2013 SC/MLA Research Award Winners

I want to first thank the volunteers of the research paper and research posters for the 2013 Annual Meeting. Irma Quinones and Lee Clemans-Taylor did an awesome job reviewing paper sessions. Because of concurrent research paper sessions, Kim Meeks (Membership Chair) graciously volunteered to assist in the judging of the papers. And Skye Bickett and Melissa Wright did a great job helping evaluate the research posters.

There were some wonderful submissions this year, however the Research Committee Award volunteers identified the following submissions as outstanding. Please join me in congratulating the winners!

PAPERS

1^st Place ($300) – A Sketch of the Future of Libraries

Authors: Rick Wallace, AHIP, Assistant Director; Nakia Joye Woodward, AHIP, Senior Clinical Reference Librarian; Katherine

Wolf, Clinical Librarian; Quillen College of Medicine Library, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN

                               

2^nd Place($200) – Survey of User Satisfaction: A Comparative Analysis

Authors: Roland B Welmaker, Sr, PhD, MSLS, Archivist/Librarian (rwelmaker@msm.edu), Joe Swanson, Jr, MSLS, Library

Director (jswanson@msm.edu), Xiomara E. Arango, MSLS, Division Head for Technical Services (xarango@msm.edu), Tara

Douglas-Williams, MSLS, Division Head for Information Services (tdouglas-williams@msm.edu), Morehouse School of Medicine

Library

3^rd Place ($100)  – A Study on the Art of Information: Publishing and Presenting by Medical Librarians

Authors:  Skye Bickett, MLIS, AHIP, Reference and Education Librarian, Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine-Georgia

Campus; Christine Willis, MLIS, Librarian, Noble Learning Resource Center, Shepherd Center; Melissa Wright, MLIS, PhD,

Assistant Professor, Reference and Instructional Services Librarian, University of Mississippi Medical Center

POSTERS

1^st Place ($200) – A Closer Look for a Clearer Picture: Analyzing In-House Article Requests

Author: Eric Altmyer, Graduate Student, Preston Medical Library & Learning Resource Center

2^nd Place ($100) – Library Resource Survey: Preliminary Sketches Essential to Collection Design

Authors: Allison M. Howard, MLIS, AHIP-Distinguished, Catalog/Reference Librarian, University of South Florida, Shimberg Health Sciences Library; Krystal Bullers, MA, AHIP-Provisional, Emerging Technologies and College of Pharmacy Librarian; Randall Polo, JD, MA, Instructional/Reference Librarian; Kristen Sakmar, MA, Graduate Medical Education Librarian

3^rd Place ($50) – Trends in Published Study-types in Core Physical Therapy Journals from 1992-2011

Authors: Dennis Fell, PT, MD; Judy Burnham, MLS, AHIP; Joni Barnes, SPT; Yan Goh, SPT; Sarah Taylor, SPT, Biomedical Library, University of South Alabama

General Session III

The Ethics of Healthcare Information - Dr. Ralph Didlake, Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities, University of Mississippi Medical Center

• Ethics are an informal code
• Individuals have codes of ethics and you have group/profession/corporate ethics.
• Professions practice specialized knowledge and pass it on to members they allow in.  Professional organizations then self regulate and create codes of conduct.
• Professional Membership comes with rights and responsibilities - to individuals you serve, to society, to colleagues, and to the profession - this is an implicit social contract.
• Challenges to Health Care Professionals - shifting societal expectations, medicalization, evolving delivery models, Affordable Care Act, specialty fragmentation, technology, complex environment, traditions, multi-disciplinary, conflicting professional obligations.
• The Gardner Model - The Effective Professional is: Excellent at what they do, Ethical about what they do, and Engaged in what they do.
• How for Medical Librarians? - MLA Code of Ethics - make your actions about patients as end users, profound fiduciary obligations - we are the caretakers of our professional knowledge, but also the knowledge of other professions.
• This is a unique position - how do we meet these obligations? - teach about academic integrity, teach about responsible conduct of research(this is required for NSF grants), archival functions(digital libraries), defining the boundaries of the medical literature(what is a good OA journal, peer-review), case reportage(Lincoln to JFK to Giffords, who is it ok to report on?), medical humanities programs(patients come in a context of topics outside of medicine-history, sociology, etc.), inter-professional education activities(library equipped to handle this)
• Barriers - curriculum is crowded, no access to curriculum committees, marginalization of non-clinical content
• Suggestion - embed curriculum elements - embed slides into already existing courses and lectures.  Can weave these across courses with students existing instructors.

