The goal of the “Value of Library and Information Services in Patient Care” initiative is to develop and implement a research study to measure the value of the health sciences library, library services, and librarian on clinical decision making and patient care outcomes.  From a discussion at a November 2006 meeting of the Regional Advisory Committee (RAC) of the Middle Atlantic Region, National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM), emerged the issue of establishing the value of health sciences libraries to administrators in hospitals, academic health sciences centers and other organizations where librarians work.

In the RAC discussion the “Rochester study” [The impact of the hospital library on clinical decision making: the Rochester study. Bull Med Libr Assoc. 1992 Apr; 80(2):169-78] was mentioned as an influential, highly-cited (109 times) piece of research that was now seriously out of date.  The Regional Advisory Committee recommended moving forward with planning a new study based on the original Rochester study, but updated for the present day.  [See: Measuring the value and impact of health sciences libraries: planning an update and replication of the Rochester Study. J Med Libr Assoc. 2009 Oct;97(4):308-12.]

The Value Study Planning Committee is comprised of members of NN/LM and researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).  Julia Sollenberger, (principal investigator), Karen Brewer, Susan Cavanaugh, Kathel Dunn, Sharon Easterby-Gannett, Mary Lou Klem, Lynn Kasner Morgan, and Kate Oliver comprise the NN/LM members.  We have developed a research plan in consultation with Joanne Marshall, now on the faculty of the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Information and Library Science, and one of the original authors of the Rochester study.  The other UNC members are:  Jennifer Craft Morgan, Susan Rathbun-Grubb and Cheryl Thompson.  The plan is to reproduce the original study in the current environment, and to include as many hospitals as possible in the MAR region. The survey is to be administered by a private survey company and analyzed by the research group at UNC.

A Problem

Funding for the entire study (just over $144,000) is coming from the MAR program, which is itself funded through the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM).  However, in the spring of 2009 the National Library of Medicine alerted us to a potential problem — all surveys funded by government agencies (including NLM) must be approved by the US Office of Management and Budget, (OMB), and this process could delay the study by at least 12 months.  The only time-saving solution seemed to be funding the survey itself (the programming and administration of the survey by an independent survey company) with non-NLM funds, which would alleviate the need to get OMB approval. The actual cost of conducting the survey is approximately $18,000.

Library Groups Save the Day

Through the generosity of twelve different regional and national library groups, financial support for conducting the survey was secured.  By October, 2009, the following groups had agreed to contribute to this important initiative:  the Hospital Library Section of the Medical Library Association, the NY/NJ Chapter of MLA, the Philadelphia Regional Chapter of MLA, the Upstate New York and Ontario Chapter of MLA and all eight of the New York State Reference and Research Library Resources Councils.

Where We Are Now

Due to the generous support of these groups, we are now at a point where the study will soon be implemented.  The planning committee has completed survey development and a handbook for the study participants; the research plan is going through the UNC Institutional Review Board; and the survey will soon be pretested.  We expect to implement a pilot in the spring of 2010; libraries in the MAR Region will be contacted soon as we begin to recruit pilot participants.  The actual survey will begin in late summer.  The research team is very busy, but excited to be so close to implementation. We are grateful for your show of support and look forward to sharing more progress updates.  Please stay tuned!

St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital in Newburgh, NY, an NN/LM member, provides extensive resources on it’s library website to the physicians, nurses and staff.  Training on the library website and resources is provided through new staff orientation and in-services.  Previously, there was not a good tool for users to be able to find help utilizing resources on the library website.  A pocket folder had been provided with information in the pockets, but the information sheets kept falling out and there was no organization to the resource sheets.

Through the Micro Awards Grant that St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital Library received from NNLM for Orientation and Training Folders and Tabs, the library was able to purchase clear front color folders and tabs to organize information and resources.  The project goal was to provide organized and easy to use folders that could not only be used for training, but could also be utilized at any time for information on accessing any of the resources on the library website.  The tabs in the folder mirrored the tabs on the website, allowing users to correlate the resource information sheets with the actual resources.  They could then easily find information on resources such as PubMed, LinkOut and Loansome Doc under the tab in the folder that matched the section on the website.  Different colors of folders were used for the varying types of users, blue for physicians, red for nurses and black for clinical staff, so that resources relating to each type of user could be placed in the color coded folder.

