.  Any one of these projects would be a major undertaking in any given year. So it will be a major feat to tackle them all at once.  Fortunately, TDNet has promised to provide ample training and support for these projects, so I won't have to do it alone.  Lets hope they stand by that!   

•  Some of my biggest frustrations come from working with IT who wants to nix library databases, resources, and contracts for security reasons without really understanding how these resources are used, and how the DO NOT contain protected health information (PHI).  For example, a big ejournal contract was nearly cancelled because the vendor saves login info on European servers--never mind that most people never set up a personal account. 
• Finding alternatives to remote authentication / Authentication by IP.  National Ascension is moving towards regional hubs for VPNs that have their own IPs.  They can let people get on the network from almost anywhere in the system without regard to local IPs which will eventually disappear. This means that we'll need to find new ways to authenticate who can use licensed library resources.   Seamless Access is trying to stay on top of the issues and solutions.
•  Finding the right people in IT to help get things done.  I used to have a contact who kept track of IPs for Ascension Wisconsin. But he has since left the organization, and I have not been able to find anyone else willing to work with me. I find out about IP changes when one of our end users tells me they are having trouble accessing library resources.  More often than not, these days, it leads back to IP changes or new VPNs.  IPs used to be pretty stable and seldom changed.  Now the Network guys make changes much more frequently -- and they don't bother to tell us.  IT has gone through a lot of their own mergers, so there's been tremendous turnover in their area, making it very difficult to find people who can answer our questions completely.  

•  Reinventing Hospital Librarianship every few years.  The pandemic forced us to go entirely virtual.  We proved we can do it, but what do I do with the physical library now that there are so few walk-in visitors and the books are essentially historical now.  

 

2) What inspires you at work?

• Learning something new everyday.  My job allows me to stay curious!
• Our Literature Search Evaluations (filled out by patrons) tell us how our research was used.  This data can show the value of how Librarians contribute to the mission, vision, goals of excellent patient care and ultimately the bottom line of our organization.  It is inspiring to read the comments people leave in praise of our work.  If we didn't ask them to fill out the evals, we'd never know ...
• Mentoring Librarians new to hospital librarianship, sharing what I know, but also learning from them, too. We all have something to contribute!
• The national Ascension Library Dept. has come together under a VP of Operations who has a gift for streamlining and improving processes.  She can pull in resources and people that none of the Librarians would have been able to do on our own.  She makes things happen, and she's a great advocate for Library Services.  We've come a long way in the last few years with streamlining budgets and creating workflows for license renewals and contracts, among other things.  After being a near solo librarian for so many years, it is nice to have a larger group of health science librarians to solve problems or share articles for newsletters, or even to cover when we're on PTO.  
• Working with an EBP Team this spring looking at Clinical Ladders for nursing to develop recommendations for leadership to ultimately implement a statewide program that could be a model for national Ascension.  This has been a great experience where ALL team members leverage their expertise.  This team let me go beyond just searching and handing it off to them, never knowing how it turned out.  I was involved with the discussions and their evaluations of the articles. They were excited and invigorated by what they were reading, and looking forward to putting a program in place here.

3) What CE would you like to see the NNLM / MLA 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?

•  Alternatives to IP authentication, perhaps by Seamless Access who seems to have a handle on the best approaches and who offers the solutions?  Or libraries who have figured out a better solution.

• Preparing annual reports and 1-page infographics to advocate for Library Services

• Technology Updates (like the GMR used to do back in the day).  Tips and tricks or useful / cool apps. and tools is always fun.

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.