Poster Sessions

The poster session was informative and fun. I love walking around to see the variety of topics presented and being able to talk with authors. Some of the posters were designated as research posters and were reviewed by judges from the research committee (and announcement of the winners will be made later on this blog and the listserv).

Topics covered ranged from EBP to emerging technology to marketing the library and it's services. It's hard to do all of the posters justice in this space. I have my favorite posters that apply to my library and could help improve the services we offer and hope you found yours. Maybe you didn't have time to talk to all authors or were unable to attend the meeting, but you an still find information to help you and your library through reviewing the information we have online. I  highly encourage everyone to read the poster abstracts on the SC/MLA Meeting website and contact the authors for more information or with questions.

Serving Research

This set of papers dealt with several aspects of helping others with research. The first paper, Face to Face: Expanded Services to University Researchers Delivered with a Personal Touch, discussed compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy. Librarians at UAB found that outreach and training took a lot of time, but also offered a great opportunity to connect with researchers.

Designing Proactive Publication Defense was presented 2nd. Mary Edwards, a librarian from UF, talked about developing ways to track faculty publications and prepare for allegations of breaching publication ethics. She brought forth several recommendations for the institution, researchers, and librarians. Those included institutions mandating data archiving, having protocols and procedures for researchers to secure files and indexing to easily find their data, and librarians to promote the IR for data storage and educate faculty and students.

Sarah Harper presented the 3rd paper - Information at Your Fingertips: Designing a Wiki to Fulfill Researcher Needs. She worked as a liaison to the ultrasound group at her institution and developed a wiki to store article information, links, and a list of journals with author instructions. She found that it helped streamline the research and literature search process as well as be replicated in other departments and institutions. The Q&A was wonderful and even brought new ideas to the author, such as adding search terms and strategies to the wiki and setting up MyNCBI email alerts for new articles.

The final paper, Designing Comprehensive Outreach in Women's Health and Sex and Gender Differences in Health, was presented by Hannah Norton (who also had a poster concerning other aspects of his topic). She and other librarians showed students the Women's Health Portal and how to use it to find information about gender and sex differences when speaking with patients or doing research. A wide variety of participants across heir campus participated in their events and librarians received very positive feedback. They found that this helped existing relationships across campus, but also created new ones with various faculty, staff, and students.

Academic Libraries (Paper Session)

I had a great time listening to the "Academic Libraries" paper session this afternoon! I hope to implement some of what I learned at my library.

To start, Kathy Davies and Lindsay Blake of Georgia Regents University spoke about the role they played in creating a database of health sciences instruments (DREAM) and in locating instruments that measure medical student milestones for the Transformation in Medical Education initiative (TIME). It was really interesting to learn about the work that goes into a project like this one, particularly the amount of searching and taxonomy development it involved!

Next, the librarians at Georgia Regents University described their embedded librarianship program - a hot topic among us academic health sciences librarians these days. I really liked how they stressed that each liaison librarian tailored his or her approach in order to better meet needs of the department - no two embedded librarian models are exactly the same.

Rick Fought illustrated how a collection development policy can be used to as a tool to demonstrate a library's value. His library, the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Library, surveyed their faculty and, as a result, built up their collection of books and e-books. It had never occurred to me to market a collection development policy to health sciences faculty, but after the presentation I think it'd something I ought to look into to.

Gregg Stevens, the Health Sciences Librarian at the Ghazvini Center for Healthcare Education at Tallahassee Community College, wrapped up the session with a fun presentation on the use of iPads in allied health information literacy education. I really liked how Gregg partnered with the EMS and Pharmacy Tech faculty at his college to come up with classroom activities that utilized NN/LM mobile resources and, consequently, the iPads. More importantly, these assignments were based on real-life situations the students might someday encounter on the job, so that the students leave with knowledge of how to use reliable mobile technology resources on the job.

If you would like to learn more about these and other papers presented at the 2013 SC/MLA Annual Meeting, please check out the complete paper abstracts available on the official meeting website.

General Session II

The second general session included three speakers talking about open access, author rights and the NIH public access policy.

