A special reminder as we ring in the New Year!   Your Regional Medical Library for the NN/LM PNR offers funding opportunities for network members!  Proposal instructions vary by type of award, but here’s a summary about deadlines for applications.

Our larger awards support personnel, travel, equipment and other costs for 9-12 months projects to implement innovative services in your organizations, or to conduct health information outreach in your communities. Current opportunities for larger awards include: Medical Library Pilot Project awards; Express Outreach awards; Technology Improvement awards; and Outreach to Under-Connected Health Organizations subcontracts. For each award, proposals will be accepted until February 1, 2012. However, if you plan to submit a proposal, we need a brief statement of intent no later than January 13, 2012 to help our planning process. Please submit your statement of intent to apply to nnlm@uw.edu. 

We also fund smaller awards to support costs for Professional Development, Assessment and Planning, Exhibiting, Training, and EFTS activities by network members.   We welcome applications at any time for these ongoing funding opportunities.

So, if you work in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon or Washington, and are a Network member of the PNR, send us your proposed ideas so we can help put your projects in motion.  Our funding page will be continuously updated with the latest information about available awards and descriptions of projects we’ve funded.

This is an award of up to $5,000 for projects that promote the value of health information services offered by an information professional within the organization or community. Projects could include:
•Working with public relations staff or a firm to develop a promotional/branding campaign;
•Using social media to highlight health information services; or
•Holding a special even that advertises new or unique services.

Also available on on ongoing basis are the Professional Development Awards, as well as Exhibit Awards, Training Awards, Assessment and Planning Award, and EFTS Awards.

For more details see the funding announcements linked above, or contact Patricia Devine, devine @uw.edu, 206-543-8275.

The Homer Public Library, in collaboation with the Friends of the Homer Public Library and local emergency responders, held a month of activities aimed at increasing the community’s emergency preparedness thanks to a $5000 NN/LM Community Preparedness Day Award.  Events, which were timed to coincide with national Disaster Preparedness Month, kicked off on September 21st with a special Story Time about safety and natural phenomena that occur locally, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

On September 24th the library hosted a Community Preparedness Day. Area emergency responders gave 15-minutes presentations throughout the day on emergency preparedness issues.  In addition, the public was invited to visit information booths operated by various agencies, including the Alaska Division of Forestry, the Homer Volunteer Fire Department, the Kenai Peninsula Borough Office of Emergency Management and the Homer Senior Citizens.

One of the biggest draws of the day was the bright orange buckets, used to distribute 75 emergency preparedness kits funded by the award.  These buckets included a first aid kit, an emergency radio, and pamphlets from FEMA and the local veterinary clinic on how to prepare for an emergency.  The bucket itself was a useful water-storage device.  Community members, including the Homer City mayor, flocked to the library to pick up their buckets and then stopped by the booths to fill those bucket with more safety information.

Additionally, on September 28th the library hosted a forum for survivors of the 1964 Good Friday earthquake to tell their stories.  More than a dozen survivors shared compelling stories to an audience of over 30 people, imparting wisdom and perspective about the very real risks faced by Alaskans living on the “ring of fire.”

The Homer Public Library is also purchasing materials on emergency preparedness, survival, self-sufficiency and related topics to better serve this end-of-the-road community.  The activities and material funded by the NN/LM award have improved community awareness about emergency preparedness and placed helpful tools into the hands of Southern Kenai Peninsula residents.

Note: If you organization is interested in holding a Community Preparedness Day event, we are currently offering funding.  Please see the funding announcement – applications are due December 16, 2011.

The purpose of the Disaster Health Information Outreach Project is to design programs for improving disaster medicine and public health information access for health professionals, first responders and others (paid or volunteer) that play a role in health-related disaster preparedness, response and recovery. Emphasis is on providing information or access to health and medical information in a way useful to the target audiences, and increasing the awareness and utilization of high-quality professional-level online medical and public health information resources on disaster, all-hazards, and emergency topics including resources from the National Library of Medicine. The purpose is also to promote new and creative collaborations on disaster health information needs among and to the mutual benefit of librarians, information specialists, or informationists and the disaster workforce.

Approved projects will be funded up to $15,000.

For more information, see the full funding announcement or contact Gail Kouame at gmarie@uw.edu or 206-221-3449.

Proposals will be accepted until February 1, 2012. However, if you plan to submit a proposal, we need a brief statement of intent no later than January 13, 2012 to help our planning process. Please submit your statement of intent to apply to nnlm@uw.edu.

