September/October 2001
volume 10, issue 5
|
|
PSRML Program Objectives, 2001-2006
The mission of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM) is to advance the progress of medicine and improve the public health by: 1) providing all U.S. health professionals with equal access to biomedical information; and, 2) improving the public's access to information to enable them to make informed decisions about their health. The Program is coordinated by the National Library of Medicine and carried out through a nationwide network of health science libraries and information centers.
As we begin a new contract for NN/LM programs and services in the Pacific Southwest Region, I'd like to review regional plans for enhancing health information access over the next five years. The following summary of our goals and objectives provides a framework for action. Please consult the web site for additional information, including specific objectives by program area [http://nnlm.gov/psr/reports.html], or contact any of us at PSRML [http://nnlm.gov/psr/staff.html].
PSRML goals are:
- To develop collaborations with NN/LM libraries to improve access to and sharing of biomedical information resources throughout the nation.
- To promote awareness of and access to biomedical information resources for health professionals and the public.
- To develop, promote, and improve access to electronic health information resources by network member libraries, health professionals, and organizations providing health information to the public.
In response to the National Library of Medicine's Request for Proposals for NN/LM services, and based on regional feedback and needs assessments during the previous contract, PSRML developed specific program objectives for 2001-2006.
Network Program Objectives
Maintaining a strong regional network structure is at the foundation of our programs to enhance information access. Thus, a major portion of the PSRML plan centers on network programs to serve regional health science libraries. These programs and services include: assessing the needs of health science libraries, offering training and demonstrations of electronic information resources and new information technologies, carrying out the network membership program to recognize and support your contributions (see related article in this issue), implementing the regional document delivery plan, coordinating regional Resource Library contributions, maintaining effective communications, and promoting funding opportunities such as NLM grants and regional subcontracts.
We will continue to publish our electronic newsletter, Latitudes, enhance and update our web site, visit network member libraries, collaborate with the regional Medical Library Association chapters, and participate in regional meetings. While PSRML will maintain a computer training facility at UCLA and will continue to conduct sessions at network member computer facilities, we will also be taking advantage of videoconferencing capabilities and web-based training approaches.
Because your participation and input are vital to the network, we have also developed programs for monitoring and evaluating regional programs and obtaining feedback from users for improving health professional and consumer access to information. We will be adding members to our Regional Advisory Committee, which will meet later in the year, and you will be involved in assessing, testing, and implementing NLM and NN/LM products and services. In partnership with network members, we will ensure a basic level of information services for regional health professionals, including access to information resources and services such as Loansome Doc. PSRML will continue to facilitate collaborations and partnerships between Network libraries and public and other types of libraries.
Outreach Program Objectives
The PSRML outreach program incorporates partnership with Network libraries in promoting awareness, facilitating access, and providing training in the use of health information resources for health professionals and the public. We again will be offering competitive funding support of your outreach projects targeted to underserved health professionals; the public; and public, school, and other librarians and information intermediaries.
PSRML direct outreach services will include training and presentations, as well as exhibits at national, regional, and state conferences of health professionals and of health organizations with a consumer focus. We will also work to identify and resolve inadequacies in Internet connectivity in the region. PSRML will continue efforts to reach underserved health professionals in rural and inner city areas, public health professionals, and special populations. We will work with a variety of intermediaries, including health care providers, public health professionals, public librarians, educators, community organizations, health advocacy groups, faith-based organizations, and self-help groups, to reach members of the public.
All of us at PSRML look forward to continuing our work with you over the next five years! EG
|
NN/LM Membership Renewal: An Invitation
This Fall, PSRML will conduct a membership renewal drive to mark the beginning of the new NN/LM contract period. We will issue new membership certificates to replace the current certificates that expire at the end of 2001.
There are two key issues with this membership drive. First, we need to make sure that our member information is complete and accurate. When new DOCLINE was brought up last year, membership information was migrated from the national Network Membership Directory into DOCUSER. Now it is time to update that information to provide the best service to member libraries, health professionals, and the general public.