Lisa Macklin began the presentations with Managing Rights to Fullfill the Promise of Open Access.  Some main points I took away from her presentation:
- Not all open access is created equal - some are peer-reviewed, and some are not.
- Creative Commons allows you to decide which parts of copyright law you want to use.
- Data is not covered by copyright
- It's tough to get faculty and researchers to understand rights and options

Susan Steelman continued with a talk on NIH Public Access Policy: Librarians on the Frontline of Compliance
- The Policy was enacted in 2005 as voluntary, but not really followed in April 7, 2008 it became mandatory.
- Authors are only allowed to use final peer-reviewed manuscript and must supply supplemental material.
- NIH grants funded Oct 7, 2008 to present and in peer-reviewed journals or NIH contracts signed on April 7, 2008 covered.
- Not covered - articles in trade magazines, abstracts/proceedings - non-peer reviewed articles - editorials/correspondence
- The University of Arkansas was involved in a pilot project - universities given access to Unistat System to find problem areas in submission process for manuscripts.  UAMS created - website, links to NIH, fact sheet, presentations, worked on communication w/ publishers, feedback to NLM, consultations, customized reports, & building contacts points in depts.
- Challenges for researchers - what types of articles are covered? - publications dates covered? - who submits the article? - the submission process is complicated - knowing the numbers NIHMS or PMCID or PMID, etc. - rejection of progress reports, inclusion of sub-awardee publications
- NIH enforcement actions - they can withhold grants, no new or renewing contracts
- What Librarians Need to Know- Know the policy, learn about internal grant process, know steps to being compliant, be willing to intercede with publishers, stress the importance of communication

Emma Cryer Heet gave the last presentation -  Open Access and Public Access : Outreach is the Name of the Game.
- Outreach is focused on clinical researchers - they don't come in on their own - NIH and open access made them work with library
- Outreach to graduate students with mandatory responsible conduct of research course
- Faculty has open access mandate to submit to repository, but this is not really enforced due to author rights and publisher obstacles
- Scholars at Duke - Facebook for researchers profilre and links to articles
- Library efforts - Open access lib guide - COPE(Compact for Open Access Publishing Equality) fund - OA funds - training - Library helps with licenses - wrote two clauses to place into standard licenses - 1st clausekeeps publisher from charging for author to publisher and school to pay subscription - 2nd asserts rights to harvest for internal repository-DukeSpace -
- NOT DONE - not members in PLOS, Hindawi or BioMedCentral - it was decided to support authors instead of publishers
- Challenges faced - old grants, retired or deceased faculty, faculty that has moved, wrongly attributed articles or grants, wrong grant numbers, multi-PI grants - locating manuscripts - not being aware of publications - PI role versus author role- working with publishers - 12 month embargo, but 3 month compliance - linking MyNCBI and era Commons accounts - multiple systems to submit- missing NIHMS emails to approve articles - not linking manuscripts to PMID.

Keynote Speaker Dr. Teitelbaum

Medical librarians have a champion in Dr. Teitelbaum! His presentation began by noting his relationship several years ago with medical librarians and argued that despite being many years later, the role of medical librarians has not changed but rather the world has changed with the advancement of technology. Librarians are "information accessors and distributors" in the beginning and we still are today, only differently.

Dr. Teitelbaum expressed concerns of the future of graduate medical programs having limited locations for residents to train at. Shorter hospital stays mean that ambulatory care settings are the training grounds for these graduates. More often than not graduates find themselves turning to hospital and medical librarians for assistance and education on research, which is leading to an "integrated teaching model" for graduate medical education.

As an early-career academic medical library professional, Dr. Teitelbaum's talk was encouraging. Most of my library career has been during the economic downturn and sometimes I feel as if I've only experinced the "do more with less" institutional mentality. In a time when libraries are struggling to communicate their relevancy, it was validating to hear Dr. Teitelbaum's continued appreciation and support of libraries.

Hospital Libraries Symposium

Friday's Hospital Libraries Symposium was a great success! Anjou Restaurant gave us a comfortable private room with a wall-mounted and framed large TV screen, a tasty multiple option menu, and good service. 23 people came to eat and hear speaker Mary Virginia Taylor of the Shreveport, Louisiana VA take us through her forty year experience as a hospital librarian. It was fun to see, remember or wonder over the vast changes in technology that have occurred in that time. The VA was one of the earliest users of email, but like all libraries, they started out with Union catalogs, print and 'snail-mail' ILL, and early use of telegrams, microfilm, carbon copy ILL forms, and the changes from manual typewriters to electric typewriters, to the initial PCs, to today's world of laptops and smart devices. Mary also discussed how our roles have changed over time, providing recommendations on how to win administrative support at your institution. She then led us into sharing some of our own experiences. Thank you to everyone who participated and especially to Mary for sharing with all of us.

