Author: KraftyLibrarian

While I was attending the Midwest MLA Annual meeting this past week I got the idea that it might interesting and helpful to try and record some of the posters during the poster session on video.  I ran this idea by the co-chairs of the meeting committee and we decided it would be neat to try.  Well the  idea was good, but overall I was not pleased with the results.  This a perfect example of learning through failure. 

My Goal:
Take my Flip camera around and ask poster presenters if it was ok if I filmed them and ask if they would like say a little something about their poster.  Upload that information to YouTube (Sorry hospital librarians that is the easiest hosting service I can think of. I can’t access it at my work either) Link to the video through the Midwest MLA conference blog  and through this blog. 

The Reality:
Most people were ok with filming them but it was often difficult to get their permission without interrupting them while they were speaking to another librarian visiting their poster.  Plus I had to make sure I got the permission of the librarian visiting poster if I accidentally got their face on camera as well. 

Poster presenters are all too eager to talk other librarians about their poster and what they did and how they did it.  However, they are significantly less enthused to talk directly to a camera.  Of those who gave me permission to film, not one wanted to speak directly to the camera.  They would rather speak with another person than give a few brief statements about their poster to the cameraman (me).  So I had to lurk around waiting for somebody who was interested in the poster to start speaking to the presenter.  Let me just say, lurking is never a good way to get people to be interested in a poster or to talk. 

The Flip camera is small and produces images that are easy to slap up on the web.  However it does not have image stabilization and its microphone picks up a lot of the background noise (which can be quite loud in a poster session). I did my best not to jiggle the camera and to get the audio of those speaking, but lets just say I am more suited for a career as a librarian than one in T.V. or movie production.

The Future:
I think video recording the poster session still has the potential to be useful, especially for those unable to attend the conference.  It is nice to have the poster online, but a big part of the poster session is listening to the presenter and others discuss the poster and the opportunities and challenges of the project.  Just having an image of the poster online misses all of the exchange of information and knowledge.  However, if I were to do this again there are a few things I think I would do differently.

Permission:
If something like this is planned ahead of time by organizers then it would be much easier to have forms signed ahead of time by poster presenters. 

If it is something spur of the moment, then you still need to get permission from the poster presenter and that can get a little awkward because you feel like you are interrupting (and often are) them in their train of thoughts.

Talking to the Camera:
This is a two person job, a roving reporter and cameraman.  Find an inquisitive, outgoing and talkative buddy who can speak with the presenter about their poster and ask questions.  People had no problem talking to another person in front of the camera but they were a bit camera shy when faced with just themselves and the camera.  The buddy really helps get the conversation going.  

Additionally, you will already have the permission of your loquatious librarian buddy so all you have to worry about is getting permission from the poster presenter.   This can easily be accomplished by the buddy asking ahead of time before you begin filming.  Something as simple as, “I am interested in your poster do you mind if we video record while we chat?”

Camera:
The Flip is really an easy camera to work with but the lack of internal image stabilization and the audio difficulties make it really difficult for me to endorse this camera for a loud busy poster session room.  I don’t think you need a professional video camera for this endeavor, I just think there might be some better alternatives.  I don’t have this camera, but the Kodak Zi8 is a pocket video camera ($180) that has internal image stabilization and has external microphone jack. Check out your camera options.

So without further ado, here is the one video that was somewhat decent among the many that I took.  I want to thank Mary Schleicher who let me record her and also let me lurk a short distance away for somebody to ask her questions.  Creating a Collection Development Policy for a Variety of Old Medical Books.  (The video is on YouTube, so if you are like me, you may have to watch it at home.)

Monday afternoon I was a part of the Technology Forum for the Midwest MLA Annual Conference in Columbus, OH.  I spoke on libraries using Twitter and Facebook.

You can see my slides at http://bit.ly/hA9g0.  I specifically wanted to show examples of what other libraries were doing with these two social networking sites.  I tried to find as many medical library examples as possible (I even found one example of a hospital library).  But there were also neat things being done by other libraries and I went with those examples when I found they were doing something that the medical libraries hadn’t picked up on yet.

