Work Challenges and Inspiration among WHSLA Members: Featuring Kellee Selden

  

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.

Kellee Selden, MLIS, is currently Library Manager at Ascension Health Care in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

1) What challenges do you face with work?

• Finding the right person to get the job done.  For example, we need to locate an updated list of IPs for Ascension WI.  We have so many IT people and so much turnover that getting to the right person that has this information is a challenge.
• Communication flow.  We have a lot of great information that needs to get to the associates.  Finding the right avenues and getting it to flow properly is difficult.  It may work for a while but if someone leaves, the chain can be broken and disrupt the whole flow.
• Time for contract purchases and renewals.  Library contracts have to go through so many departments (Acquisitions, Contracting, IT, Admin, etc.) before it can be approved.  If it gets stuck in one department it can slow everything down and delay signature for weeks.

2) What inspires you at work?

• Finding the right information that helps an associate treat a patient, do a presentation, or answer a question.
• Merging contracts for the Ascension Librarians.  Getting better terms and conditions, making sure they are beneficial to us and saving money so we have the resources we need to treat patients, educate each other and provide the best service to everyone.
• I love working with students, interns and residents.  When I teach them they generally get excited to learn how to find information that will help them with a project or their practice.  They have such interesting topics and I learn from them too.
• The comradery with the other Ascension Librarians.  Before we merged into a national group, each librarian was on their own locally.  I was fortunate enough to work with Michele Matucheski before we went national.  Now we have over 20 librarians nationwide that collaborate.  We have regular meetings, share resources, help each other with projects etc.
• Having a voice at the table. Our Vice President, Michelle Heavens, works closely with me and the other co-manager to keep us relevant and involved with leadership on our behalf.  We have been invited to be a part of national Ascension Nursing Pillars programs, deciding on enterprise-wide Point-of-Care tools etc.  She is embedding us in Ascension on local, regional and national levels.  We are more powerful as a group versus individual librarians across the country.

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?

• This is not a CE, but a discussion I would appreciate.  How can hospital librarians and MLA work together to not just retain our jobs, but make executive leadership understand our value now and in the future.   As hospitals have lost money during the pandemic they will be making cuts.  MLA needs to help us make executive leadership understand that we don't just manage space but do value added research,
  save money on contract negotiations, right size budgets, do training so associates are using the resources efficiently, obtain ebooks, ejournals and other resources that are EBP for their departments, troubleshoot technology etc. If we collaborate and create a document that points all of this out perhaps we can release it to hospital leadership across the country.  This way they know our value and understand what we do for them, instead of them having misinformation and thinking we just take care of space and books.

Thank you, Kellee Selden, 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.

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.

Work Challenges and Inspiration among WHSLA Members: Featuring Brenda Fay

  

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.

Brenda Fay, MLIS, is currently Library Manager at Advocate Aurora Health Care in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 

and one of our WHSLA Bloggers.

1) What challenges do you face with work?

• I worry  about the next merger…whenever it comes. Our health care system leadership has made it clear that there will be more, and while merging to lower costs for physical items/machines make sense, this rarely (if ever) translates into lower library resource costs. It’s always more, which means cuts invariably happen. Budget pressures are so very real and this is another thing I worry about. Do you cut people or resources when push comes to shove? 

2) What inspires you at work?

• Working with Residents and other learners. It’s really gratifying to teach someone a skill and see them applying it, or sharing it with their colleagues.  

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?

• I’d love to see a CE about hospital and library mergers. What to do when your hospital system merges? Who should you reach out to, how do you find out about new stakeholders, how to present a case for your library/staff to remain because of the services and resources you provide.  

• Another CE topic that would be great is How to Prepare a one-page infographic/annual report about your library. Things like this always fall to the wayside it seems, because hospital librarians are busy helping clinicians or other immediate work like getting the journals back up after an IP change, but you and I know that when someone questions the value of your department, you need to have a one-pager or quick thing to tell them/show them. I’d love more practical CEs like that. I could care less about data since it has nothing to do with my job and I’d guess many other hospital librarians feel the same. 

•  Finally we’ve been getting a lot of questions from Residents and MDs looking for financial support to publish in open access journals. This just makes me so mad that publishers are making money of these authors. We have started compiling a list of free journals to publish in, but many clinicians want the prestige of a certain journal, even if they have to pay $1,500-$3,000 to publish. I’d love NNLM to address this and give us boots on the ground librarians resources to help our people publish. 

Thank you, Brenda Fay, 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.

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.  

Work Challenges and Inspiration among WHSLA Members: Featuring Dora Davis

 

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.

Dora Davis is The WHSLA Professional Development Coordinator one of 2 WHSLA Members-at-Large.  She works as a Medical Librarian for ProHealth.

1) What challenges do you face with work?

Dora: My main challenge is being available to the providers.  I am pool so I only work when there are requests.  However, there are ALWAYS requests.  I cannot work more than 10 hours per week and often times that’s not enough to even work on the pending requests.  Sometimes by the time I get to a request, they no longer need it.  Also, hearing from providers time and time again that they just don’t understand why the library isn’t seen as valued.  I appreciate them telling me, but they are preaching to the choir.  I always send them to the man in charge.

2) What inspires you at work?

Dora: I am absolutely inspired by my core group of library users.  They are always appreciative of the help.  I also find it recharging to be able to help someone find resources that they didn’t think existed.  I almost never hear the outcome of a request but recently I had a physician contact me to tell me that their patient was doing much better thanks to some resources I provided that helped them argue the case for their insurance coverage and they wanted to thank me. I felt such joy I’m almost embarrassed to write about it.  I had been sitting here having an existential crisis about my job and thinking I couldn’t possibly make a difference in my limited hours so maybe I should reconsider.

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?

Dora: I would love CE on making our roles more efficient.  I am currently working on short video tutorials on library topics, since I don’t have time to do 1:1s at all anymore.  Example: My first [video tutorial] was titled “search engine OR database” and it was a tik tok style video.  I kept getting literature requests where people answered “google” to the question “what databases have you searched already?” (A benefit of not working here regularly/post covid is that I have time to look for inspiration outside of the library for teaching skills).

Tips and Tricks from seasoned veterans would also be amazing.  One that I use that helps me tremendously is to create signatures for FAQs.  I have those same FAQs on the library page but no one ever reads them.  Now when I get an email asking me where the request forms are, or how to register for UptoDate, I just click on the signature and save myself lots of time.  I’m sure others out there have their own tricks that make the job easier?

I do work on things like the Evidence Based Practice group and sometimes participate in providing Nursing CEUs.  Maybe some CEs on how to provide these would help.  So for the EBP group I am on the “faculty” and I teach their first class on finding evidence and then I provide assistance as the cohort goes on.  For Nursing, sometimes our education department will host a learning fair for the nurses and I will provide a version of the EBP class tailored to nurses and then it’s bundled with some other items to give them CEUs.  So I guess I would like to see CE for myself on things we can provide for these instances besides EBP.  I think hosting things like this makes our value more tangible to some stakeholders so I feel like I need all the help I can get for hosting more of these but on limited time to plan.

Thank you, Dora!   If you want to know more about Dora, check out this post on the WHSLA Blog.

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.