MLA Members Running for Boston Survivors

Dear Medical Library Association Members,

(from MEDLIB-L listserve) 

In the wake of the Boston Marathon tragedy, Montie’ Dobbins and Bart Ragon want to raise money to help support the victims and families affected by the events that occurred on April 15, 2013. During the conference they are going to attempt to run a total of 26.2 miles. This roughly works out to be 5-6 miles a day. For those members who are interested, They are for a donation of $1 for every mile they run. If they accomplish their goal, this means that the total donation would be $26.20. Donations would be made to The One Fund, a charity set up by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Tom Menino. Donations are on the honor system and you make your donation directly to the charity. They will not collect any money or track donations. They will send an e-mail at the end of conference to those who choose to participate with an update on the total miles ran. During the conference they will provide updates via Twitter, including maps of their route. They are currently working out a running schedule and if you would like to run some or all of the runs, please indicate below. They plan to run a slooooooooow pace (10-12 min miles).

For more information about the charity please see www.onefundboston.org

 To register go to http://t.co/eljJqzZ2sX 

 Questions can be sent to bart(atsign)virginia(dot-thingy)edu.

 Thank you for your consideration. We know that Boston is going to be an excellent host city for our conference!

Business of Hospital Libraries on #medlibs Tomorrow

Join me tomorrow April 25th for a #medlibs Twitter chat at 6pm Pacific/9 Eastern on the topic of the business of hospital libraries, hosted by yours truly (@Krafty).

The Affordable Care Act has changed the way hospitals are reimbursed for medicare patients. In the past hospitals made more money off of patients who were readmitted for things they were orginally discharged with. Now, they are penalized for readmissions happening within 1 month of discharge for certain conditions. This means that a lot of hospitals are going to be seeing losses of millions of dollars.

Where does the library stand in the face of these losses when technology has changed the way we search for things and users often search Google before asking a librarian. The librarian needs to get lean and mean and start operating his/her library like a hospital department that is responsible for achieving the specific goals of the hospital. So if the hospital’s goal is to reduce readmissions by x% then the librarian needs to figure out specifically how the library can help the hospital do that. (If your answer is I can give them more literature searches, then think again because that won’t help you keep your job because administrators think they can do that already.)

This tweet chat will discuss the various ways librarians can specifically show their worth to their own administration instead of passivley pointing to some standard or study illustrating the need for a hospital library. We will be discussing ideas of what we can do to answer our administration’s always constant question “What have you done for me lately and why should I give you money instead of another department?” The game has changed and we need to change our strategy.

If you are new to Twitter or the idea of tweet chats then I highly recommend participating using the website http://www.tweetchat.com.  Login to the site using your Twitter username and password then type in the word medlibs into the box at the top of the page next to the go button.  You will be able to follow the discussion very easily and you won’t have to worry about adding #medlibs to every post because it already does that for you. For more information about tweet chats check out this quick guide.

Be an MLA Mentor

There is still time to apply to be a mentor to a new MLA member or first meeting attendee.  To be a member just volunteer for the Colleague Connection Program at this year’s annual MLA meeting.

Colleague Connection is MLA’s mentoring program that pairs newer members or first-time meeting attendees with returning, more experienced members during the annual meeting. The purpose of Colleague Connection is to introduce new attendees to the association and help them get the most out of the MLA annual meeting.

Sign up to be a mentor today: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KZBMKD7!

I was a mentor a few times and I can say that it was a great experience.  Each time I met a new person that had different and fresh ideas that I loved hearing about.

MLA is only 2 weeks away…. click on the link now and be a mentor.

 

 

Librarians Take a Consumer Health Information Survey & Win

Researchers from Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport, LA are conducting a 15-20 minute survey to identify consumer health information services. 

The researchers hope to receive responses from public libraries, academic institutions, hospitals and not-for-profit organizations involved in consumer health information services.  The goal is to identify what services are currently offered, who is offering them and how often. 

The data may be able to assist other organizations in implementing new consumer health information services.  Organizations that participate will be entered for a drawing to win one of two $300 checks. After the survey period, 53 randomly chosen hospital librarians that complete the follow-up survey will receive $10 for their time and effort. 

This research is possible through financial support from the Hospital Libraries Section of the Medical Library Association. The survey will be open from April 15, 2013 to April 30, 2013 at 11:45 pm Pacific time. If you are willing to participate, please go to https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2012_CHISS.