There were 225 folders that were use for a period of five months with positive feedback on their utilization.  The number of users accessing the library website increased 10% from the prior five months.  The results and usage have been encouraging and have helped provide justification to continue the project of purchasing the folders with tabs and correlating information on resources with those on the library website.

Sample Folder from St. Luke's Cornwall Hospital Library

Twila Snead
St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital
Medical Library
70 Dubois St.
Newburgh, NY 12550

From ars technicha:

The CRA (Copyright Reform Act)  is a new project from Public Knowledge, with much of the heavy lifting being done by the Cyberlaw Clinic at Stanford and the Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC-Berkeley. While Berkeley’s noted copyright scholar Pam Samuelson works up a new “model statute” for copyright law in the digital age, Public Knowledge hopes to make smaller interim fixes to copyright law that won’t require the same dramatic reworking.

To read more about their project and how they hope to clarify fair use read the ars technica article in full.

Alan Carr, Outreach Coordinator at NN/LM Pacific Southwest Region, has developed new brochures for PubMed. They’ve been updated to include recent PubMed changes. They are available for MAR member use, and include:

PubMed Basics

PubMed My NCBI

Full Text and PubMed

Searching PubMed with MeSH

Loansome Doc

Also revised are:

Gateway Basics

MedlinePlus for Health Professionals

The new product developed by Google has just been announced. The name of the new product is “Google Buzz” which will integrate social networking features such as status updates and picture sharing into your Gmail account and your cellphone.

Read more about the features of Google Buzz.

Over the summer and fall of 2009, the Hospital for Special Surgery’s (HSS) Library teamed up with the Greenberg Academy for Successful Aging (GASA) (a collaborative program between the HSS Public and Patient Education Department and New York-Presbyterian Hospital’s Irving Sherwood Wright Center for the Aging) program to use funding from the NNLM Mid Atlantic region to achieve 2 program goals:

• We implemented a training series, for seniors that was age and information appropriate.
• We integrated health information resources from NLM, NIH, and other credible health information sources into GASA community outreach and health education programming.

The trainings entitled were held over 8 weeks at the Carver Senior Center/ Casita Maria in East Harlem. 20 students, all of whom were clients of the center of the center were enrolled.

The classes began with instruction on how to set up an e-mail address and get on the Internet. Students then learned to surf the net to find disease and drug information in English and in Spanish. They were introduced to websites where they could check doctors’ credentials, compare hospitals by quality and procedure volume, and even find the neighborhood pharmacy that charges the lowest price for specific prescription drugs. Throughout the course they developed the skills to determine if a health website is up to date, reliable, and free from biased opinions. Most importantly, students learned that sharing the health information found online with their doctor is a great way to begin a dialog and start a conversation that will lead to a stronger patient/provider partnership.

We modeled our program off the course structure put forth by the National Institute on Aging in the NIH Senior Health toolkit, (http://nihseniorhealth.gov/toolkit/toolkit.html) We added a section on social networking, healthy computer use, (ergonomics, posture, etc.) and NOAH (New York Online Access to Health – http://www.noah-health.org/.) The trainings used the computers in their own center and we were able to enlisted volunteers from the center to assist participants during the hands on portion of the classes. There was one facilitator for every 4 or 5 students.  We feel our successful was primarily due to these 3 factors: class structure, location and local resources, and the student to teacher ratio.

Along with the class, the initiative with the Greenberg Academy for Successful Aging programming led to nearly 600 hundred participants in the Greenberg Academy having been introduced to reliable online health information resources related to their area of interest.

All in all, the program exceeded our expectations and a warm relationship was nurtured between HSS staff and the Carver Center clients.

Report submitted by

Timothy Roberts, MLS, AHIP
Medical Librarian
Kim Barrett Memorial Library
Hospital for Special Surgery
robertst@hss.edu

PubMed has been updated!

