Reports from Small Group Discussions

Collective Wisdom Gathered from Small Group Discussions

Changing Roles: How are librarians embracing new roles within their institution and reinventing their models of service?

  • What are the Advantages of taking on new Roles:
  • Respect
  • Funding
  • Demonstrated impact of library services
    • Partnering with hospital’s wellness programs; providing background research, tracking and organizing patient information.
    • Leaving the library and meeting with your user population to find out what they information services need to be successful at their jobs.
    • Faculty and Students can overestimate their searching skills so planning bibliographic Instruction focused on How to do research better rather than  Basic searching mechanics
    • Designing information portals on complex topics
    • Data Mining for research laboratories
    • Making the librarian accessible outside the library using technologies like Skype
    • Librarian as subject expert
    • We must prove the library’s worth by embracing new roles
    • Take Initiatives to seek new roles
    • Accept roles we may not like (e.g. Teaching Endnote) to keep users seeing the value in the library
    • Find the “hook” to reach out to people
    • Embrace new “far out” roles like Disaster Preparedness and Health Literacy
    • “Text a Librarian”
    • Librarians sitting on the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and other institutional committees
    • Managing a data warehouse with a connection to Health Information Technology, Medical/Patient Health Records
    • Getting additional degrees, expertise to lecture in other areas
    • Role of liaison to research departments – Informationist.

Changing Stewardship: What can different generations of librarians teach each other?

  • Teaching and learning is a 2 way street
  • Be open and receptive to new ideas at all stages of your career.
  • Leadership experience can be acquired in a variety of ways
  • Take a leadership role in a club or group of interest outside of work
  • Hosting a dinner party involves many of the same leadership skills that come into play in the work environment
  • Professional Committee work is a great way to gain leadership experience
  • Set up “informational interviews” or just go out to lunch with people in the profession that you think you would like to learn from.
  • Take initiative on projects, sometimes it is easier to apologize than to ask permission.

Changing Economic Issues: How are librarians doing more with less, creating innovating purchasing arrangements, finding new funding resources? Or how far can a librarian stretch a dollar?

  • Suggestion to create a task force between Publishers and Medical Librarians addressing pricing models and changing factors driving both sides.
  • Open Access: both side need a better understanding of the economic implications
  • For consortia to be successful they need a strong Executive Director
  • MLA Should offer a CE course on what it takes to form a consortia
  • Vendors and Librarians can take a team approach to market new products

Changing Technology – Social Media: How are librarians implementing Social Media?

  • Keep the library name out in public through RSS Feeds, blogs, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter
  • Use for announcements of new resources, classes, local authors, personnel changes, etc.
  • Live immediate access to staff through chat services
  • Internal documentation through Wiki’s
  • Share slides and videos through youtube, Flickr, Slideshare.net
  • Library can play a role as the early adapter and lead the way for an institution through publicity and training sessions
  • Libraries should establish a Social Media Policy including Best Practices
  • Why do it if no one is using? (if a bear tweets in the woods and there is no one following their twitter feed, does it make a sound?)
  • Blog posts can just sit there, they need to be pushed to other places.

Changing Technology – Educational Media: How are librarians implementing new Educational Media?

  • Open source Learning Managament Systems (LMS) include Sakai, Angel, Moodle
  • Ability to conduct Webinars
  • Developing sites for mobile resources and using them as a platform to push educational content

Changing Technology – Electronic Medical Record: Are librarians a part of their institutions’ Electronic Medical Record development and/or implementation?

  • Important to keep a record that patient has viewed patient handouts
  • Patient portal must include list of required medications to improve compliance
  • Challenge: IT & Hospital administration; small screen with limited space, limits on access to Patient Data
  • Challenge; Learning the controlled vocabulary of the EMR (ICD-9/ ICD-10) and mapping it to information resources vocabulary
  • Advantage: Librarian can save clinicians time by prioritizing between clinical/EBM information and patient information
  • Concern is that the Players involved in developing
  • Link to a specialized referral service
  • What are the Standards and Requirements involved in getting information

Changing Perceptions: What are librarians doing within their institution to demonstrate their library’s value and the institution’s return on investment?

  • There are return on investment calculators and other tools available from MLA – http://www.mlanet.org
  • Keep up on health issues that are in the news that reference the Medical Literature and send relevant article to appropriate Clinicians and Administrators
  • Survey your users
  • Conduct qualitative and quantitative research on the impact of health information access on your population
  • Match that library’s goals and mission to the competencies that your institution measures it self by e.g. JCAHO, ACGME, Magnet, Gallup.
  • Market your Library’s services, come out of the library and make connections, look for champions among Clinicians and Administrators.
  • Be involved in planning committees
  • Tie a dollar amount to services or items used
  • Get involved in facilitating scholarly output from your institution.
  • Challenge: Many librarians feel they are too busy to do the research that would show their value

Changing Spaces: What does the library space look like now and what will it look like in the future?

  • The library still needs to be a physical space but with digital materials.
  • Space needs will be tailored to institutional values
  • Space should be staffed by Medical Librarians
  • Space tailored to the activities that take places (quiet study, independent research, collaborative research). Space should not be focused on storage.
  • Before redesigning conduct usability study that includes input from end users.
  • There will still need to be some books in hard copy.