Second, NLM has defined a new membership category, Affiliate Member, because of the increasing numbers of nontraditional health information providers. Thus, there are now two membership categories, Full Member and Affiliate Member. NLM has defined these categories as follows:
A Full Member can be any health sciences library or health-related information center, institution, or organization that: (1) is regularly staffed; (2) has an Internet connection; (3) has its own collection of health sciences materials (books, journals, audiovisuals, electronic databases); (4) provides information services to health professionals and/or the general public.
"Information services" must include DOCLINE® participation, and should include the following:
Answering or referring reference questions;
Performing information searches.
Members are encouraged to provide Loansome Doc® service to their own users and/or to unaffiliated users.
An Affiliate Member is a library, information/resource center or organization that is called on for health information by its users, but which does not meet all of the criteria for Full Member participation. An Affiliate Member might form a cooperative relationship with a Full Member, for example, for reference assistance or document delivery.
Both categories of membership have the following benefits and responsibilities:
Responsibilities:
Each Full Member and Affiliate Member institution must agree to make the following contributions:
- Designate an individual as the local contact person for network information/communications.
- Be listed in the national registry of network members. National registry information is available online through the DOCUSER® file.
- Provide basic information on collections and services to NLM and to their Regional Medical Library (RML) by keeping their DOCUSER® record up-to-date.
Benefits:
Each Full Member and Affiliate Member will receive:
- A certificate, which names the institution as a recognized member of the NN/LM
- An invitation, on a periodic basis, to provide input to its RML on the region's programs and services, and invitations to apply for various funding opportunities
- Access to interlibrary loan services available to the network
- Special mailings of NLM posters, brochures, and other publications
- An opportunity for librarians from their institution to be considered for service on the RML's Regional Advisory Committee
- Enrollment on their regional electronic discussion list if requested
Membership Renewal Process
To begin this membership drive PSRML will mail each member a letter, inviting you to renew your membership. Libraries that participate in DOCLINE will be directed to update their DOCUSER records directly and to then submit an update confirmation on the PSRML web site. For libraries that do not participate in DOCLINE, PSRML will mail a copy of the network member record. These libraries will be directed to return their corrected records to PSRML, and PSRML staff will enter the corrected data into DOCUSER. PSRML will review the membership information and make final determinations regarding membership category.
PSRML will then order a new membership certificate for each member institution. We plan to send these certificates to members well before the end of the year, and we hope to include a special memento with each certificate.
Because this is the first time we will validate the information in DOCUSER, we ask everyone's cooperation in submitting complete information. Accordingly, we will include appropriate instructions in our mailing. If you have any questions, please feel free to call Andrea Lynch, Network Assistant, or Julie Kwan, Library Network Coordinator, at 310-825-1200 or 800-338-5389.
We thank you in advance! JKK
What's Remote Got To Do With It? Document Delivery 21st Century Style
Alice Witkowski and Kellie Chang
Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery Services, Hawaii Medical Library
The Hawaiian Islands are among the most isolated places on earth. Did you know that Hawaii is farther from another landmass than any other place in the world? The Islands are about 4,000 kilometers from the nearest continent and 3,200 kilometers from the nearest high-island group (the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia). Remote or not, 21st century technology has given the library staff an opportunity to provide and receive documents from anywhere with just a mouse click or two. Even time constraints melt away with Ariel, email, DocMorph, and a strong commitment to customer service!
Document Delivery: Lending to Libraries and Individuals
Being anywhere from 2-6 hours behind the mainland libraries gives Hawaii Medical Library the opportunity to provide documents to libraries that get that late afternoon "rush" request. As distance is non-existent on the WEB, a six pm rush from NYC can be received, scanned and emailed to the library or the patron before HML closes in the evening or before the requesting library opens the next morning. For Loansome Doc users, Kellie Chang, HML Interlibrary Loan Coordinator, will convert the photocopied or "TIFF" article into PDF format (via DocMorph) prior to emailing it to the user. We have found that most users want the PDF format and are reluctant to convert the files themselves. Note: Aloha "RUSH" Spirit = Do it now!