This is an award of up to $5,000 for projects that promote the value of health information services offered by an information professional within the organization or community. Proposals are due December 30, 2011 and projects must be completed by April 30, 2012. Projects could include:

• Working with public relations staff or a firm to develop a promotional/branding campaign;
• Using social media to highlight health information services; or
• Holding a special even that advertises new or unique services.

For more details see the funding announcement, or contact Patricia Devine, devine @uw.edu, 206-543-8275.

Thanks to all who entered the contest by submitting their stories of advocacy and outreach during the month of October. Your stories provided insights, ideas and best practices about how you’ve shown your worth. We hope to continue this tradition in years to come, so keep your wheels turning and plan to share your ideas with your colleagues in the NN/LM PNR.

We also welcome articles from our Network members about other projects you may be working on, even if they didn’t fit the criteria for this contest. So keep us in mind. Contact Patricia Devine.

Medical Librarians: Your Ultimate Search Engine.

Definition: A search engine is a web site that collects and organizes content from all over the internet. Those wishing to locate something would enter a query about what they’d like to find and the engine provides links to content that matches what they want. http://realestate.about.com/od/sv/g/defsearcheng.htm.  In other words, we as medical librarians locate, collect, and organize in order to provide needed information for our patrons. The statement that medical librarians are the best resource when searching for health information goes beyond the usual perception that we can obtain or retrieve information. It also applies to the expanding role of creating vessels that assist in organizing and assembling information to create better access for our patrons.

Medical librarians have spent hours and hours online as users with a unique perspective. We not only are seeking requested information, but during our searches we are also observing and analyzing the organization of the site and its information. We can’t help it; we are wired to notice how the information has been arranged. It is like an artist noticing the colors or the composition of a painting. We notice the headings, the format, and the overall philosophy of each site we search. We appreciate those sites or repositories that make it easy to locate the information that we want. We have become experts in knowing what works and what doesn’t. So now with so many do-it-yourself technology tools such as websites, blogs, SharePoint, DropBox, Publisher, Audacity, Movie Maker, YouTube, (and the list goes on and on) that will allow anyone to create their own container to house information in various formats, the challenge then becomes what technology tool best suits their needs and how should it be designed.

Because of our expertise we can help with this. Many might see this as an extra service, where others view it as a necessary role. Medical librarians have always connected the user to the needed information and we do this very well. This new role of technology tool advisor is the same concept, but with a different wrapping. It helps the user to organize information so that it can be accessed and shared. When you think of it these sites are kind of growth off-shoots of the library. We have so much to contribute; we truly are ultimate search engines.

The goals of Community Preparedness Day are to:

• Encourage, strengthen and/or expand library partnerships with first responders and community emergency management personnel
• Provide access to emergency management information tools and resources for families or other target populations
• Integrate and involve libraries in emergency preparedness, response, and recovery planning
• Promote and publicize the roles libraries, faith, or community organizations can play in emergency preparedness
• Strengthen and expand medical and public library partnerships

Applications from libraries and other organizations are welcome.

Consideration of requests for funding will begin on December 16, 2011. Proposals should be submitted using the Community Preparedness Day Award Application.

For additional information, see the full funding announcement or contact Gail Kouame, NN/LM PNR Consumer Health Outreach Coordinator at gmarie@uw.edu, 1-800-338-7657.

I am surprised.

Many of us know the worth of medical librarians. We know we provide valuable services for our patrons and our facilities. We also know how we can help others who don’t yet know about our services.

Some of us are not afraid to speak up to promote our services. And some of us are. That’s not the profession; that’s our individual personality or our own distinctive style.

I am surprised at the number of colleagues who told me that perhaps their supervisor or direct report doesn’t know it is Medical Librarians Month! As someone who is initially very shy, I learned firsthand the importance of speaking up in addition to letting my work results speak for itself.

For a long time, I was a solo librarian with a small medical library tucked away in the corner of a hospital basement. Time has taught me the value of speaking out proactively about library services. It is very easy to fall into the trap of “well, everyone knows about us.” There are typically numerous clinical staff changes over the course of a decade. Even if your library is part of an orientation program, chances are, not everyone knows about your library or implicitly understands your services. And if they knew about the library, they may not know it is Medical Librarians Month at this very moment!

I stand in awe of those librarians having fabulous promotional activities in their libraries. They do a fantastic job of promoting their services.

