New measures for new roles: defining and measuring the current practices of health sciences librarians. (25/257)

The roles of academic health sciences librarians are continually evolving as librarians initiate new programs and services in response to developments in computer technology and user demands. However, statistics currently collected by libraries do not accurately reflect or measure these new roles. It is essential for librarians to document, measure, and evaluate these new activities to continue to meet the needs of users and to ensure the viability of their professional role. To determine what new measures should be compiled, the authors examined current statistics, user demands, professional literature, and current activities of librarians as reported in abstracts of poster sessions at Medical Library Association annual meetings. Three new categories of services to be measured are proposed. The first, consultation, groups activities such as quality filtering and individual point-of-need instruction. The second, outreach, includes activities such as working as liaisons, participating in grand rounds or morning report, and providing continuing education. The third area, Web authoring, encompasses activities such as designing Web pages, creating online tutorials, and developing new products. Adding these three measures to those already being collected will provide a more accurate and complete depiction of the services offered by academic health sciences librarians.  (+info)

The role of medical libraries in undergraduate education: a case study in genetics. (26/257)

Between 1996 and 2001, the Health Science Center Libraries and Department of Zoology at the University of Florida partnered to provide a cohesive and comprehensive learning experience to undergraduate students in PCB3063, "Genetics." During one semester each year, a librarian worked with up to 120 undergraduates, providing bibliographic and database instruction in the tools that practicing geneticists use (MEDLINE, GenBank, BLAST, etc.). Students learned to evaluate and synthesize the information that they retrieved, coupling it with information provided in classroom lectures, thus resulting in well-researched short papers on an assigned genetics topic. Exit surveys of students indicated that the majority found the library sessions and librarian's instruction to be useful. Responses also indicated that the project facilitated increased understanding of genetics concepts and appreciation for the scientific research process and the relevance of genetics to the real world. The library benefited from this partnership on a variety of fronts, including the development of skilled library users, pretrained future clientele, and increased visibility among campus research laboratories. The course and associated information instruction and assigned projects can be considered models for course-integrated instruction and the role of medical libraries in undergraduate education.  (+info)

Real-time, evidence-based medicine instruction: a randomized controlled trial in a neonatal intensive care unit. (27/257)

PURPOSE: The study assesses potential for improving residents' evidence-based medicine searching skills in MEDLINE through real-time librarian instruction. SUBJECTS: Ten residents on a rotation in a neonatal intensive care unit participated. METHODOLOGY: Residents were randomized into an instruction and a non-instruction group. Residents generated questions from rounds and searched MEDLINE for answers. Data were collected through observation, search strategy analysis, and surveys. Librarians observed searches and collected data on questions, searching skills, search problems, and the test group's instruction topics. Participants performed standardized searches before, after, and six-months after intervention and were scored using a search strategy analysis tool (1 representing highest score and 5 representing lowest score). Residents completed pre- and post-intervention surveys to measure opinions about MEDLINE and search satisfaction. RESULTS: Post-intervention, the test group formulated better questions, used limits more effectively, and reported greater confidence in using MEDLINE. The control group expressed less satisfaction with retrieval and demonstrated more errors when limiting. The test and control groups had the following average search scores respectively: 3.0 and 3.5 (pre-intervention), 3.3 and 3.4 (post-intervention), and 2.0 and 3.8 (six-month post-intervention). CONCLUSION: Data suggest that measurable learning outcomes were achieved. Residents receiving instruction improved and retained searching skills six-months after intervention.  (+info)

Users' information-seeking behavior on a medical library Website. (28/257)

The Central Medical Library (CMK) at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, started to build a library Website that included a guide to library services and resources in 1997. The evaluation of Website usage plays an important role in its maintenance and development. Analyzing and exploring regularities in the visitors' behavior can be used to enhance the quality and facilitate delivery of information services, identify visitors' interests, and improve the server's performance. The analysis of the CMK Website users' navigational behavior was carried out by analyzing the Web server log files. These files contained information on all user accesses to the Website and provided a great opportunity to learn more about the behavior of visitors to the Website. The majority of the available tools for Web log file analysis provide a predefined set of reports showing the access count and the transferred bytes grouped along several dimensions. In addition to the reports mentioned above, the authors wanted to be able to perform interactive exploration and ad hoc analysis and discover trends in a user-friendly way. Because of that, we developed our own solution for exploring and analyzing the Web logs based on data warehousing and online analytical processing technologies. The analytical solution we developed proved successful, so it may find further application in the field of Web log file analysis. We will apply the findings of the analysis to restructuring the CMK Website.  (+info)

