Health information day for non-health librarians

HLG Wales, in conjunction with CyMAL, will be hosting a health information day for public, school, FE and prison librarians in South Wales on the 6th July at the National Botanical Gardens.  The day will be funded by CyMAL, therefore free to participants.  Health information is frequently requested from the public and is high on government agendas.  However, there is so much information out there (I just heard it called Infomation Obesity in a conference), that  librarians may not know of the best sources of information to meet their users’ needs.  Health Promotion Wales Library and the NHS Direct are just two of the organisation speaking at the event.  There will be opportunity for break-out sessions and hands-on exploration of health websites.  The group will work towards a plan of partnership working to benefit all the sectors involved.

Tuesday 19th cont…

This afternoon I went to a session discussing the role of the Librarian in Translational Science/Research, the joining together of basic science with health research for the benefit of patient care. Interesting perspectives from an MD and a Bioinformationist.

Kristi Holmes from Wahington Uni St Louis was particularly interesting, a bioinformationist based in the library she gave some good practical hints on raising the profile of the services you can offer to researchers. One tip was to organise webinairs of resources useful to this user group and advertise them via the library, vendors seem happy to do this. I have emailed her to ask for her full presentation and will ask her if it is ok to distribute to HLGW members if you are interested, she had many more useful hints and tips. Becker Medical Library at Washington Uni have produced a Research Impact tool which I certainly hadn’t come across before, you can see it at http://becker.wustl.edu/impact/assessment something again that may be useful for our users involved in research.

Tuesday evening was the MLA Luau. A lovely meal outdoors under starry skies with entertainment of the hula variety, a nice fun evening. Will try to upload some photos!

MLA 09 Tuesday 19th May

Attended an open forum at 7.30am discussing health information literacy, results from the MLA/NLM health information literacy (HIL) project. Focus on providing health information to consumers. Interesting project and at the end your HLGW blogger felt brave enough to comment about the UK, bibliotherapy prescriptions and how HLGW will be working with public librarians, this is an international topic.

PubMed update

 End of summer 2009-05-20 redesign of the interface to simplify, refresh, better organize the information and promote scientific discovery (?)

We saw a brief mock up of what the pages could look like with a warning that that will probably change but basically simplifies arrangement of result pages with a more ‘Google’ layout – no surprises there.

Coming soon for My NCBI are custom filters and sharing Collections, My Bibliography and Other Citations, rare disease terms will be added to MeSH in 09/10.

Tips for using the Advanced search option, use the clear box before starting a new search [I will probably forget to do this like I forget to remove limits!]

There is a detail link and help link available there now and you have the option to show more or less history.

 Going from the PubMed update session to the NLM update I was a little late but NLM update started with a discussion on quality assurance issues. Making health information users aware of common errors in clinical trials – see clinicaltrials.gov

[Critical appraisal issues again I guess, getting users to realise the importance of evaluating and appraising all information before use, ‘cause it’s in print doesn’t mean it’s true!]

There was some information about NLM’s role providing information in case of disaster, DIMRC planning, though something none of us want to contemplate this is an impressive ongoing project in the US you can see info at http://disasterinfo.nlm.nih.gov

The HMD’s database of images for the History of Medicine has had some revamping making images easier to view zoom in on and use for educational purposes [a resource to remind our health professionals and academics about]

 More later…

MLA Monday 18th May

Best bit of today was the Top Technical Trends panel discussion with five trend setters including Michelle Kraft who many of you will know from her ‘Krafty Librarian’ blog. Lively and fun discussion fom all panel particpants. trends we should be aware of/making use of include: flip cameras to produce our own videos simply and cheaply, our Generation X and millenial users like visual info and are youtube users.  iPhone/iPod Touch – these are replacing the PDA technology. Libraries can optimise webpage info for use on these small screen technologies. If creating apps libraries should: tailor the look of apps to be similar to those already available, think about the info that students may want to access, don’t just throw everything from the website at your users in this form, and always let users access the full webpage if they want to. University of Virginia have produced http://mobile.hsl.virginia.edu. Twitter –  suggested that tweeting will replace texting. Tools such as Tweetdeck can help you manage your Twitter.

That was just a taster of the discussion – phew!

Went along to hear about Endnote x3 which will be released June 2009. Some new bits and pieces include; compare duplicate records side-by-side for easy review, use EZProxy to find full text when off campus, arrange groups with simple drag and drop, Endnote web included for all Endnote users and the Cite while you write facility will be available to those using OpenOffice.org Writer 3 and Apple Pages 09.