As I typically do each October, I quietly put up a reusable colorful sign indicating Medical Librarians’ month on the library exit door, changed our voicemail greeting to announce Medical Librarians Month, and add one short line to my email signature. I didn’t do an announcement for our hospital newsletter. Instead, this year, I nonchalantly cc’d my Administrator when I sent an email to my staff about how appreciative I am of them in recognition of Medical Librarians Month.

Later that same day my Administrator’s assistant called for us to schedule a lunch with him – for which we three librarians got to pick the restaurant. During the delightful experience of having lunch away from the facility, we had his undivided attention. What a perfect time to tell him what the library needed!

Instead, we asked about how things were going for him. We were treated to some great inside information regarding his personal workload along with a variety of Administration projects. It was very enlightening for us, and there were a few times we librarians discreetly winked at each other during the conversation knowing that we’ve got the skills to support him and some of the Administration projects. We’ve got our Administrator’s back.

All because of a simple cc on a short email. I am surprised … and pleased.

Be Vital or Be a Museum Exhibit

I know history, and about my forebears, in addition to being a healthcare librarian for Massage Therapists.  I can tell you from historical perspective that any profession that failed to provision for and support its depositories of knowledge ended up with only the consolation prize; an exhibit in a natural history museum.  Mad Hatters, anyone?

Massage Therapy as a form of medicine has a very long history, and can be found in practically every culture.  Despite that long history, a concerted effort to conceptualize and structure a true Body of Knowledge began only five years ago.  Because I know a bit of history, I’ll tell you about The Grotto Library historically.  This library was literally created from the remnants of a simple 4’x8’ wooden box at a long-time Massage Therapy school in Seattle.  The overarching institution integrated with another competitive school a few blocks away, which itself had a small, neglected room with a few hundred books.  Whereas the institution wanted the library to be, they had no plan or time or strategy.  The simple mandate was “to take care of the library, and by the way, there’s no budget.”

That was 2008.

From barely 400 books and some magazines, The Grotto Library now maintains nearly thirteen percent of the world’s possible resources for Massage Therapy (donation drives for the win).  I scoured the online world of libraries looking for best practices, better mechanics and organizations.  I created an online catalog and website right away.  I had no budget, so that was self-funded.  Also from that search, from watching instructors in classes and students asking for more information in different modes, I developed a downloadable Internet browser-based Toolbar with the help of a third party vendor called Conduit.  This Toolbar aggregates online links to our periodicals, medical animations, videos, the library’s online catalog and the catalogs of several others to boot.

With that Toolbar in place and available for library patrons to download for themselves, I actively pinged one of our research instructors – I wanted to present the new library during classes.  He liked that idea, and the feedback from that class at term’s end showed a remarkable improvement in their acceptance of research as more approachable (as it can get).

Part of my strategy was to be as mobile as the people I intended to help, and although that meant the intuitive leap to mobile app as an tool, my strategy was about helping graduates in their practices.  The former schools allowed graduates to use their respective libraries, but didn’t allow for anything other than a reading room.  I altered that philosophy so that graduates had regular access to their library for the rest of their lives.  I also wanted to help the employers of our graduates by granting them access to the library’s services too.  Electronic, peer-reviewed periodical access was another benefit I added.  I wrapped that into a basic mobile app for all platforms, and then added the online catalog search to it.

Our school was already on the forefront of Massage Therapy research by actively introducing students to peer-review and case study information as part of the curriculum.  Since 2005, our students have won Gold, Silver or Honorable Mentions in practically every Student Case Report Contest provided by the non-profit Massage Therapy Foundation.  Unfortunately, graduates from years past had little context for massage research; I had to introduce that as part of the library’s dialogue.  I extracted periodical articles that spoke about research and massage.  By sending these out to our graduates, I slowly geared them up by asking and answering: 1) yes, there was a new library system they could use, 2) research isn’t a scary thing, and 3) here’s how the library wants to impact their practice.  This little push was the start of a larger-scale endeavor I was planning for the next year.   Before 2008, we barely saw graduates.  With this new effort, we saw or heard from graduates a lot.

I increased the exposure of the library by adding a new program called Author Spotlights.  I would invite authors of this profession to give a talk to our population, and that has drawn many graduates back to the school.

That was 2009.

Students need to know a lot anatomy.  They feel it under their hands, but being able to see it visually (or three-dimensionally) was something I wanted for them.  The National Library of Medicine, of course, had the Visible Human Project.  I applied and was granted full access to both the male and female data set (18,000 images of two cadavers, centimeter by centimeter).  Obtaining the data was easy.  Integrating it into the curriculum was easy.  Making the data available on library computers wasn’t so easy.  Turns out, old computers and new, large format files don’t mix well together.  I contacted a third party vendor called CoolIris about their fancy scrolling wall application.  Very soon, our old computers could display hundreds of images in a scrolling wall akin to scrolling apps on a mobile phone, at a reasonable speed.

