While we promote health literacy for patients and consumers (http://nnlm.gov/outreach/consumer/hlthlit.html), we should also take the opportunity to reach out to the decision makers and planners in our institutions to help them become health literate. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) published a discussion paper earlier this year describing the “Attributes of a Health Literate Organization.” As institutions make decisions about how to help patients become more literate about their health care, librarians can aid in the process by sharing information with various groups in the institution. This can be an excellent opportunity to shine as a crucial player in the healthcare decision making process and also market your library to key stake holders. Please take a moment to read the document from the IOM to see how you can help your partners in health care increase their health literacy. For more information, please contact the RML @ 800-338-7657 (choice number 1 on menu) or dmidyette@hshsl.umaryland.edu.

IOM Link: http://iom.edu/Global/Perspectives/2012/Attributes.aspx        

by Sheila Snow-Croft, Public Health Coordinator

This week is National Public Health Week (NPHW), organized annually by the American Public Health Association, in an effort to spotlight issues important to the public’s health. This year’s theme is “A Healthier America: One Community at a Time.” For overall information see http://www.nphw.org. Books and resources, a planner’s guide and toolkit, media outreach materials, legislative information, downloadable logos and many other resources are available. For events across the country, see the calendar at http://www.nphw.org/events/calendar.

Each day of the week will focus on a different aspect of the overall theme:

• Monday - A Healthier America and YOU: The impact your health has on your community
• Tuesday – Your Community: The impact your community’s health has on the nation
• Wednesday – Your School: How education and school policies can improve students’ health
• Thursday – Your Workplace: How healthy employees and healthy businesses can effect real change
• Friday – Your Nation: How the nation’s health is dependent on all individuals and communities.

 Also, Friday is also National Public Health Student Day.

 Here are just a few of the activities SE/A Network members are doing to spotlight National Public Health Week. Feel free to add your own institution’s activities in the comments section of this blogpost. Together, one community at a time, we can make a Healthier America!

•  The Health Sciences Library at Mercer School of Medicine in Savannah is doing a book sale. 
• St. Petersburg College Health Education Center in Florida, together with the National University of Health Sciences, is having a panel discussion on “Healthy Living – How To Incorporate It Into Your Daily Life.”
• The Graduate Program in Public Health and MPH Class of 2013 at Eastern Virginia Medical School are sponsoring an event called “Got Wellness? Get It…” and the Edward E. Brickell Medical Sciences Library will have a booth to promote free consumer health information.
• North Carolina State University is doing  a display on healthy and safe walking with pets
• Geethra Sridaran will be providing a health literacy class for South Cobb Regional Library, part of a series of these classes she has been providing on her own time for public librarians in the area.
• Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at the University of Alabama Birmingham is hosting a PHSA-sponsored poster display on injury prevention, having an HIV-testing day at the library, and staffing a booth at the Public Health Research Day event on Tuesday where they’ll be demoing their new evidence-based public health LibGuide.
• The NIH Library in Bethesda is making this a month long activity by (1) highlighting staff that support researchers working in the field of public health, (2) promoting National Public Health Week, (3) promoting a public health resource, and (4) discussing ways to stay abreast of what is going on in the field.  Look for their work at (http://nihlibrary.nih.gov/pages/default.aspx)

Date:  April 18th, 2012

Time:  Noon to 1:00 pm (EST)

Presenter: Janet Schneider

Bio:  Janet Schneider is recently-retired Chief of Library Service at the James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital in Tampa, Florida.  She was instrumental in the formation of one of the first VA patient education library programs in the nation in 1976, and has spent her professional career in promoting the librarian as an integral part of the health care team. She has worked to advance the rights of patients to access reader-appropriate evidence-based information, including their own health records, in order to make informed decisions about their health care. She has chaired the VA Library Network’s (VALNET) Consumer Health Library Panel, and has authored numerous articles and one book chapter on patient education and consumer health issues. She began a formal information therapy program in 1997, and has been involved with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs electronic patient health record program “My HealtheVet (www.myhealth.va.gov) since its inception in 2001.

Presentation:  Electronically Embedded:  Librarians and the Electronic Medical Record

Electronic medical records (EMRs) are increasingly being implemented by health care organizations and private practitioners.  The benefits to patients and health care organizations are great, providing continuity of care and patient safety through clinician access to one’s comprehensive health records. Librarians have the opportunity to provide point of care resources directly through the EMR as well as participate in information therapy services, to provide consumer health information in collaboration with the referring clinicians. A case report of how  Veterans Healthcare Administration librarians are providing services and resources through the VA’s Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) and My HealtheVet web portal will be presented.