Some of my favorite examples:

• Weill Cornell and Loma Linda both have tied their catalog new books feed into their Twitter account. So when a new book is added to the catalog a tweet is sent out with a tinyurl.  Clicking on that tinyurl gets you to that record in the library catalog.  I thought this was cool.  I don’t know how difficult it is to set this up, perhaps somebody who has done this could comment.
• Health Library & Resource Center of El Camino Hospital put their patient education material up on their Facebook page under Notes. 
• UTS Libraries (University of Technology, Sydney Libraries) use Twitter’s tweet poll feature to create a quick survey and ask for feed back on an issue.  In this case it was the use of QR codes, but almost any question could work.

I notice a lot of libraries out there dipping their toes into the social networking arena, but as I was researching this topic for the presentation, I started to notice that a lot of libraries good efforts seemed a little disjointed.  What good is having a Twitter account if you don’t list the feed on your home page.  I’ll even go a little further with that idea.  What good is even having the Twitter icon on your site if you don’t have the feed displayed anywhere on your website.  There are tons of libraries that are using Twitter as a sort of “what’s up at the library” news service.  Yet, I really couldn’t find all that many that tied this news feed into their own news feed on their own library web page.  Why?  Why do these libraries have two different news feeds?  Which on should a patron pay attention too?  We spend so much time on authority records in our catalogs and databases, yet where is our authority control on our Twitter and news information feeds?  I don’t mean specifically what they are posting but the fact that there are two (or more) sources of different news information.  This is extremely distracting.  So a library patron has to subscribe to the Twitter feed to get information and check the library’s site for information, not good.

There are lots of widgets, plugins and other things that allow you to include all of these social tools (Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, YouTube) into your current web site.  I am just going to use Twitter as my example.  Twitter has its own widget that allows you to display your Twitter feeds on your site, all you have to do is copy and paste the code.  But lets say you don’t like the look of Twitter’s widget and how it displays on your site, there are other widgets and applications out there on the web that you can search for that will allow you do to this too.  Additionally there are ways to send your blog posting’s URL and title to Twitter.  And don’t forget about RSS.  If you there isn’t a widget out there that will do what you want, you might want to look at the RSS feed and figure out how you can import it easily into your page.

Why is having your Twitter, Blog site, YouTube account, SlideShare account, etc. tied into your library’s home page important?  Because the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  A library’s Twitter news account there hanging out on the web is not as useful or helpful by itself.  Same with the blog, YouTube, and slides from SlideShare.  How is a patron going to know you have a particularly helpful video demo on using PubMed and RefWorks if it is just on YouTube under the library’s YouTube account.  Sure you linked to it, but wouldn’t it be more helpful to be able to see the video within the library’s website? (I know many hospitals can’t access YouTube, in this example I am really appealing to the academic medical librarians.) Let’s say you have a bit of news for the library on a new database that is greater than 140 characters (Twitter’s limit).  You decide to write a blog post about this new database.  The blog is linked to on the web site.  Heck your library might even be grabbing the RSS feeds and be posting them on the web page.  But if you use a little widget you can get that blog feed put in Twitter which you now display the feeds on the News and Information area of your site.  Finally to use the Cornell and Loma Linda catalog Twitter feed example.  Take that Twitter feed and display it under the a section on your website labeled new books.  Loma Linda has a recent books  link, but that goes to a list that can kind of large and somewhat confusing to patrons. 

Wrapping all of this stuff together makes these sites more powerful in the context of the library and the library website.  It also makes these resources more valuable to us and our patrons.  Of course that brings me to the end of my presentation where I discussed making sure you evaluate your usage of these resources and try to determine your ROI.  Don’t just assume these things are doing there job and they are important to your library and your users, but measure them.  These applications are all very new and sometimes there aren’t the best things out there to measure usage (aka popularity) but look for something that might work.  If you are unsure about how to do this you really need to check out TechSoup’s Meeting Archive: Understanding the ROI of Social Media, it is specifically directed at nonprofits and libraries.