Part of the overall strategy from Day One (which was scanning ISBNs into the catalog, oh how I remember that well) was to create a Library-in-a-Can model that could easily be replicated across the eleven other campuses of the institution.  I submitted a five year proposal that would actively alter those basic libraries (boxes of books is some cases) to be fully functional branch libraries; I would be their Head Librarian.  The proposal included a year-by-year plan to acquire books and access our digital periodicals here in Seattle.  I intended to push the entire Visible Human Project to each campus as well.

Massage Therapists are the third-most licensed healthcare profession in Washington State, and only the third if you lump all physicians and surgeons into one group.  They have access to Heal-WA, and I became an advocate for that.  I can’t tell you how many faculty or graduates have stopped by hoping to get a journal article from there.  I tell them I can’t do it myself, but here’s how they can do it for themselves using the handy front page search field.  “What do you mean you haven’t logged in before?  Tsk, tsk.  Did you know there are a ton of ebooks and even some CE there too?”

That was 2010.

For graduates, however, who aren’t so conveniently located within a few miles of the library, I had to plan for their predilection to move about in the United States willy nilly.  Having access to the various campus libraries nationwide wasn’t sufficient enough, by my way of thinking, to qualify as a baseline.  With a slight poke at my institution to get them moving, I submitted an application to the network of the National Library of Medicine.  Of course, that was accepted.  I wanted our graduates to be able to reasonably access other healthcare libraries wherever they ended up practicing, and so the NN/LM provided more than a few extra perks.

Those perks included very handy library evaluations and reporting tools.  Very handy!  For every $1.00 spent by my institution (now that I can show objectively that I really, truly need and want a larger budget), the return to the institution and patrons is $6.45.  Our three major contributors towards Value of Resources and Services are: 1) books and periodicals, 2) articles accessed and 3) computer-use.  Following in close fourth place was the Toolbar being downloaded and utilized (which we quantified as $25 per based on costs from Toolbar uses in other industries).

Fifty three percent of students in the 2011 summer term said the library had a major contribution to completing assignments and finding information (reported a 5 on a scale of 1 to 5), whereas only three percent said it had only a minor contribution (reported a 1).  Eighty four percent felt the library helped them achieve academic excellence (reported 3 to 5 on that same scale) in this summer term; 81% in spring term 2011.

The year 2011 draws to a close.

The Visible Human Project is now on its way to each campus even as I write this.  The Toolbar has over a 1,000 downloads.  I see every research-based class each term, whether presenting the Librarian’s Perspective on Research to basic research students, to a full-on field trip to the library for the entire class.  I’m assisting the Massage Therapy Foundation with the establishment of a Toolbar of their own.  There’s a possibility that an additional ten schools unrelated to our institution may want to integrate under the library and library system I created.  So far, I and The Grotto Library directly serve the accrediting requirements for four schools, and may well serve twenty-two by the end of next year.

What else?  I now have a volunteer Library Advisor, a graduate of our program, to assist me in collection and re-describing materials into ‘therapist-speak’.  Although my larger institution couldn’t move fast enough to meet the deadline because of competing needs, I had intended to submit a subcontract proposal to the NN/LM to create a Professional Massage Therapist Mentorship Program as part and parcel of the library’s mission:

• To support Massage Therapists’ professional education
• To enhance research endeavors
• To help maintain safe and efficacious client care

What else?  Even as students sign-up for school, I am there with a handy Welcome Kit (PDF by email) giving them some library factoids, and fun anatomy and physiology online games to play while they wait for their term to start.  I consider that one piece of my active part in the school’s retention policy.  I introduced the idea of a musculoskeletal anatomy and massage class (MAM) as an additional pre-schooling activity, and volunteer to help the instructor each time.  ‘Academics’ hasn’t always been a good experience for some, and if there is a symbol of academics, it would be the library.  I don’t want people to be afraid of the library by association.  By volunteering in the MAM class, I hope to put a smiling, approachable face to anyone who may feel that way.  Do they even know what a librarian does?  They do after that class.

I am still the Patron of the library, sometimes funding projects our institution can’t, but always looking out for free resources.  I’m amazed at what can be found for free, and not having a large budget is necessity’s mother.  That’s about it then.

Let’s see what 2012 brings.