How to get connected:

What do you need to join these conferences?

• A computer (with Flash installed)
• A telephone

How do I connect?
Go to this URL: http://webmeeting.nih.gov/beyondthesea
Enter as a Guest
Sign in with your first and last name
Follow the instructions in the meeting room to have Adobe Connect call your phone or call 1-800-605-5167 and enter the participant code 227471 when prompted.

Presenter: Debra Ozga, National Library of Medicine

In the context of MEDLINE®, the Medical Text Indexer (MTI) system consists of automatic machine-learning software for applying alternative methods of discovering MeSH headings for citation titles and abstracts and then combining them into an ordered list of recommended indexing terms.  This Webinar will describe the structure and workflow of the NLM Index Section as it relates to the ingestion of an ever increasing number of articles, citations and abstracts which require indexing in MEDLINE®.  MTI and similar applications fall under NLM’s Indexing Initiative (II) which is designed to investigate methods for automatic and assisted indexing to enhance access to NLM document collections.   MTI, and its newer version, MTIFL (Medical Text Indexer First Line) are solutions used, in conjunction with reviewers, in completing the individual steps/tasks that result in a finished citation/abstract in MEDLINE®, searchable through PubMed.

As Head of the Index Section at the National Library of Medicine, Deborah Ozga manages the unit responsible for MEDLINE indexing and quality assurance. Prior to joining NLM, Ms. Ozga held a variety of administrative and information specialist positions, at The Catholic University of America Libraries, the NIH Library, and the Library of Congress, and taught the core course on information access as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Maryland iSchool at College Park.

To hear this webconference, please go to our list of previously presented web conferences.

This article will be the first in a series of “What We Learned” articles where staff from the NN/LM SE/A write about conferences they’ve attended, sharing insights and experiences with the SE/A Region.

From February 26-28, 2012, MJ Tooey, Dale Prince, and Andrew Youngkin of the NN/LM SE/A attended the 2012 Annual Conference of the National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) in Philadelphia. The theme of the conference was “Born of Disruption: An Emerging New Normal for the Information Landscape.” Topics included big data curation, the latest data from Pew, the effect new technologies have had upon publishing and libraries, cloud computing, and transformational technologies such as HTML5 and the semantic web. Following are MJ’s, Dale’s, and Andrew’s impressions of the conference.

M.J. Tooey

The point of attending the NFAIS conference was to feed my need to be a sponge. So often we go to meetings and our time is taken up with committee meetings, obligations, “have to do’s.”  Sometimes, I like to go to meetings, be relatively anonymous, and not have to do anything but soak up trends and disruptive information. I then revel in turning the ideas over in my head. And this was an excellent meeting for that!  The top 10 things I learned at NFAIS were:

1. There is great synergy across the trend cosmos. Recently I have seen great synergy from NFAIS to Horizon to my trend reading. The synergies? Data as a hot topic. Learning analytics. Mobiles and tablets (about 50% of the people in the room at NFAIS who were using devices had tablets). Open everything (access, source, data). The Internet of Things!
2. “The new normal is rarely built by the old normal.” John Wilbanks, Senior Fellow, Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation.
3. We need to train an entire new profession of data curators. John Wilbanks sees that as an opportunity for community colleges and librarians. Jim Neal from Columbia sees is as a role for librarians.
4. John Wilbanks also feels we should use open data to determine embargos – a data-driven open access policy?
5. What is tweckle? Heckling someone on Twitter.
6. Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet and American Life Project makes me smile with all his cool statistics. He considers Pew a “Fact Tank.” Some statistics and facts?
• 80% of Internet users use broadband enabling people to become content creators (bloggers, Twitter, personal web sites, tagging).
• Mobile subscribers have more connected devices than there are people in the U.S.
• 50% of all adults use social networking.
• His new reality?
1. People shift between platforms easily depending what they need to do.
2. Influence is moving from organizations to networks and new experts.
3. Attention zones have changed – continuous partial attention to media. It’s hard to get off the grid. Info-snacking!
4. New information divides are emerging based on tech literacies.
5. Plan for the future based on uncertainty – what do we do best? What is our commodity? Who are our natural allies?

