Category: EAHIL 2014 conference

How committed are our young doctors to EBM?

EBM has, over the last forty years, become the fundamental principle of clinical practice – or, so we thought. Marte Ødegaard reported to the EAHIL 2014 conference about her assessment of final-year students’ knowledge management skills which they have to demonstrate in an assignment. Her analysis showed that a significant proportion of future doctors lack even basic literature searching skills.

Oslo university is addressing the problem, but many in the audience were left feeling uneasy how a similar evaluation would have turned out at our own institutions…

Medical librarians of all nations unite!

Four Scandinavian colleagues proposed that medical librarians across EAHIL collaborate in the field of Information Skills Teaching. They had carried out a survey that clearly demonstrated wide-spread support for sharing teaching materials, but also experiences.

Interestingly, a parallel effort to establish a shared resource for librarians teaching EBM started recently on an MLA forum, and led to the creation of a resource pool (hosted by Northeast Ohio Medical University) and a – still informal – mailing list. Let’s see if these two groups will join forces!

Evidence Based Librarianship: a nice example from Norway

Marion Mühlburger reported a lovely example how the medical library at Bergen university used the methodology we are all familiar with from our EBM literature searches, which also shows where our professional approach may hit difficulties. When an overhaul of their facilities was required (in the usual context of print journals disappearing and leaving space vacant), the library team decided to give the needs of those who actually use that library space, a prime rôle in the planning.

Evidence was created in the form of a student survey and other user involvement the findings of which informed the planning for the re-purposing of the existing space. However, a major obstacle in the process turned out to be that the hierarchy which had to approve the decisions, did not always agree with the evidence gathered from the actual users. This resulted in a six-months delay between planning and implementation.

Oliver Obst’s advice in the discussion was best not to involve those in power before the library had shored up strong support from its clients…

Reinventing the ZB Med as ‘Leibniz Information Centre for Life Sciences’

Dr. Ulrich Korwitz, Librarian of the ZB Med, reported about the new strategy of the ZB Med in the wake of the evaluation two years ago. An extensive user consultation was undertaken, and the input from professors and research fellows used as a starting point for the new strategy.

Some highlights amongst the many adjustments to the ZB operations:

  • shift towards an advisory rôle to academic medical libraries, especially in the field of license negotiation (they will even hire a business lawyer)
  • focus on research and clinical practice
  • services to the pharmaceutical industry have been dropped
  • constant innovation which will include regular evaluation of assisting products and services
  • strong commitment to staff development, including a decrease of junior and increase of senior positions

This is a bold move by the ZB Med, or rather: the ‘Leibniz Information Centre for  Life Sciences’. Especially the advisory services in the field of license negotiation were met with great approval by the audience.

Creating the European Library Quality Standards for Health (ELiQSR)

In the context of EBM libraries have become more important to medical education and research and to the delivery of healthcare services than ever. Surprisingly, there hasn’t been an adequate set of quality standards for the evaluation of medical libraries so far.

Janet Harrison, Clare Creaser and Marta de la Mano prepared a paper for the EAHIL 2014 conference about their development of an evaluation tool for medical libraries. Standards currently used by medical libraries are MLA and LQAF. The new standard will review these and other existing standards, but will take feedback from a survey of medical librarians across Europe into account.

Elsevier out of sync with Elsevier?

Francesca Gualteri reported about her library in a pharmaceutical company’s use of Elsevier’s ‘Mendeley’ to manage the internal literature repository. Interestingly, she mentioned problems with the importing, especially of Elsevier publications. Others in the audience confirmed these issues. I suppose quite a few of the participants at the conference are going to ask the Elsevier reps at their stall about this issue…

Library blogging: what’s it actually good for?

Tuulevi Ovaska is a subject librarian from the University of Eastern Finland, with additional commitments at a hospital. In her talk at the 2014 EAHIL conference she reported on her experience in running a library blog that aimed to assist users with everyday search queries which tended to be about PICO, the ‘deep web’, and database searching. From the start Tuulevi added a list of answers to her users most frequently asked questions, but even so her (Finnish language!) blog attracted over 3’000 views within its trial period of around a year – part of which came from Sweden and the US.

What’s the meaning of library blogging? Tuulevi is certain her blog complements the library’s website, especially with news and marketing (in conjunction with social media), but also responding to real-life user enquiries.

Journal Apps

Guus van den Brekel presented an excellent comparison of four journal apps which the university of Groningen evaluated as a way to help academics keep up to date with their literature. How do your users want to read journals? Only in response to a concrete query, doing a database search? Or do they also browse tables of content? And how often do they do the latter – do they rather use RSS feeds from selected journals, or do they browse their favourite journals on a Friday afternoon?

All four apps come from fairly small, innovative companies, not from the big library software providers or publishers. They are:

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The app that scored highest in the Groningen evaluation against a set of criteria and attracted a substantial amount of additional usage of the journals, was Browzine. I was glad to hear of this outcome: at Bern university we are currently trialling Browzine, too!

“Open” and the Library

Maria Cassella in her keynote speech at the EAHIL 2014 conference reports that “Open” – i.e. Open Access, Open Data, Open Educational Resources, Open Peer Review, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) – has triggered a centrifugal trend away from the traditional channels of scholarly communication, including the library. This new trend contravenes the previous centripetal tendency of consolidation of all information related services in the library. As academics increasingly are in a position to produce and store data themselves – research data and publications, educational content; using repositories, cloud services and the like -, they use these new channels rather than the library. This could, ultimately, lead to the fragmentation of knowledge.

Librarians, so Maria, need to form partnerships to counter this dangerous trend: with faculty, students, IT. And they should develop new skills and professional roles, such as (as defined by the ALA as ‘core competencies in librarianship’ in 2009):

  • data librarian
  • digital cudrator/data curator
  • scholarly communication librarian
  • project manager
  • ontologies specialist
  • intellectual property rights specialist
  • bibliometrics specialist
  • knowledge facilitator
  • educator

In the discussion, a colleague saw the risk that the wide range of highly specialised tasks could lead to specialisation and fragmentation of the profession of librarians. She was certainly right in the sense that none of us will be able to cover the full range of both our traditional and our new roles as a single person: we will need to split our tasks between several people with different focus. At the same time, as our roles rapidly change and evolve, we will have to keep up with these developments.