Heidi Sandstrom and Claire Hamasu spent four days in January with Network member librarians in Northern California. They attended the January 27 Executive Board and Business meetings of NCNMLG and the evening program that followed. They subsequently conducted a series of workshops in San Francisco and Sacramento.
At the NCNMLG meetings, Heidi and Claire updated members on NLM and PSRML developments and enjoyed hearing about this MLG's involvement in various projects. Tom Rindfleisch, guest speaker for the evening program, drew upon his experience with the Comm ittee on Maintaining Privacy and Security in Healthcare Applications of the National Information Infrastructure to explore the security and confidentiality of the patient record in the digital age. One of the committee's findings is that it is not the co mputer hacker that threatens confidentiality, as much as it is the lack of policies and regulations that apply to the myriad number of personnel in the healthcare industry who handle patient records (e.g. health insurance employees). For The Record: Protecting Electronic Health Information is the result of the committee's work. You can read it online or order it from the National Academy Press at URL: http://www.nap.edu/readin groom/enter2.cgi?0309056977.html
What a treat it was to use two new training labs for our workshops, one at the Barnett Briggs Medical Library at San Francisco General Hospital, the other at the UC Davis Medical Center Library. Special thanks to Rick Scott at Barnett Briggs and to Te rri Malmgren at the Medical Center Library for making all the arrangements for these workshops.
Class participants at the "Resource Sharing Workshop" were introduced to a number of the lesser know features of DOCLINE and its related systems. Future challenges/opportunities for document delivery in the Internet environment were also discussed. C lass participants of the "IGM & PubMed: For the Librarian" class were challenged to visualize a working version of PubMed as NLM fixed the PubMed bugs in the first week of a new release. Suggestions from class attendees for improving the interface were compiled and forwarded to the National Library of Medicine. The most frequent requests included the ability to abbreviate subheadings, set searching capability, and the addition of the metathesaurus.
Following the San Francisco workshops, Heidi Sandstrom was given a tour of the Patient Education Resource Center (PERC), located within the Barnet-Briggs Medical Library. This Center has an extensive collection of patient education pamphlets that se rves the needs of the San Francisco community. Following the Sacramento workshop, and in the midst of El Nino's fury, Heidi Sandstrom also visited several libraries in the Sacramento area. These included the Sutter/CHS Health Resource Center Library, th e Mercy Healthcare Sacramento Regional Library, the VERY NEW Sutter Roseville Medical Center, and the California State Library. It's a pleasure to see the many ways services are implemented at the "front lines"!
PSRML staff haven't had the opportunity for an extended visit in Northern California in some time. Many thanks to all for such a welcome reception-we're looking forward to our return!