7. View The Nano Song if you are at all confused by nanotechnology. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFoC-uxRqCg
8. Taliesin Benyon (or Talie as we call him) of Wolfram Alpha astounded everyone in the room with his presentation on computational knowledge. I can’t even begin to describe the visualizations and the way it manipulates data. There’s that data stuff again!  www.wolframalpha.com
9. Lee Dirks of Microsoft Academic Search showed how next generation scholarly discovery could look. Microsoft has developed a free API for non-commercial research use only. There are graphic representations of impact, author and institution profiles, and other interesting ways to manipulate publication data. I searched myself – I have no impact on anything. Feeling much humbler now. http://academic.research.microsoft.com
10. Hung LeHong of Gartner Research spoke of Gartner’s Hype Cycle: Technology Trigger>Peak of Inflated Expectations>Trough of Disillusionment>Slope of Enlightenment>Plateau of Productivity. Don’t we live through that cycle every day? He also spoke about the Internet of Things where everything will be connected to the Internet – cars, chairs, television (imagine a device hearing what you are watching on tv and sending the commercials to your iPad), mirrors that can become iPads, plants that tweet you when they need to be watered, streams of information being deliver to students and faculty based on what they are doing.

Bonus take: The most sobering thing I heard was from the final keynote speaker, Joseph Esposito, who has worked in and with the publishing industry for years. One of the points in his talk entitled, “Predicting the Present,” was for publishers to bypass the librarians and go to direct consumer marketing. There’s no money in libraries with their declining budgets so even though it requires investments in IT, it is the only area where there is potential for growth.

Like I said, this conference made me think.

Dale Prince

After this conference NFAIS strikes me as one of those well-kept secrets that I wish I had known about sooner. I was greatly impressed by the caliber of the speakers they had lined up for this relatively small group of participants: Lee Rainie from Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project; Taliesin Benyon from Wolfram Alpha; and Thomson Nguy from Amazon’s Web Services. Of course MJ and Andrew will probably find others more impressive, but these are the projects that spark my imagination. Without Wolfram Alpha, Siri on the iPhone would be just another voice recognition application that misunderstands what you say. Pew is essential to anyone applying for a technology grant, and cloud computing is the future of functional services, even for libraries.

Sadly, Neither Benyon’s nor Nguy’s slides are available on the NFAIS site (see below to the link to the program and slides), but Lee Rainie’s are. I think that Rainie’s talk was, in some ways, the highlight of the program, not necessarily because it was more important than the others, but because it established a baseline for what the new normal is. It’s what Pew is best at: telling you who is doing what on the internet and how they do it. But other speakers addressed, directly, some matters concerning medical libraries, particularly scientific collaboration and data management. The opening speaker, John Wilbanks, Senior Fellow, Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation (his slides are available) said that data publication was not the answer to our problems—there’s just too much of it. It must, instead, be standardized and he suggested that an entirely new professional class of data curators needed to be trained. And John Kunze, Associate Director, University of California Curation Center, California Digital Library, presented the idea of a “data paper,” a structured coversheet that links to archived artifacts with information such as title, date, authors, abstract and persistent identifiers that provide just enough data to permit basic exposure and discovery.

Because two others will be adding their impressions, and I want to avoid TLDR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) comments. I will cut off my impressions there.

Andrew Youngkin

For me, the 2012 NFAIS conference provided an excellent balance of both the practical and the theoretical. I was able to come away with some specific tools, trends, and applications that could be quickly and easily put to use. I also gained some valuable ‘big picture’ perspective—what I’d call my 10,000 foot view on the most significant trends and emerging technologies poised to alter, influence and, yes,—disrupt the information landscape as we know it.

First, the big picture stuff. The main theme of the conference was what will be (or has already become) the ‘new normal’ of the information landscape. Many of the speakers touched on the increasing importance of linked, open data—both in the private and public sectors and across industries—specifically publishing, academia, and science. (Some technologies I noted were OpenPhacts and Public Library of Science (PLOS)). I was also struck by the phrase ‘ubiquitous computing,’ or the idea that the computer (in any/all forms) should effortlessly extend your consciousness and create a feeling of calmness for users. A great insight into what many users desire and what technology design ought to encompass. Another big trend, one which we’ve been seeing, and will continue to see take effect, is that of ‘the untetheredness of mobile’ as one speaker phrased it. With advances in mobile computing and acceptance of handheld devices among users (often multiple devices), faster, cheaper, and more efficient wireless Internet access, and the ever developing possibilities of cloud computing and geo…well,.. geo-everything, users have been and will continue to be less restricted in how, when, and where they access and use information.