Bye Bye Miss American Smail: Getting Materials for our Users
"Sure we can get you an article from a mainland library, but it will take anywhere from 2-3 weeks to receive it." This phrase is almost gone from our collective ILL memory now. Using DOCLINE or OCLC, we only order from libraries that supply materials via Ariel or Email. Even fax has now become a second delivery choice. As part of the Hawaii consortia of libraries, we will also use CISTI or BRI in Canada at discounted rates. Both deliver by Ariel or fax within 24 hours and are good sources for difficult to find journal articles. As our resident Internet sleuth, Kellie will search the web for direct access
to authors or publishers when traditional ILL routes come up empty. Recently, she received an article faxed directly from an email request to India within 12 hours. While mail is passé, the telephone is sometimes our only hope for extreme emergencies. The kind folks at UC Davis answered our late night call and faxed an article within thirty minutes for a very grateful user.
Actions and Results
To encourage our patrons to request articles through Loansome Doc, we routinely provide email delivery. We now have well over 100 satisfied Loansome Doc users. The results and responses to our new improved services continue to be rewarding. With the latest version of Ariel, we are planning to post all ILL documents to our website which will streamline delivery operations plus get more users to our website (hml.org).
Technology has helped our department to streamline operations, provide faster services, feel more connected to our mainland colleagues, and reach out to our customers with personalized services.
For more information contact:
Alice Witkowski or Kellie Chang
Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery Services
Hawaii Medical Library
1221 Punchbowl Street
Honolulu, HI 96813
Ill2@hml.org
Phone: 808-536-9302
Fax: 808-524-6956
(Editor's Note: Information about free use of DocMorph is available at http://docmorph.nlm.nih.gov/docmorph)
LinkOut at the US Naval Hospital, Guam
By Alice E. Hadley
This article represents the opinions of the author and not the opinions of the Department of the Navy or the Department of Defense.
I manage a one person library at the US Naval Hospital on the western Pacific US territory of Guam. This is a 59 bed, level 1 trauma, JCAHO accredited hospital 3,800 miles west of Honolulu, Hawaii, just north of the equator, with a staff of about 600. We have 135 paper subscriptions, about 900 textbooks, several Internet/WWWeb resources including MD Consult and Ovid, a WWWeb page and a Clinical Digital Library. We are in the GMT +10 time zone, on the other side of the Date Line from most of the US, so it is probably tomorrow here as you read this.
My primary clients are the 54 physicians and 10 physician extenders on our staff, but I also provide limited services to the civilian health caregivers in Micronesia, backup services for the nursing school at the University of Guam, and miscellaneous services for naval ships doctors in the Western Pacific. In addition I provide library services to the rest of the hospital's staff, serve as the consumer health information librarian for our patients and their families, and mentor the medical library managers at the US Naval Hospitals in Yokosuka and Okinawa, Japan. My library is a member of the Guam Library Network, the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, a full DOCLINE participant, and a FreeShare library. I have informal working relations with a number of federal libraries, especially those of the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration.
Because of the diverse and dispersed communities I serve, I am always looking for ways to provide service to the desktop. As soon as I saw the demonstration of LinkOut at the Medical Library Association meeting in Orlando, I knew I wanted to participate. It looked like the perfect answer to my problem of how to make our e-journals more easily accessible to authorized staff.
Implementing LinkOut turned to be easy. It took me about 6 (much interrupted) hours over 3 days to implement LinkOut. If you have already registered all of your e-journals, it will take less that 2 hours. I had a few snags, but they were easily resolved. I highly recommend that you consider becoming a LinkOut provider.
I had been slow to signup for all our WWWeb versions of our paper subscriptions. It was just one more item on my endless To Do List when I saw the LinkOut demonstration. The demonstration looked like exactly what I needed to make our e-journals easier to access. When I actually started going through the LinkOut registration, it turned out that of our 135 paper subscriptions I only needed to register 18 to begin (these covered 26 subscriptions, since we have 9 AMA titles that only collectively require one registration). Because we also have MD Consult, my users have 102 titles available through LinkOut
as of 6 August. Potentially more will be available every week as more providers register with NCBI.
