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!

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.