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Dragonfly

Newsletter of the NN/LM PNR
Spring 2004 -- Volume 35, Number 2

In this issue:

Articles

New Class Focuses On Hospital Library Evaluation

by Betsy Kelly
NN/LM MidContinenetal Region

Colorado Council of Medical Libraries sponsored a new workshop, Measuring Your Impact: Using Evaluation to Demonstrate Value, in Denver on April 2, 2004. Betsy Kelly, NN/LM MidContinental Region (NN/LM MCR) and Maryanne Blake, NN/LM Pacific Northwest Region (NN/LM PNR) with Cathy Burroughs, Acting Associate Director of NN/LM PNR and Assistant Director, Outreach Evaluation Resource Center (OERC), developed the workshop in response to growing concerns about hospital library closures. Hospital libraries are facing numerous challenges. These include the rising cost of library resources, cuts to library budgets and staffing, and increased workloads. At the same time the "everything is free on the Internet" syndrome is rampant. Librarians are looking for ways to demonstrate their value to their institutions not only to save their jobs but to ensure that health care professionals and patients and their families have ready, reliable access to health information.

Librarians may know instinctively, may even have statistics to show that library resources - both staff and print/electronic - are used by their communities but hospital administrators want more proof than the number of books and journals shelved, the number of searches conducted and the number of interlibrary loans processed. Demonstrating value can show the impact of the library on the organization's mission and goals, show accountability, serve as an advocacy and marketing tool. Being proactive rather than reactive is imperative.

The workshop emphasized the importance of librarians understanding and addressing the organizational mission when developing evaluation plans. MLA is devoting resources to library survival. It's Librarian's Survival Kit on the MLA web poses the question "Are you jeopardized by hospital administrators only concerned with the bottom line; or merely by those uneducated about what a real librarian does?" and stresses "No matter what the reason, address the priorities of the organization as a whole, instead of attending only to the needs of the library. Do not use your jargon; use their jargon. …. Show that you meet the needs and further the goals of the organization." (http://www.mlanet.org/resources/survive/index.html)

The workshop included discussions about assessing the library and its communities, choosing what to evaluate, developing a logic model that describes the activities and resources needed to provide library services, designing an evaluation plan, collecting and making sense of the data and communicating results.

Participants learned that the assessment phase will help the evaluator understand needs, desires and problems, validate assumptions about services, and provide data for later evaluation. When choosing what to evaluate consider who wants or needs to know what, what users feel is important, and what certain stakeholders want to have evaluated. Choosing what to evaluate helps the evaluator articulate what you want to accomplish. Using the plan backward, implement forward concept, once you know where you want to go you can plan how to get there. Logic models help articulate what you do or will do to get where you want to go. The evaluation plan describes the tools that will be used and the resources needed to carry out the evaluation. It also defines "success" - how you know that you've achieved your goals. Knowing what you want to measure will dictate whether surveys, observations, skill tests, self reporting through interviews or focus groups, or other measures are most appropriate. Knowing who will use the results of your evaluation will help you narrow your data collection approach. Some of the currently popular analysis tools discussed include cost/benefit analysis, return on investment, balanced scorecard approach and benchmarking.

Finally, the participants considered reporting results. Issues such as audience, the purpose or use of the report, format, and dissemination strategies will affect who receives an executive summary, charts and graphs, or the full report. It is important to have interested parties outside the library review drafts to ensure there is a clear link between conclusions, recommendations, results and the original evaluation question. While the traditional written report is always useful librarians are encouraged to be creative. Photo essays, posters, Q&As on library websites, presentations to hospital professional and administrative staff, and publications in respected journals are all effective ways to get your message across - the professionally managed hospital library is an invaluable and irreplaceable resource for administrators, practitioners, patients and families and the greater community.

Dragonfly, Spring 2004 -- Volume 35 Issue 2

New Directions for the Tribal Connections Website

by Miles White, Editor and Writer
Tribal Connections Project, NN/LM PNR

We have embarked on a new direction with the Tribal Connections website that may be as innovative as it is bold. The website, developed by Tribal Connections Project Manager Roy Sahali and others over the years, continues to be a valuable database for health related resources for Native Americans and Alaska Natives, and that will not change. The website is an important outreach tool to the American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities and for promoting National Library of Medicine (NLM) online resources like MedlinePlus. What we have begun to do over the last several months is provide editorial content in the form of news articles and features about health and wellness issues.

We're attempting to do two things with this approach. First, we want to provide reader-friendly information about critical issues or topics in the news related to Native American health. We hope to make available information that will be interesting to both health professionals and to consumer health information seekers. Secondly, we would like to help raise awareness of Native American health issues in the general population and among Native Americans and Alaska Natives themselves by promoting Native American health writing, an area that has generally been overlooked by the major media.

Most recently, thanks to funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, we have contracted with a local Native American physician and herbalist, to write a regular column that combines western and Indian approaches to healing and healthy living. We are also working with an Native American nutritionist and dietitian to develop a regular column that will focus on food and nutrition. In addition, we have begun to seek out Indian writers who have an interest in writing health news articles for Tribal Connections. Finally, we are working with the Native American Health Writers Institute, a new project based at the University of New Mexico-Gallup, to publish Native American writers who have an interest in doing health writing in their own communities. Tribal Connections is a member of the Native American Journalists Association, and we distribute all our editorial content to online Indian newspapers across the country and allow them to reprint our features at no cost, since many Indian newspapers cannot afford to hire health writers. So far, our efforts have been well received both within the NN/LM and by Native American/Alaska Native members who have viewed the site, and we are grateful for these responses. Our challenge in the near future is to continue the direction we have started while expanding our scope to become more inclusive, with features and news articles from across Indian Country and from our various NN/LM regions. We'd love to hear from anyone who would like to contribute articles for the website. Visit us at http://www.tribalconnections.org.

Dragonfly, Spring 2004 -- Volume 35 Issue 2

Produced by the NN/LM PNR
Maryanne Blake, Editor
Michael Boer, Publication Manager

This publication is funded in whole with Federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. N01-LM-1-3516.

NN/LM | UW HSL | NN/LM PNR | Contact us: nnlm@u.washington.edu | Revised: May 12, 2004