The new changes include:

• Advanced search page will be streamlined
• A link to Clipboard will be added to the homepage, if applicable
• A new Limits page with additional limits for dates and search field tags

The 26 January 2010 NLM Technical Bulletin has an article describing these changes:  http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/jf10/jf10_pm_advanced_search.html

The Maternal and Child Health Library at Georgetown University, in collaboration with the National Maternal and Child Oral Health Resource Center (OHRC), released a new edition of the knowledge path about oral health for infants, children, adolescents, and pregnant women.   Presented in time for National Children’s Dental Health Month in February, this electronic guide points to resources that analyze data, describe effective programs, and report on policy and research aimed at improving access to and the quality of oral health care. The knowledge path contains sections with resources for professionals, resources for consumers, and resources on specific aspects of oral health. Topics include child care and Head Start, dental caries, dental sealants, fluoride varnish, K-12 education, pregnancy, school-based care, and special health care needs. The knowledge path is available at http://www.mchlibrary.info/KnowledgePaths/kp_oralhealth.html. Knowledge paths on other topics are available at http://mchlibrary.info/KnowledgePaths/index.html .

Please help in disseminating this information to the health education and health promotion communities. You may send comments to:

Susan Brune Lorenzo, MLS

smblorenzo(at)gmail.com

Maternal and Child Health Library

National Center for Education in Maternal and Child Health at Georgetown University

Web site: http://mchlibrary.info

See below for additional information about the publishers involved in NLM’s Emergency Access Initiative for libraries and hospitals affected by the earthquake in Haiti. The updated wording is in bolded to enable you to more easily see the new information.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM), in partnership with members of the Professional & Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers and other publishers announce the availability of free full-text articles from over 200 biomedical journals and *over 65 reference* books for libraries and hospitals affected by the earthquake in Haiti.  The collection is also intended for healthcare personnel responding to the disaster.

The Emergency Access Initiative collection is a combination of common biomedical journal titles and reference books, and also emergency medicine related titles.  The Emergency Access Initiative serves as a temporary collection replacement and/or supplement for libraries and hospitals affected by disasters that need to continue to serve medical staff and affiliated users.

The literature is being provided as part of the Emergency Access Initiative – a collaborative partnership between NLM, the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM) and participating publishers to provide free access to full-text articles and select reference books to healthcare professionals and libraries affected by disasters.  While the project was established to assist libraries affected by disasters in the United States, NLM and the publishers are activating the Emergency Access Initiative in light of the medical disaster unfolding in the aftermath of the earthquake.

If your library is working with a library or organization involved in relief efforts or was impacted by the Haitian earthquake, please let them know of this service.

Emergency Access Initiative:  http://eai.nlm.nih.gov

NLM thanks the participating publishers for their generous support of this initiative:  *American Academy of Pediatrics, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American College of Physicians, American Society of Health-Systems Pharmacists, ASM Press, B.C. Decker, BMJ, Elsevier, FA Davis, Mary Ann Liebert, Massachusetts Medical Society, McGraw-Hill, Merck Publishing, Oxford University Press, People’s Medical Publishing House, Springer, University of Chicago Press, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer.*

For questions regarding the Emergency Access Initiative, please email custserv@nlm.nih.gov or call 1-888-346-3656 in the United States, or 301-594-5983 internationally.  Libraries in the United States can contact their Regional Medical Library for assistance and support at 1-800-338-7657

Check out the February issue of NIH News in Health, the monthly newsletter bringing you practical health news and tips based on the latest NIH research. In this edition:

Keeping Bones Strong and Healthy
Let’s Talk about Osteoporosis
As you get older, your bones may become weaker and more likely to break. The good news is, it’s never too late to promote bone health.
full story

Things Forgotten
Simple Lapse or Serious Problem?
Occasional forgetfulness is a normal part of life. In most cases, it’s no cause for alarm—unless it begins to hamper your daily activities.
full story

Health Capsules:

• Fit Teens Succeed as Adults
• Can’t See Certain Colors?
• Featured Web Site: The Heart Truth

Click here to download a PDF version for printing.

Visit our Facebook wall to suggest topics you’d like us to cover, or start a discussion about how you use the newsletter. We want to hear what you think! Also check out the NIH Health & Science Gifts and send some to your Facebook friends. Please pass the word on to your colleagues about NIH News in Health.