**Update**
I have had a few emails from people asking me about the time commitment for something like this.  Everybody is doing less with more and have little time to invest in new projects.  My response is, these things do require some time to create and get going.  But if done correctly and depending on how extensive your project, the upkeep is extremely minimal. 
Here is a an example:  Our library has an Inter and Intranet website.  Right now if a major system like OhioLink goes down we post a red note at the top of both home pages to let our patrons know about the problem.  To do this the web adminstator goes to our saved copy of each page, adds the news item, uploads it to the server, then we wait for a half hour to an hour for the server to refresh before our message is live.  If we add our Twitter feed to our page we won’t have to do all of that and any librarian could add a message, not just the web admin.  So if we discover Illiad has freaked out and isn’t working, any one of the librarians can go on Twitter write the tweet which is then automatically displayed on our home pages.   Easy squeasy. 
That is just one example and it illustrates how you need to have a plan for your social media.  Don’t just go out an adopt it because all the cool kids are doing it.  Look at what is out there and determine whether it meets your needs.  Too many libraries and librarians are creating Twitter accounts for the library without a plan and without logically tying it into library services.  They have Twitter accounts floating out there with news and information and they wonder about its effectiveness.  You have to make it relevant to yours and their situations for it to have a chance at being successful.  A link or the icon to the library’s Twitter feed without putting it in any context isn’t relevant to most users.

Those of you in the Midwest Chapter of MLA who were unable to attend the annual meeting this year in Columbus should be happy to know that several folks in Columbus have been doing some great blogging.  Read about Evidence Based Nursing Practice: Hospital and Academic Librarian Roles and other programs at ConnectMidwest, the blog for meeting.

That is a little bit about what Midwest MLA keynote speaker Clifford Stoll talked about today. While we don’t want to drag our heels to find information, the process by which we find it sometimes is lost. We have become a society that often relies on getting information fast but doing that isn’t always cheap and the information isn’t always good. He drew a triangle with words Good, Cheap, Fast at the corners and used food as the example of how we get things. You can get cheap food fast (ala McD’s) but it isn’t really that good. You can get good food for in a reasonable amount of time (ala restaurant) but it isn’t cheap. You can get cheap good food (home cooking) but it isn’t always that fast. Stoll says that most researchers want the right answers fast. But the right answers aren’t always fast, nor are those answers always right, especially in science. For many years people believed the correct scientific answer was that the sun revolved around the Earth. The process at getting the right answer is just as important answer. Sometimes by finding the answer you create more questions and in answering them you develop a completely new right answer to the original question. After all, if Copernicus had asked for the right answer quickly he would have never developed his heliocentric cosmology theory and we would still think the sun revolved around the earth instead of the earth revolving around the sun. Through out the history of medicine how many standardized medical treatments we have thought of as “right” have later been revolutionized and changed by another medical researcher? I am probably going to go out on a limb here but I bet that researcher didn’t ask for the quick right answer.

The MLA Leadership and Management Section blog is hosting regular discussions every Tuesday on “25 Counterintuitive Principles of Leadership.”  Check out the Leadership and Management column in the upcoming October 2009 MLA News.

While I am on the topic of leadership and MLA, I want to congratulate those who were selected for the 2009-2010 NLM/AAHSL Leadership Fellows Program.

 

The fellows and mentors selected for the 2009–2010 class of the leadership program jointly sponsored by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) have been announced.

Congratulations

Heidi M. Nickisch Duggan, Associate Director Galter Health Sciences Library, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University.

Irma Quinones, Interim Library Director, University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus

Bart Ragon, Associate Director for Library Technology Services and Development, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia

Debra C. Rand, AHIP, Director, Health Sciences Library, Long Island Jewish Medical Center North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System

Keir Reavie, Head, Biological/Agricultural Sciences and Map Services Department, Shields Library, University of California-Davis

The moment we have all been waiting for is here, PubMed’s redesign is live and available for everyone to poke and play with.  Right away the splash page is a bit of a departure from what we are used to.  At first glance I like how it appears cleaner and less cluttered, however it will take me some time to get used to.  For example I was looking for the Advanced Search feature underneath PubMed Tools near Citation Matcher and I couldn’t find it.  That is when it dawned on me that the link for Advaced Search is up above the search box. Oops I should have thought of that.

The newly redesigned PubMed is now accessible from a  link on the pubmed.gov page (New! PubMed: Try the redesigned PubMed) or directly from http://preview.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

The Midwest Chapter Medical Library Association’s Annual Conference is right around the corner (4 days away) and there are 15 papers and 31 posters being presented at the meeting.  Things are hectic at meetings (even the Chapter ones) time flies by and before you know it you are on your way home trying to remember everything you saw.  So for those of you who are going to the meeting it might be a good idea to check out the abstracts of the papers posters ahead of time online.  Reading the abstracts before the conference gives you the opportunity to formulate questions ahead of time and for the poster session it helps you prioritize which ones you need to see. 