Just to make you feel a little better about not being in Hawaii, it was cloudy today and we even had a brief shower 🙂

Photos from MLA 09 Hawaii

Sunny MLA 09 venue

Presidential address

Your HLGW MLA blogger

Hawaiian welcome to MLA

MLA 09 Sunday 17th May

Day started at 6.30amwith the first time attendee breakfast, good food and good company, met libarians from across the USA, Japan and Tanzania, a truly international conference!

First Plenary session of the day was a Welcome to MLA 09 and Presidential address from Mary L Ryan, current MLA President.  The MLA 09 conference was now officially underway!

The second plenary session was deliverd by Adam Bosworth of KEAS who discussed how Electronic Health Records or Patient Health Records were not enough. He argued that what is needed are dynamic adaptable Health Action Plans, tailored for individual patients, the content of which is relevant to the patients own lifestyle and circumstances and engages patients fully in their own healthcare. Thought provoking stuff.

From 11am on I attended various sessions offered by different Sections and Interest Groups of MLA. One of which was a lively and interesting discussion on using social networking tools to market librray services. Conclusion was that as lomng as you have a definite message to get over you should get Facebooking, tweeting etc.

Visited the vendors exhibition and a technology update on CINAHL Plus with Full Text, lots of interesting products out there but all librarians were commenting on the lack of budgets to spend!

Looking forward to another interesting day tomorrow.

Katrina

MLA09 Welcome reception

Just back from the welcome reception and opening of exhibits. We were welcomed with Hawaiian music and hula dancing.  (There will be an opportunity for delegates to try hula dancing over the next couple of days so I may give it a try!)

The ususal vendors were there and I had to be careful not to pick up too much information or too many freebies as I need to bear in mind my luggage restrictions! Over cheese and biscuits I chatted with several American and Canadian Librarians, and it seems we are all feeling the pinch these days, everyone has reduced budgets. They asked some questions about the NHS/academic arrangements in Wales so did my best to fill them in.

The prize for most novel vendor stall must go to Elsevier for their Scopus database. “Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research.” The introduction to Scopus took the form of a bingo like quiz as we watched a demo of the available tools and crossed of icons on our ‘bingo’ cards. I failed to win a Starbucks voucher but came away with a booby prize of a parrot shaped stress toy!

Alongside the conference ‘proper’ there will be some demos from vendors over the next couple of days. I’ll try to attend the PubMed update session and the Endnote 3 demo to take a peek at what is coming with the next version of the reference management software.

First attendees breakfast session at 6.30am tomorrow, looking forward to meeting other ‘newbies’ and glad of the start time, early morning and evening temperatures suit me better!

Aloha from Honolulu

Well I find myself in Hawaii, feels a little surreal to tell the truth! Found various landmarks yesterday including Waikiki beach which is a beautiful as it sounds! More importantly I found the Hawaiian Convention Centre where I will be attending MLA 09 for the next few days. Registration was painless and today we start things off with the Welcome Reception and opening of the exhibts stall.

The programme looks great and hopefully you’ll get a flavour of the event from my blog entries and a little flavour of Hawaii too. Stay tuned!

Katrina

Spring Study Day – 8th May, Angel Hotel Cardiff

The joint HLG Wales/IFMH Study Day will take place on the 8th May at the Angel Hotel in Cardiff.  The day’s themes will be business/strategic planning and change management.

Costs:

• Early-bird Rate for HLG/HLGW/IFMH members £20 (plus VAT =£23) if booked before 31st March, 2009.
• HLG/HLGW/IFMH members £50 (plus VAT = 57.50) if booked from 1st April, 2009.
• Non-members £70 (plus VAT = £80.50) regardless of date booked

Registration available from http://www.ifmh.org.uk/studyday0509.html .

Speakers (confirmed to date):

• David Peacock, Knowledge Services & E-learning Manager, North East Workforce Team, NHS North East – Stragic planning toolkit: an opportunity to familiarise yourself with a number of tools aimed at supporting your strategic planning
• Joanne Stemp, Trust Librarian, Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust – Planning in practice: one librarian’s experience of developing library strategy
• Dr Judith Broady-Preston, Department of Information Studies, Aberystwyth University – Change Management: a survival kit
• Wil Williams, Principal Lecturer, Business School, University of Glamorgan – Change Management: a view from different perspectives
• Caroline Plaice, Faculty Librarian, Health and Life Sciences, University of the West of England – Moving on up: change management in practice.

Spring Study Day – 8th May

Please save the above date for our Spring Study Day!  This will be a joint day with IFMH and will include the hot topics of change management and business planning for your library.  The event will be from 10am (registration) until 3.30pm. at the Angel Hotel in Cardiff.  Details to be sent out shortly.  The registration fee is at a reasonable £20 for HLG/HLGW/IFMH members!