 

 

The Business of Hospital Libraries

Earlier last week people on medlib-l discussed (The  perfect library storm) closures of hospital libraries.  They are seeing a contradiction between Evidenced Based Medicine imperatives vs budget and resource demands on hospital libraries.  Some are seeing how the increase in pricing and bundling practices have caused the hospitals to “throw it back to the physicians and staff” causing libraries to close.  I interpret this statement to be that the hospitals are no longer willing to provide monies for institutional support of resources (the library) and require doctors and staff to buy their own resources.

This email conversation is very timely.  It turns out this week I will be in Tulsa, OK teaching the class, “The Evolving Librarian: Responding to changes in the workplace and in healthcare.”  Technology changes, social changes and healthcare changes have forced hospital librarians to step back and really change the way we do things.

Personally, we hospital librarians need to start treating our library like a hospital department and not a library.  I mentioned this in my medlib-l post. I know this statment sounds odd because you might think we do that already.  I think we could do better.  I think librarians not only need to align their goals to the hospitals, but they need to make the hospital’s goals their goals.

With the Affordable Care Act, hospitals stand to lose 1% of their Medicare payments in penalties if patients with specific conditions are readmitted within 1 month of discharge.  By 2015 it will be 3%.  That is billions of dollars.  To put it in perspective, Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis will lose $2 million dollars according to Kaiser Health News. Dr. John Lynch the chief medical officer of Barnes-Jewish says they could absorb the loss this year but not over time if penalties continue to accumulate.

You better believe all of the other hospital departments in your hospital are working toward the hospital goals.  Aligning the library to demonstrate specifically (hard numbers) how it can help the hospital achieve their goals is essential.

I thought long and hard about my post to medlib-l before I sent it.  The reason was I didn’t want to lay blame for hospital libraries closing on the librarians.  I didn’t want to imply that they weren’t doing their jobs or that if they “could’a, would’a, should’a” they would still have their jobs.  That wasn’t my intent.  Although, one person responded on the list saying they found it “disheartening that sometimes when a library staff is downsized or actually closed, that a too common belief is that if  only ‘that library’ had been doing more, building a stronger case, demonstrating their worth in concrete ways, etc., etc., this would not have happened.”

Who knows what the situations were at those hospital library closures or downsizings?  However, I firmly believe if you don’t start looking at your library as a business arm of the hospital and align your goals to support the hospital achieve its goals, then you are going to have a very rough time.  Because if an institution as established and good as Barnes-Jewish is dealing with these things, then it can, and is happening everywhere.  Where do you think the library stands when the institution has to deal with a $2 million dollar loss one year? Repeatedly?  Where do you think it stands if you do not illustrate exactly with hard numbers how your department has helped prevent that loss.

I think everyone (administrators, doctors, nurses, etc.) can agree that the idea of a library is good.  But when faced with money demands, that idea  needs concrete specific support.  That support must be generated from within.  Administration doesn’t care about the library in terms of JCAHO standards. Administration doesn’t care about the Rochester study or newer updated similar published research.  Administration cares about what your library is doing now.  Those studies, standards, etc. aren’t going to change your administration’s mind, you are.  They don’t care if you give them every flipping article under God’s green earth saying that a library will save them money and help them cure every disease known to man.  Administration only cares about you, your library, what you are doing, and how it benefits them.

I am not alone in thinking that hospital librarians need to change they way they think and do “library business.”  The Mid Atlantic Region will be running a CE webinar series starting May 31, 2013, entitled “Running Your Hospital Like a Business.”  Some of the things the series will address are: writing a business plan, art of negotiation, and proving your worth/adding to your value.  All of these things are those business skills that I ran away from in college but now am kicking myself as I realize I really need them today and could’a, should’a taken a business class back then.

Oh well, time to beef up now.

 

Pack Your Floss for MLA’13

This was also posted on MEDLIB-L but I thought it was important to also post here.

Before you head off to Boston, drop an extra pack of dental floss in your bag.  In honor of the Dental Section’s 80th Anniversary (impressive) they will be collecting dental floss for needy populations in Guatemala and Mexico.  Dental students from Boston University go on mssions to these areas to provide treatement and according to organizers their is a scarcity of floss (compared to other oral hygiene products) there.  There will be a donation box at the conference registration desk.

Floss is so small you can probably pack a couple of packs in your carry on.  Don’t forget!!!!

MLA 13 Scheduling Tool

Every year it seems I wrestle with the annual meeting’s scheduling tool.  Perhaps I am too picky, asking it to do more than normal people would like or perhaps I am not savvy enough in the way of calendar apps.  Whatever the case, I always seem to have problems getting it to sync correctly.  So I thought I would share my experience this year in hopes that it might help others who might also be having problems.

I used Google Calendar synced to my iPhone.  I have synced Google Calendar to Androids and the practice is pretty much the same.  I don’t sync to my Outlook calendar, so I can’t help you there. If somebody wants to comment on how they did it in Outlook and any problems/tricks they found, that would be helpful.