The contributions of library and information services to hospitals and academic health sciences centers: a preliminary taxonomy. (29/257)

OBJECTIVES: This article presents a taxonomy of the contributions of library and information services (LIS) in hospitals and academic health sciences centers. The taxonomy emerges from a study with three objectives: to articulate the value of LIS for hospitals and academic health sciences centers in terms of contributions to organizational missions and goals, to identify measures and measurable surrogates associated with each LIS contribution, and to document best practices for communicating the value of LIS to institutional administrators. METHODS: The preliminary taxonomy of LIS contributions in hospitals and academic health sciences centers is based on a review of the literature, twelve semi-structured interviews with LIS directors and institutional administrators, and a focus group of administrators from five academic, teaching, and nonteaching hospitals. RESULTS: Derived from the balanced scorecard approach, the taxonomy of LIS contributions is organized on the basis of five mission-level concepts and fifteen organizational goals. LIS contributions are included only if they have measurable surrogates. CONCLUSIONS: The taxonomy of LIS contributions offers a framework for the collection of both quantitative and qualitative data in support of communicating the value of LIS in hospitals and academic health sciences centers.  (+info)

Outreach to community organizations: the next consumer health frontier. (30/257)

Outreach by health sciences librarians to various constituencies helps ensure that the information needs of these groups are adequately met. In the past, librarians have extended outreach to isolated rural health care providers, urban clinicians not affiliated with libraries, and consumers. One logical next step in outreach efforts is to partner with existing community groups who seek to improve the health of residents concerning such areas as lead contamination and rising asthma rates. This article describes a National Network of Libraries of Medicine-funded project, where librarians worked with a group of grass roots community organizations, schools, and clinics. Knowledge gained from past outreach projects was applied with mixed success because of the unique nature of community groups where many unanticipated issues arose. Lessons learned while extending outreach library services to community groups are described.  (+info)

Students and overdue books in a medical library. (31/257)

At the University of Ilorin Medical Library, sixty-one randomly selected medical students with overdue books were surveyed using a questionnaire with a view to (1) finding out why they had not returned the library books in their possession, (2) determining their perceptions of eight given overdue measures, and (3) seeking suggestions on how else to reduce overdue books. Most of the overdue books were as a result of (1) the students not finishing with the books and (2) the students being forgetful. Providing for renewals was the most favored overdue measure, while the need for increased multiple copies and extended loan periods for students were also stressed. Thus, a notice urging readers to return or renew borrowed library books was mounted on the issue desk as a reminder to all readers borrowing books. The library is being automated, which will facilitate timely generation and sending of overdue notices. More copies of some titles were purchased, while a copy each of others was transferred to the reserve collection. The need for an extended loan period will require further investigation, while the judicious use of other overdue measures to complement providing for renewals is recommended.  (+info)

When less is more: a practical approach to searching for evidence-based answers. (32/257)

The information needs of practicing clinicians are distinct from the needs of students, researchers, or nonclinical personnel. Clinicians seek information to stay current with new relevant medical developments and to find answers to patient-specific questions. The volume of available information makes clinicians' tasks of rapidly identifying high-quality studies daunting. New tools evaluate the rigor and relevance of information and summarize it in the form of synthesized clinical answers. These sources have the opposite focus of many other information tools in that they strive to provide less information rather than more. With the development of these sources of validated and refined information, a new search approach is needed to locate clinical information in which speed is the benchmark. The existing medical literature, including these new refinement tools, can be conceptualized as a pyramid, with the most useful information, based on validity and relevance, placed at the apex. Use of this hierarchy allows searchers to drill down through progressive layers until they find their answers. Librarians can play a significant role in evaluating the ever-increasing variety of these synthesized resources, placing them into the searching hierarchy, and training clinicians to search from the top down.  (+info)