Click here to check out the papers being presented.

Click here to check out the posters being presented.

For those of you who aren’t going to the meeting, it is even more important to read the abstracts of the paper and poster sessions because this may be the only time you see the information.  Who knows, maybe somebody presenting is doing something in their library that you have wanted to do too.  You might be able to contact them and bounce ideas or ask some questions.

On May 13-18 2011, the Medical Library Association’s Annual Meeting will be in Minneapolis, MN.  Gabe Rios (University of Alabama) and Bart Ragon (University of Virginia) are the National Program Committee (NPC) co-chairs.  Linda Watson (University of Minnesota) and Dawn Littleton (Mayo Clinic) are the LAC co-chairs.

The LAC co-chairs are looking for volunteers for to chair the two remaining Local Assistance subcommittee spots; Publicity and Promotion, Library Tours.

More details can be found on the blog of the Health Sciences Libraries of Minnesota: 

 

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/lmcguire/hslm/LAC-VolunteerCall-FINAL-Sept2009.pdfThese subcommittee chairs must be MLA members and will be responsible for recruiting volunteers for their subcommittee.  Those interested in volunteer for the subcommittee chair positions contact Linda Watson at lwatson[atsign]umn[dot]edu by October 10, 2009.

Last school year my son was asked to talk about his parents and tell the class what we do at work.  He responded, “My mom is a librarian at a hospital and she finds stuff in books and on computers to help doctors.”  I was so proud.  Of course then he described what my husband at work.  “I don’t know what my dad does but his work has a lot of computers with video games and they have two slides and a bouncy castle you can play in.”  My husband is a web developer and yes his company has two slides within the building that employees, including the CEO, have used to get the ground floor.  But the rest of the stuff, the computer games, Wii, Guitar Hero, bouncy castle, etc. are only at my husband’s work during the children’s holiday parties.  Since my son really has only been to my husband’s work when there is a party, he assumes his Dad has Wiis and bouncy castles at work all the time.  

My son’s perceptions of what each of us does in our jobs is colored by what he sees us doing and our work environment.  Obviously my husband doesn’t have bouncer at his work place every day, and at 6′ 5″ he probably is slightly over the height restriction for that type of entertainment.  But since my son really only sees my husband’s workplace during the parties, that is all he has to go on for a point of view of what his dad does at work. 

Each person’s perception is colored by what they have seen and what they have learned from experiences.  When I am at various social gatherings I am often asked what I do.  I respond that I am a medical librarian and then I watch as the glazed look flits across their faces and they get that deer in the headlights stare.   Most adults have not been in a medical library, many more adults (more than I care to think of) were last in a library when they were in college or high school, some go to the public library with the their children.  Their library experiences are usually not in medical libraries.  So the glaze in their eye comes as they try and match their library experiences with their hospital or medical experiences, for most people that isn’t always easy to imagine. 

Those preconceived ideas are part of what we medical librarians are always dealing with.  Even within our own work environment, we have people who don’t realize that a hospital can/should have a medical library and what a librarian does.  These people not only have their on experiences of what a library is but they are most often very busy and completely immersed in their own work world that they may be unintentionally walking by the library with mental blinders on. 

That is why it is important to get the word out to people about what we do and most importantly what we can do for THEM.  Earlier today Dr. Ves Dimov  alerted Twitter followers  of this article, “Ask-A-Librarian Column: What Exactly Do You Do? A Clinician’s Guide to the Medical Librarian,” in Clinical Correlations, the NYU Internal Medicine Blog.  In the article, Jamie Graham does a great job of explaining what medical librarians do and what they can do for the Internal Medicine Residents.  She notes that we aren’t always in the library, that we are out and about doing other duties within the hospital. 

Graham mentions that the NYU librarians can be seen at or doing:

• Clinical rounds
• Faculty council
• IRB sessions
• Help with group or individual workshops
• Finding patient education material
• Finding evidence-based clinical care information
• Teaching citation management programs (Refworks)
• Create Table of Contents alerts
• Find bibliometrics
• Teach how to prepare manuscripts according to NIH mandates
• Find medical multimedia
• Participate on institutional projects (NYU’s ALEX system)

I wanted to share this article with others in the medical library world.  Not only is it a great article but it is published in the blog for Internal Medicine residents and is aimed right at a core group users who may or may not know what a librarian does or what one can do for them.  Perhaps you have a few more things to add to the list, feel free to add them by commenting here.  Others can read Graham’s article and the comments and can create a newsletter article of their own for distribution. 