I signed into the scheduler using my Facebook.  I admit I did it because I am lazy and didn’t want to try and remember another ID and password for a one time event, plus it is kind of nice seeing my picture and other librarian pictures next to events.

I clicked the star for every event I plan to attend.  I found information (abstracts or other details) on most of the events if I hovered over them.  Those that didn’t have abstracts when I hovered, included a link for me to get more information.  I discovered there is no way to add events that are not on the official MLA Scheduling Tool.  The only way I have been able to do this is to put the added event into my Google Calendar.

Speaking of Google Calendar and exporting.  I clicked on the Facebook and Twitter icons to see what exporting would happen.  Facebook did nothing, it didn’t post to my timeline or anything.  Clicking on the Twitter badge sends out a generic tweet for people to check the scheduler with a link to the scheduler.  (Both the Facebook icon and Twitter icon are kind of useless IMHO.)  Clicking on the phone icon gives me the option to use their mobile web app to view your schedule or to download your schedule into iCal for Google Calendar, Outlook and Apple iCal. 

I downloaded it for Google Calendar to my KraftyLibrarian Google account.  (I have a personal Google Calendar with my entire family life on it and I don’t want my MLA schedule cluttering the family calendar and vice versa.)  The import goes fairly easily, but it Google treats the scheduler calendar as a imported calendar that you can’t edit.  So if you want to add any events you have to add them to your home calendar (in my case KraftyLibrarian calendar) and they will show up in a different color and under that calendar. 

Because it is an imported calendar you will also have to sync it to your mobile device’s calendar. If you are following multiple calendars then make sure you scroll down for the link to syncing multiple calendars.  https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/151674?hl=en&ref_topic=13950. Thank you @dearbeth on Twitter for the link to syncing it to my phone.

Once I was able to sync it to my phone I was able to see everything I needed and add additional MLA personal events (to the non-mla calendar) to show up on on my phone’s calendar to keep me on track for the meeting. 

Anybody else have any tips or tricks?

Friday Fun: More About the Unofficial #DrinkingSIG

Last Friday Fun I briefly mentioned the unofficial Drinking SIG of MLA, this Friday Heather Holmes also known as @LaMedBoheme73 on Twitter and #DrinkingSIG Convener, wrote a more in depth guest post that I thought would be fun to share.

*BTW as Heather mentions you don’t have to drink alcohol. I’m living proof, because I remember being pregnant one year sipping away at my Coke.

 

What is the (unofficial and not at all sanctioned by) MLA, #DrinkingSIG?
Heather N. Holmes, MLIS, AHIP
#DrinkingSIG Convener
@LaMedBoheme73

The MLA #DrinkingSIG came about a few years ago prior to the MLA annual meeting in Minneapolis. There was twitter banter about social activities to take place after the day’s events were over and the #DrinkingSIG was born. Key players in the (very) early discussions were myself, @krafty, @deanhendrix, @eagledawg and @gabinator, and from there many others joined in. Since then it has become something that many of us formally add to our schedules as something to do while at MLA.

 To be clear, just because we call it the #DrinkingSIG, we do not exclude anyone. You do not have to consume alcohol of any sort. We assume that even if you don’t booze it up drink alcohol, you probably drink water, tea, Pepsi, or something. See what I did there? Just by ‘drinking’ you qualify for #DrinkingSIG membership. Our intention is to get together with old friends and hopefully make some new ones, too. It is a chance to unwind after long and sometimes stressful days, and to network with your colleagues while rehydrating* your body.

Last year (2012) was the first year we made it a little more formal when I introduced the idea of opening a CafePress shop to sell #DrinkingSIG merchandise and have the profits go to the MLA Scholarship Fund. The shop offered tshirts and umm, obviously, drinkware like pint glasses and shot glasses. This year’s shop includes some more drink related products like can cozies, a cocktail shaker, and of course a flask. There’s also a small flask on a necklace. It is only 1oz, but as @eagledawg said on my Facebook page: “Flask. Necklace. 1oz isn’t enough, you say? Remember those consecutive 7am committee and business meetings you have to go to? ‘Cream’ for your coffee = Bailey’s. ‘Nuff said. ” The logo on this year’s products says One Hooch: It’s Always Happy Hour Somewhere! MLA Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, 2013 accompanied by a picture of a few of my own personal drinking vessels (copyright issues avoided). The theme was a combination of submissions by Molly Knapp and Heather Brown. Special thanks to them.

drinkingsig

The only problem with CafePress is that they don’t issue payment of profits to you until you reach a certain amount. To keep things reasonable (read: most librarians are poor) I haven’t added a huge markup up the products so I have yet to make a donation to MLA on behalf of the #DrinkingSIG, but hopefully we’ll make enough this year that I can do so. I’d like our first donation to be at least $50. Right now I have about $22.