If you are interested in trying LinkOut I suggest you:
- Read "LinkOut for Libraries" and the "Frequently Asked Questions: Library LinkOut Submission Utility" twice.
- Email NCBI at linkout@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, stating that your library would like to have electronic journal holdings represented in LinkOut. Provide the email address and phone number for a contact person from your library. They will send your contact a User Name and Password the same day.
- Get a GIF for the link (100 by 25 pixels). Your IT or PR department may have one or you can create one by printing your hospital's name in a word processing document and scanning that and turning it into a GIF.
- Get a copy of the list of your e-journals (or if you have not registered all of them, gather the address labels for them, decide on a Username and Password, and get a list of all of your IP addresses from your IT department).
- Go to LinkOut Files Submission Utility and activate your journals. I found it easier to look up the titles in the Journal Title list as I do not have my subscriptions identified by provider. I did use the provider list for the MD Consult titles as I could choose them all in one step.
You will save time if you understand HighWire Press and know if you have any e-journals through them. I was confused to discover that some journals in LinkOut are available through them rather than directly from the journal, and I still have to figure out what exactly is available through them.
I also discovered half way through my registrations that my computer department had forgotten to tell me about an IP address range. Luckily I was rejected for registration at one site because I was registering from a computer outside the range of IPs I was registering. I then went to what has become one of my favorite sites http://www.simflex.com/ip.htm and discovered a new IP range. This added about an hour to my registration as I had to locate all of the titles that require IP registration and then had to go back and update all of them.
It was interesting to learn about the convoluted world of e-journal subscriptions. This is an area that will continue to evolve and be confusing for years to come. I now also have a notebook with the mailing address labels of all my paper journals annotated with information on their e-subscriptions including which are in LinkOut. This will make several other projects easier and make updating LinkOut easier. I also have an additional Performance Improvement project to add to my list.
It is too early to know what the impact of becoming a LinkOut library will be on my users. They are all impressed and enthusiastic when they hear about it; however, based on past experience, I do not think they will actually use it. Unfortunately, the service does not work in the Summary view and the user must change to another view (Abstract or Citation). It seems like nothing, but asking the user to change view, and to one that is less compact than the Summary view, is just enough to stop the user from bothering to use the service.
I just read an excellent article by Sheila Hayes in the National Network 2001 July v.26(1):26 "Inspiring Patrons to Use Loansome Doc". I am going to try her method on getting users to try LinkOut. This might increase the number of people who use LinkOut.
To summarize my LinkOut experience: it is easier than I thought and helpful for accessing my e-journal subscriptions. Best of luck to you if you decide to try it!
(Editor's Note: NLM is aware of concerns regarding library icons and the display formats and is considering how best to make this information available to the user.)
Q & A: How to Activate Icons for More than One Library in LinkOut for Libraries
Question: I have a link to PubMed on my library's web page. It is set to show my library's icon for full-text holdings. Is it possible to show another library's icon as well?
Answer: You can activate several libraries in one PubMed URL statement by including multiple holding parameters separated by a comma, e.g.,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/quesry.fcgi?holdings=medlib,medlib2,medlib3
JKK
Needs Assessment Pointers
By Marilyn Wolf Schwartz
Naval Medical Center San Diego Libraries
Conducting Needs Assessments: A Practical Approach taught by P. Zoe Stavri, Ph.D. was a fast-paced afternoon class at MLA, Orlando, 2001. As Dr. Stavri cautioned, whole courses are offered on needs assessments, and only highlights can be covered in four hours. Here are some of the words of wisdom Dr. Stavri shared and some of my lessons learned.
People do not always know what they want because they may not know what technology is available to help with their work. Sometimes, we can only measure probable needs. A case in point is the introduction of Personal Digital Assistants (PDA's). People may not have realized how beneficial PDA's could be when they first came out.