With regard to the more specific—there were many trends, topics, and unique resources I found very exciting. Cloud computing applications such as Evernote, Dropbox, and Pandora were some of the favorites mentioned. Another speaker talked about the Internet of Things—a term used to describe the connectedness of more ordinary objects, giving an example that even the most mundane of objects—a chair—could theoretically be connected to the Internet at a relatively low expense—to capture interesting data about that chair’s use, it’s location, even its physical health (time to replace?), providing data to support high level serious functions like inventory supply management and event planning. Screens and sensors will start becoming more commonplace—screens being integrated into car dashboards and bathroom mirrors, while sensors can be built into pill bottles to track drug consumption or into flower pots to regulate the hydration needs of your household Ficus. Computing and data will increasingly be used for predictive analysis—from discovering people’s potential purchasing habits to regulating driving habits to set insurance premiums. There will also be a significant uptick in technologies versed in media recognition and augmented reality—applications that will convert the language of a street sign (Word Lens) or provide song/artist information upon ‘hearing’ music (Shazam) or assessing the popularity of a place or things at a particular geographic position—or the interests of people in a particular place based on what sorts of things they’re taking pictures of (Crowd Optic).

The program and accompanying slides can be found at http://www.nfais.org/page/361-program-2012-nfais-annual-conference.

Addendum

Here is the link to an edited, article version of the presentation given by Joe Esposito that MJ mentions above: Predicting the Present, via The Scholarly Kitchen. The slides and text of the presentation are on the NFAIS site.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is conducting a needs assessment for the Hazardous Substances Data Bank (HSDB).

Please assist us in gathering valuable information from current and potential new HSDB users by completing the following online survey. Your feedback will help NLM determine future enhancements and/or changes that may be necessary to better serve users and to ensure that HSDB continues to be a valuable toxicology and environmental health resource in the future.

The survey is available at HSDB Needs Assessment Survey. We would very much appreciate your response by April 3, 2012.

Thank you for your time, input and interest.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=6dwQV3gn9efOhrwMaBwylg_3d_3d

NLM has decided to end its support for ToxSeek. For ten years the National Library of Medicine has supported ToxSeek, a research project involving natural language processing and semantic technology.

This federated-search engine helped users to search across diverse biomedical and environmental health resources and provided a method for locating information resources on topics related to toxicology and environmental health.

Since there are now several comparable alternatives for users needing a federated search, such as Science.gov (http://www.science.gov), NLM will realign the resources to support other mission-critical programs.

ToxSeek will not be available after March 23th, 2012.

Please direct any questions to tehip@teh.nlm.nih.gov

Date:  March 21, 2012

Time:  Noon to 1:00 pm (ET)

Presenter: Debra Ozga, National Library of Medicine

Beyond the SEA: March 21, 2012 – The National Library of Medicine – Medical Text Indexer: An Update

Time: 12 pm ET

Topic: The National Library of Medicine – Medical Text Indexer: An Update

In the context of MEDLINE®, the Medical Text Indexer (MTI) system consists of automatic machine-learning software for applying alternative methods of discovering MeSH headings for citation titles and abstracts and then combining them into an ordered list of recommended indexing terms.  This Webinar will describe the structure and workflow of the NLM Index Section as it relates to the ingestion of an ever increasing number of articles, citations and abstracts which require indexing in MEDLINE®.  MTI and similar applications fall under NLM’s Indexing Initiative (II) which is designed to investigate methods for automatic and assisted indexing to enhance access to NLM document collections.   MTI, and its newer version, MTIFL (Medical Text Indexer First Line) are solutions used, in conjunction with reviewers, in completing the individual steps/tasks that result in a finished citation/abstract in MEDLINE®, searchable through PubMed.

As Head of the Index Section at the National Library of Medicine, Deborah Ozga manages the unit responsible for MEDLINE indexing and quality assurance. Prior to joining NLM, Ms. Ozga held a variety of administrative and information specialist positions, at The Catholic University of America Libraries, the NIH Library, and the Library of Congress, and taught the core course on information access as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Maryland iSchool at College Park.
How to get connected:

What do you need to join these conferences?

*   A computer (with Flash installed)

*   A telephone

How do I connect?

Go to this URL: http://webmeeting.nih.gov/beyondthesea

Enter as a Guest

Sign in with your first and last name

Follow the instructions in the meeting room to have Adobe Connect call your phone or call 1-800-605-5167 and enter the participant code 227471 when prompted.