This year’s meeting does not have a Tweetup scheduled so we will make one with an official (but not sanctioned by MLA!) #DrinkingSIG meetup. Probably a good time to have it would be during @TheBeardedPigs event on Sunday night. The EBSCO party is also that night, but The Pigs usually play relatively late and the EBSCO event is within walking distance so people who want to do both won’t be stuck waiting for a bus to bring them back. Another possibility could be on Tuesday after Tech Trends. The Taste of Boston party is also that night, but for those of us who couldn’t shell out the extra $ to go to it, can have a #DrinkingSIG event somewhere. Plus, I’m a panelist on this year’s Tech Trends and I’ll definitely need a drink afterward. Also, it can be considered a #DrinkingSIG event any time that 2 or more MLA members are drinking together. They can happen any time, any where!

 Go to the CafePress shop, get some gear so we can make some profit, and we’ll see you at MLA in Boston!

 *some drinks rehydrate better than others. All members are encouraged to drink plenty of water before, during, and after #DrinkingSIG events.

 http://www.cafepress.com/DrinkingSIG

See the Midwest Chapter Members Presenting at MLA

The ConnectMidwest blog has a list of Midwest Chapter members presenting at MLA in Boston.  Very busy group of people, scroll through it and see what your colleagues are doing or have done.

The Midwest Chapter is also looking for a blogger or two who would like to post about the conference for the MidwestConnect blog so non attendees can keep up.  If you are interested send Elizabeth Moreton a email. emoreto[at sign] siue [that dot thing] edu.

Updates on Edwin Mellen Press lawsuits

Another layer has been added to the issues surrounding the Edwin Mellen Press lawsuits.  Last week Scholarly Kitchen published a post explaining they removed two posts (and comments) by Rick Anderson discussing Edwin Mellen Press because they received letters from EMP threatening legal action. The letter tells Scholarly Kitchen, “We are putting you on notice that the moment Mr. Anderson publishes or provokes any statement about our company or authors that is the slightest bit defamatory, we will pursue legal action only against him, but your organization as well.”

Here is the full letter to Scholary Kitchen about Rick Anderson.  It also appears that Edwin Mellen Press is also holding Scholarly Kitchen liable for libelous comments made by the general readership.  Because in their Rick Anderson letter they also mention they enclosed a copy of a letter  to Kristine Hunt, who they claim posted libelous statements in response to Anderson’s blog.  EMP’s Anderson letter says, “We are bringing this information to your attention because you are the publishers of both Ms. Hunt’s statement and Mr. Anderson’s blog. As such, you have a legal obligation to monitor these types of comments. In order to limit any damage from such events, we request the immediate removal of Ms. Hunt’s comments from your blog.”

The letter to Kristin Hunt specifically states that EMP takes issue with two comments she made on Anderson’s post that they believe are harmful and untrue.  Their letter ends, “You have the right to seek legal counsel pertaining to this matter and, if you do so, your attorney should contact me directly.  If you do not consult an attorney, you are welcome to contact me yourself.  If I do not hear from you or your attorney by April 15, 2013, the Press will take legal action as it sees fit.”

Yikes! But there is more.

Roy Tennant with The Digital Shift published on Friday that Edwin Mellen Press registered domain names using Dale Askey’s name (Askey, to my knowledge, is still battling one of the two lawsuits brought by EMP).  Roy has the registration record  as an in the post showing DALEASKEY.COM registered to Edwin Mellen Press Ltd. address and has Iona Williams with an EMP email address as the administrative contact.

Dave Pattern mentions in the comments, that many sites (besides the Dale Askey ones) were registered by “pseudonymous  ‘Arthur Scholar’ (pen name of the blogger on the EMP site & also the EMP tweeter) has been used to register around 100 domains over the years.”  He says Iona (Margaret) Williams registered some other mellenpress domains and is listed as a contact on Mellen’s website and as a Secretary for the company at these two places

  • http://bit.ly/XSDvd0
  • http://bit.ly/Z3GbUz

 

I agree with Dave, in which I have no idea why anyone or any company would want to buy domain names that aren’t related to themselves.  Weird, and just to let my readers know. This is not an April Fool’s post.

(Total side note and apology to Rick Anderson, I can’t help it but every time I read the EMP letter all I can hear is Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) in the Matrix saying “Mr Anderson.” I bet there are times Rick and Dale wish they took the blue pill.)