I know we are all looking at ways to get our message out and to draw users’ attention to us and our services.  Not all of us have slides and bouncy castles to grab people’s attention to our jobs, so we need to try every other method available.

We love Google Scholar, we hate Google Scholar, which is it?  It’s a complicated relationship.  Librarians use it to find trickly little articles that are hiding in some dark crevice of the Internet and we search it probably just as much or more than the rest of the normal world.  So why does Google Scholar draw such frustration with librarians at times?  Why do we do our best impersonations of  The Scream  at the reference desk when researchers, doctors and nurses claim to have done an extensive search on Scholar? Part of the reason is us (librarians) and part of it is Google.

We are nerds who know that the information in Google is not always right. Just like a Trekkie debating the merits and flaws of Star Trek, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, and all of the movies, we debate the merits and flaws of databases and information.  Google Scholar is just one of the various topics in our librarian geek debate camps.  As important as the debate over proper Klingon verb conjugation is in the Trekki community, it doesn’t usually impact the daily medical lives of many people.  (I know, I am going out on a limb there.)  Where as the information that librarians, researchers, doctors, and nurses retrieve from medical and other information databases usually does impact the lives of people.

As librarians we are trained to index, categorize, find and retrieve information.  As the Librarian Avenger  states, librarians “bring order to chaos.”  Nothing gets us more worked up than a database like Google Scholar that pretends to bring order to chaos.  I take that back.  Nothing gets us more worked up than when our patrons don’t realize that the Google Scholar database isn’t always right. 

Google Scholar indexes the full text of scholarly literature across many disciplines.  Yet Google keeps Scholar’s coverage and indexing a giant super secret.  Had Darth Vader employed Google Scholar creators, those pesky rebels would never have been able to sneak the plans out to destroy the Death Star.  This secrecy helps make Scholar a mess of a database.  Who knows what is in the that soup of information?  Some publishers do not allow Scholar to crawl their journals, but it is difficult for searchers know specifically which ones and adjust accordingly.  Like the unknown item in the Tupperware in the back of the fridge we don’t even know how fresh Scholar’s content is because it does not provide information on the frequency of its updates. 

As if not knowing what is in the database and how often it is updated isn’t bad enough, a recent article in Library Journal, “Google Scholar’s Ghost Authors, Lost Authors, and Other Problems” by Peter Jacso clearly will make any librarian (and should make any researcher) shudder over the idea of doing citation analysis within Scholar. 

Some of the problems Jacso found:

• False authors like P Login (for Please Login), P Options (for Payment Options), and a whole bunch related to author affiliation such as CA San Diego.
• Multiple listings of the same paper
• Mismatched citation information – Scholar ignores existing, correct publication years, page numbers, volume numbers, etc.
• Missing authors – Scholar in many cases replaces the real authors names with that of the false authors.

Really if it weren’t true it would make for a great comedy for librarians to laugh at, but with the 10.2 million records added from Google Books into the millions already within Scholar the story reads more like a B horror film. Not a campy one like Evil Dead, but more like the Blair Witch Project where despite the rave reviews (who gave that thing such great reviews anyway) leaves you nauseated and declaring it unworthy of even renting. 

However, I wonder if our patrons will even notice.  Will they even care about the fact that Scholar developers decided not to use metadata from scholarly publishers but instead built the database around a parser created by the developers and labeled as “imbecile” by Jacso?  Call me a cynical librarian nerd but I don’t think they will.  I have about as much hope that researchers will know or care as Jacso has for the Scholar developers to correct their massive mess. 

“The parsers have not improved much in the past five years despite much criticism. GS developers corrected some errors that got negative publicity, but these were Band-Aids, where brain surgery and extensive parser training is required. Without these, GS will keep producing similar errors on a mega-scale.”

WE may have a complicated relationship with Google Scholar and we will still be using it to find things, it is up to us, the Trekkies of the database searching world, to inform our patrons of the pitfalls as well as the promises of Google Scholar and to alert them to alternative resources and databases to use instead of Scholar. Because for every person who just wants something quick and easy, there are always those who happy to learn something new and will be amazed at what Scholar does not really do.