Interview conducted by Terri Ottosen, Consumer Health Coordinator, NN/LM, SE/A Region

Cynthia Vaughn and Martha Earl, medical librarians at the Preston Medical Library, University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville, have been invited and sponsored by both the U.S. Embassy in South Africa and the Library and Information Association in South Africa to teach public librarians how to access the best available health information on behalf of their communities. By making this trip and providing training, they hope to provide families throughout South Africa with valuable education and information so they can make informed decisions about health care and do their best to keep their families healthy.

Cynthia and Martha will conduct numerous workshops throughout South Africa to help community librarians successfully navigate and access the wealth of quality online health resources. The National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM) developed the classes, and the workshops are patterned after those utilized in “A Simple Plan Extended,” a project Vaughn and Earl participated in where they taught health information to librarians throughout Tennessee. The schedule includes presentations in major cities such as Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pretoria and Durban, as well as in the areas of KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga.

Before they left, we had a chance to interview the pair. We wish both safe travels and much success! To follow their progress, please read Cynthia’s blog: http://tn2sa.wordpress.com. 

Interview Questions for Cynthia Vaughn and Martha Earl

South Africa Outreach Project

How did you become involved in the project that led to the invitation by the U.S. Embassy in South Africa?

As part of the Outreach State Planning group, Rick Wallace at ETSU obtained an NN/LM award to teach in three Tennessee regions. Later, we partnered with him and Nakia Woodward of ETSU in order to extend the outreach. This project was called “A Simple Plan Extended.”

What is your background or story that led you to do the work you do?

Preston Medical Library has been involved with consumer health for over 20 years.  Outreach to the communities in rural Tennessee is just a natural part of that mission.

What other outreach experience(s) led you to this project?

Preston Medical Library’s consumer health program began as a partnership with the Tennessee State Library and Archives (TSLA) and the Knox County Public Library.  Martha has participated in the Tennessee Continuing Education Planning Summit organized by the TSLA.

Why are you targeting the public librarians in South Africa for this training? Do you think other groups might benefit as well?

We were asked to target the public librarians! While there, we will also have the chance to meet with several medical librarians and find out more about what kind of partnerships are (or are not) currently in place.

What do you love most about the outreach work you do? 

Cynthia: The people. Everyone has a story, and I love meeting new people.

Martha: Consumer health outreach empowers the consumer and the librarian to take care of their own health, and the health of their family and community. 

What is the biggest challenge you encounter in your work? What do you think will be the biggest challenge during this trip?

Here, one of the biggest challenges is health literacy, or more specifically, the lack of health literacy. Also, time is a big obstacle … there is just not enough time to do all the outreach desired.

We expect some degree of language/cultural barriers. Another challenge could be issues with technology.

What do you see as the biggest health concerns in the communities you will provide health information training and instruction?

From the preliminary research we’ve done, HIV/AIDS is the top health concern. We think we’ll also be asked about how to find information about at-home treatments for common ailments and prevention of other communicable diseases. Other major issues are maternal/child health and nutritional challenges.

Can you share a success story about the impact of health outreach in your community? Or, what do you anticipate to be the impact of this trip?

Some of the library staff in the Tennessee outreach told us that what they learned in our classes helped them to make smarter decisions about their health and healthcare, as well as for their loved ones.

What advice would you give others who are interested in doing similar health outreach work in their communities?

Go for it!  This Tennessee project was funded by an award from NN/LM. Contact them … the librarians there have resources to help you plan and succeed with your goals.

After the project is completed, do you anticipate future collaboration or outreach either locally or internationally?

We have talked about doing outreach again in 2014 or so to the same regions in Tennessee, so the people we trained before can take CE classes to maintain their MLA Consumer Health Information Specialization, as well as train new staff.  More international work is always a possibility, but we don’t have any concrete plans as of now.

Are you interested in improving the health information literacy of your organization? The Institute for Healthcare Advancement (IHA) invites you to attend the  Eleventh Annual Health Literacy Conference, “Operational Solutions to Low Health Literacy,” May 9-11, 2012, at the Hyatt Regency, Irvine (near Orange County/John Wayne airport). MLA credit is offered for attending. There is even a special discount for librarians! Use discount code MLA12 when you register here, and save $50 off the regular low registration rate. Register early to get this special rate – early registration deadline is on or before April 11^th.

Questions? Visit the conference website, send an email to mvillaire@iha4health.org or call (562) 690-4001, ext. 202 for more information.

The National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM) recognizes that members have a role to play in health literacy and encourages you to attend this conference. The NN/LM and the Medical Library Association will be hosting an exhibit table at the conference to help inform attendees how librarians can support improved health literacy