We apologize, but there are networking issues with the Webcast.  The technical team is working on it and we hope to have it resolved for the RAC meeting which begins today at 12:00p.m.. We will be recording the meeting nonetheless. Additionally, minutes of the meeting will be available on the MAR Website in the future.

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NN/LM MAR is pleased to announce that on March 15, 2010 Neil Romanosky joined the NN/LM MAR staff as Network Services Coordinator.  Neil received his MSLIS from Pratt Institute, and a MS in Communication and Information Studies from Rutgers University.  Most recently, Neil served as Interlibrary Loan & Delivery Services Librarian at Columbia University, New York, NY. Before joining the library profession, Neil held senior editing positions in the publishing industry. In 2009 Neil was named an ALA Emerging Leader under sponsorship from Reference and User Services Association (RUSA). Please join me in welcoming Neil to the NN/LM MAR.  Neil can be reached at the following address: neil.romanosky@med.nyu.edu .

In an effort to make YouTube videos more accessible to the hearing impaired, Google will now allow their Auto-caption software to be used on all English language videos.   The captioning is done by voice recognition software so it may not be perfect depending on the voice track, background noise, etc. Google also plans to expand it to other languages eventually.

Read more about from the official YouTube Blog

Colleen Cuddy

We are delighted to announce that Colleen Cuddy has been named Interim Director, NN/LM Middle Atlantic Region. She assumed her duties on January 1, 2010.

Colleen joined NYULMC in 1998 and has served the library in many capacities.  In 2007, after a national search, she was promoted to Deputy Director of the NYU Health Sciences Libraries and received promotion as Associate Curator in the NYU Curator track in the same year.  A nationally recognized leader in the field, Colleen has specialized in technology and systems applications in libraries.  She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Library Information Technology Association and is the Chair of the Medical Informatics Section of the Medical Library Association.  She has been the recipient of two prestigious fellowships supported by the National Library of Medicine, the AAHSL/NLM Leadership Program and the NLM/MBL Bioinformatics Program in Woods Hole, MA.

Please join us in congratulating Colleen on her appointment and in thanking Dr. Karen Brewer, who retired at the beginning of this year, for her many contributions in her role as Director.

Posted On Behalf of the NNLM MAR Value Study Planning Committee:

An Update on a Study: The Value of Library and Information Services in Patient Care

Background

The goal of the “Value of Library and Information Services in Patient Care” initiative is to develop and implement a research study to measure the value of the health sciences library, library services, and librarian on clinical decision making and patient care outcomes.  From a discussion at a November 2006 meeting of the Regional Advisory Committee (RAC) of the Middle Atlantic Region, National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM), emerged the issue of establishing the value of health sciences libraries to administrators in hospitals, academic health sciences centers and other organizations where librarians work.

In the RAC discussion the “Rochester study” [The impact of the hospital library on clinical decision making: the Rochester study. Bull Med Libr Assoc. 1992 Apr; 80(2):169-78] was mentioned as an influential, highly-cited (109 times) piece of research that was now seriously out of date.  The Regional Advisory Committee recommended moving forward with planning a new study based on the original Rochester study, but updated for the present day.  [See: Measuring the value and impact of health sciences libraries: planning an update and replication of the Rochester Study. J Med Libr Assoc. 2009 Oct;97(4):308-12.]

The Value Study Planning Committee is comprised of members of NN/LM and researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).  Julia Sollenberger, (principal investigator), Karen Brewer, Susan Cavanaugh, Kathel Dunn, Sharon Easterby-Gannett, Mary Lou Klem, Lynn Kasner Morgan, and Kate Oliver comprise the NN/LM members.  We have developed a research plan in consultation with Joanne Marshall, now on the faculty of the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Information and Library Science, and one of the original authors of the Rochester study.  The other UNC members are:  Jennifer Craft Morgan, Susan Rathbun-Grubb and Cheryl Thompson.  The plan is to reproduce the original study in the current environment, and to include as many hospitals as possible in the MAR region. The survey is to be administered by a private survey company and analyzed by the research group at UNC.

A Problem

Funding for the entire study (just over $144,000) is coming from the MAR program, which is itself funded through the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM).  However, in the spring of 2009 the National Library of Medicine alerted us to a potential problem — all surveys funded by government agencies (including NLM) must be approved by the US Office of Management and Budget, (OMB), and this process could delay the study by at least 12 months.  The only time-saving solution seemed to be funding the survey itself (the programming and administration of the survey by an independent survey company) with non-NLM funds, which would alleviate the need to get OMB approval. The actual cost of conducting the survey is approximately $18,000.

Library Groups Save the Day

Through the generosity of twelve different regional and national library groups, financial support for conducting the survey was secured.  By October, 2009, the following groups had agreed to contribute to this important initiative:  the Hospital Library Section of the Medical Library Association, the NY/NJ Chapter of MLA, the Philadelphia Regional Chapter of MLA, the Upstate New York and Ontario Chapter of MLA and all eight of the New York State Reference and Research Library Resources Councils.

Where We Are Now

Due to the generous support of these groups, we are now at a point where the study will soon be implemented.  The planning committee has completed survey development and a handbook for the study participants; the research plan is going through the UNC Institutional Review Board; and the survey will soon be pretested.  We expect to implement a pilot in the spring of 2010; libraries in the MAR Region will be contacted soon as we begin to recruit pilot participants.  The actual survey will begin in late summer.  The research team is very busy, but excited to be so close to implementation. We are grateful for your show of support and look forward to sharing more progress updates.  Please stay tuned!