Dr. Stavri emphasized the importance of having top administration's support to make changes. A Needs assessment is a decision-making tool with the following rationale:
- Assist organizations in planning programs
- Assist organizations in allocating resources
- Provide valid and reliable information to better target services
- Prioritize efforts
- Help to target and market to underserved populations
A needs assessment is a "snapshot" of where the organization is versus where it wants to go. The assessment must have value, and the designer must have in mind what resources can be used to make changes once the data is collected.
Design factors important in developing needs assessments are:
- WHY? One reason may be that you want to justify increasing the budget.
- FOR WHOM? A higher authority person or group may mandate the assessment.
- WHEN? Is the survey time sensitive because of technology or budget?
- TARGET POPULATION? The groups are primary (doctors, nurses), secondary (students) and tertiary (secretaries or assistants sent by doctors or nurses)
- WHAT TO ASSESS? Content? Knowledge? Service?
Assessing content could mean evaluating a journal collection; assessing knowledge could mean designing a class; and assessing service could mean look at 24-hour access. A guiding force in these assessments is to have the prospect of making improvements. Keep the purpose in mind and understand limits to making changes.
The three steps in the planning process are:
- Pre-assessment: Look at the strategic plan, appoint a committee with a leader and determine the level of existing data. This existing data may be taken from previous needs assessments and look at what information is outdated and what data may be re-used. For example, our last survey asked users if they wanted the Library to copy articles for them. That was a stupid question, but we started the service and will not ask that question again. Existing data could be demographic information from the institutional or community setting.
- Assessment. In planning the assessment, limit the scope of necessary data to be collected. Establish availability of resources such as time, personnel and funds. Decide which methodological approach to use whether it is surveys, interviews, focus groups or electronic discussion groups. Try to remain neutral about the outcome.
- Post-assessment requires evaluation of needs after collecting information, analysis of data and placing priorities on new services. Then, evaluate impact of any additions or changes to current situation. And finally, figure out solution strategies keeping in mind, that to be successful, buy-in is important for both management and staff. Library school students are good candidates to help sort out the survey results.
Choosing participants may be handled in several ways including random sample, stratified sample, total population and convenience sample. Remember that if you put the survey on the web, you'll only get people who use the web to respond. Make sure you consider factors such as the different hats users may wear as they look for information and the current workflow with blocks or barriers they run into. The key informants are the ones who know what is going on in the organization and may not always be library users.
Methods to consider include looking at secondary data that already exists such as search logs, user statistics, interlibrary loan requests.
- Surveys are commonly used. Be sure to pre-test the survey on a group of at least 9 people (your buddies) to check if questions make sense and perhaps to time people so that you can say on the beginning of your survey, "This survey will take _x_ minutes to complete." Use as many open-ended or indirect questions as possible. Allow multiple ways to respond via fax, email, and snail mail. Don't forget that incentives work. How about a box of chocolate, candy bar, book or other prize to entice participants?
- Interviews often make use of the "critical incident" technique to find out about potential use of information resources. A critical incident prototype question would be: "Tell me about the last time you needed information beyond what you already know to solve a problem in your work role?" If you do phone interviews, be sure to make appointments so that people won't feel like you are interrupting them like telemarketers calling during dinner. Finally, pre-test the phone interview to make sure the questions are clear when spoken over the phone. I said "library" not "liberry."
- Focus groups require some specialized training to handle and a trained moderator is needed. Remember MLA has a course on this taught by the expert and author, Beryl Glitz. Focus groups can both mask and reveal minority points of view. Do some interviewing of key informants and ask who is willing to be in a focus group. Even Pizza Hut uses focus groups to test their newly created recipes, so libraries can use them to test radical new services.
- Consensus reaching technique requires a great time commitment. An example of this technique was used during the development of the plans for a Library of California because the groups had to agree on appropriate resource sharing. An example of a question using the Delphi technique to reach consensus would be to have a key in