St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital in Newburgh, NY, an NN/LM member, provides extensive resources on it’s library website to the physicians, nurses and staff.  Training on the library website and resources is provided through new staff orientation and in-services.  Previously, there was not a good tool for users to be able to find help utilizing resources on the library website.  A pocket folder had been provided with information in the pockets, but the information sheets kept falling out and there was no organization to the resource sheets.

Through the Micro Awards Grant that St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital Library received from NNLM for Orientation and Training Folders and Tabs, the library was able to purchase clear front color folders and tabs to organize information and resources.  The project goal was to provide organized and easy to use folders that could not only be used for training, but could also be utilized at any time for information on accessing any of the resources on the library website.  The tabs in the folder mirrored the tabs on the website, allowing users to correlate the resource information sheets with the actual resources.  They could then easily find information on resources such as PubMed, LinkOut and Loansome Doc under the tab in the folder that matched the section on the website.  Different colors of folders were used for the varying types of users, blue for physicians, red for nurses and black for clinical staff, so that resources relating to each type of user could be placed in the color coded folder.

There were 225 folders that were use for a period of five months with positive feedback on their utilization.  The number of users accessing the library website increased 10% from the prior five months.  The results and usage have been encouraging and have helped provide justification to continue the project of purchasing the folders with tabs and correlating information on resources with those on the library website.

Sample Folder from St. Luke's Cornwall Hospital Library

Twila Snead
St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital
Medical Library
70 Dubois St.
Newburgh, NY 12550

From ars technicha:

The CRA (Copyright Reform Act)  is a new project from Public Knowledge, with much of the heavy lifting being done by the Cyberlaw Clinic at Stanford and the Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC-Berkeley. While Berkeley’s noted copyright scholar Pam Samuelson works up a new “model statute” for copyright law in the digital age, Public Knowledge hopes to make smaller interim fixes to copyright law that won’t require the same dramatic reworking.

To read more about their project and how they hope to clarify fair use read the ars technica article in full.

On behalf of Alan Carr, Outreach Coordinator at NN/LM Pacific Southwest Region:

Hello Everyone,

In light of the recently released changes to PubMed, I wanted to let you know that the following trifold brochures have been revised and updated, and are available for your use:

PubMed Basics, http://nnlm.gov/training/resources/pmtri.pdf

PubMed My NCBI, http://nnlm.gov/training/resources/myncbitri.pdf

Full Text and PubMed, http://nnlm.gov/training/resources/fulltexttri.pdf

Searching PubMed with MeSH, http://nnlm.gov/training/resources/meshtri.pdf

Loansome Doc, http://nnlm.gov/training/resources/ldtrifold.pdf

Also revised:

Gateway Basics, http://nnlm.gov/training/resources/gwtri.pdf

MedlinePlus for Health Professionals, http://nnlm.gov/training/resources/mp4hptri.pdf

Alan

Alan Carr, Outreach Coordinator

NN/LM Pacific Southwest Region

UCLA L. Darling Biomedical Library

310-825-7263

acarr@library.ucla.edu

The new product developed by Google has just been announced. The name of the new product is “Google Buzz” which will integrate social networking features such as status updates and picture sharing into your Gmail account and your cellphone.

Read more about the features of Google Buzz.

Over the summer and fall of 2009, the Hospital for Special Surgery’s (HSS) Library teamed up with the Greenberg Academy for Successful Aging (GASA) (a collaborative program between the HSS Public and Patient Education Department and New York-Presbyterian Hospital’s Irving Sherwood Wright Center for the Aging) program to use funding from the NNLM Mid Atlantic region to achieve 2 program goals:

• We implemented a training series, for seniors that was age and information appropriate.
• We integrated health information resources from NLM, NIH, and other credible health information sources into GASA community outreach and health education programming.

The trainings entitled were held over 8 weeks at the Carver Senior Center/ Casita Maria in East Harlem. 20 students, all of whom were clients of the center of the center were enrolled.

The classes began with instruction on how to set up an e-mail address and get on the Internet. Students then learned to surf the net to find disease and drug information in English and in Spanish. They were introduced to websites where they could check doctors’ credentials, compare hospitals by quality and procedure volume, and even find the neighborhood pharmacy that charges the lowest price for specific prescription drugs. Throughout the course they developed the skills to determine if a health website is up to date, reliable, and free from biased opinions. Most importantly, students learned that sharing the health information found online with their doctor is a great way to begin a dialog and start a conversation that will lead to a stronger patient/provider partnership.

We modeled our program off the course structure put forth by the National Institute on Aging in the NIH Senior Health toolkit, (http://nihseniorhealth.gov/toolkit/toolkit.html) We added a section on social networking, healthy computer use, (ergonomics, posture, etc.) and NOAH (New York Online Access to Health – http://www.noah-health.org/.) The trainings used the computers in their own center and we were able to enlisted volunteers from the center to assist participants during the hands on portion of the classes. There was one facilitator for every 4 or 5 students.  We feel our successful was primarily due to these 3 factors: class structure, location and local resources, and the student to teacher ratio.

Along with the class, the initiative with the Greenberg Academy for Successful Aging programming led to nearly 600 hundred participants in the Greenberg Academy having been introduced to reliable online health information resources related to their area of interest.

All in all, the program exceeded our expectations and a warm relationship was nurtured between HSS staff and the Carver Center clients.

Report submitted by

Timothy Roberts, MLS, AHIP
Medical Librarian
Kim Barrett Memorial Library
Hospital for Special Surgery
robertst@hss.edu