SC/MLA Conference Snap Shots

Patient Education Services, Scholarly Trends, and Research Services

Today I attended and presented at the contributed papers session 1-A. This session had presentations about patient education services, scholarly trends, and research services. I felt that I was in great company with wonderful authors from various institutions.

The first paper was titled The Art of Information: Designing and Delivering a Multimedia Education Initiative for Older Adults on Urinary Incontinence. Although this paper specifically covered the topic of urinary incontinence the methods used could be implemented for various topics. Collaboration that includes medical librarians is a key feature for programs such as this and will help ensure their success. Offering multiple ways to communicate and access information can help promote dialogue between patients and providers by increasing their awareness of medical issues.

The second paper, Using Learning Styles as a Proven Strategy for Patient Education, highlighted an aspect of patient education that I'd never thought of. When working with patients we, as librarians, are always told to think about reading levels; however, we rarely think about the way a person learns. The authors used randomized controlled trials to discover what type of learning style patients liked and found that multiple styles were preferred. It was concluded that understanding this and combining it with other aspects of health literacy would greatly benefit patients and aid the communication process.

I was a coauthor on the third paper, A Study on the Art of Information: Publishing and Presenting by Medical Librarians. We surveyed librarians across the nation to see how they preferred to disseminate information. We found that medical librarians equally prefer presenting and publishing, but like quantitative methodologies over other types. Being interested in conducting research stood out as the most influencing factor, while lack of time was the most inhibiting. We concluded that encouragement from others and embedding research into the workflow could get more medical librarians to publish or present their work.

The Art and Science of Assisting Researchers with NIH Public Access Compliance was the last paper in this session. Most of us have faculty or doctors (or nurses, PAs, and even ourselves) who conduct research and need to make sure that we comply with NIH policies. They discussed their process for handling this issue as well as challenges that they faced. The tough, but necessary, conclusion was that a class wouldn't work to get things done. Librarians needs to work one on one with researchers to ensure compliance because each case was different.

This was very informative session that contained relevant  information for medical librarians in both hospital and academic libraries. I wish I could have attended all paper sessions today and look forward to the papers and posters that will be presented tomorrow.

Welcome Reception for New and Student Members

We had a wonderful reception tonight for our new and student members.  Many thanks to Connie Machado with local arrangements for finding us a great spot to congregate and for ordering the delicious snacks.  Brenda Faye Green invited some of the previous board members to the reception to discuss their experiences with Southern Chapter.  We were also joined by Dixie Jones, MLA President, and Carla Funk, Executive Director of MLA.  Brenda asked all "old" members to introduce themselves to the new members and to state in their introductions what kind of chocolate bar they would be.  This was an interesting personality test.  The most popular response was Snickers.  After a quick Google search, I found a website that provided details on the chocolate bar personality test.  According to this site if someone chose Snickers, then they are "fun-loving, sassy, humorous.  Everyone enjoys being around you, but you are a practical joker.  Others should be cautious in shaking hands!"  http://www.yelp.com/topic/miami-the-chocolate-bar-personality-test
Sandra Bandy, Chair-Elect, discussed the importance of getting involved in Southern Chapter committees.  Others echoed Sandra's sentiment.  Jan LaBeause, a retired librarian and former board member, stated that one of the reasons she still attended the Southern Chapter meetings was because of the friendships she had made, she also stated that another reason she continues to attend is "...for the hugs."

Wellness Programs and Patient Services

I had the privilege of moderating the "Wellness Programs and Patient Services" paper session this afternoon. Each of the presenters described innovative programs they had implemented at their libraries and/or shared interesting information about the world of patient services. Those of us in attendance left with a lot of great ideas that we could bring back to our own libraries.

Ann Gonzalez from the Preston Medical Library at the University of Tennessee Graduate School of Medicine reported on a wellness program designed to bring National Library of Medicine resources to the employees of Alcoa, a Knoxville-based company. The library's goal is to develop a toolkit for partnering with industry that other institutions can use. Some of the successes and challenges they've encountered (such as an employee health fair the Friday before Labor Weekend!) were things I would have never anticipated.

Pat Higginbottom of the Lister Hill Library at the University of Alabama at Birmingham shared several really fun ideas and strategies for promoting health and wellness to faculty and staff. A few of my favorite topics were walking meetings, a standing desk, salad potlucks, indoor walking trials, and a farm stand of fresh produce right outside the library. (Her co-author, Valerie Gordon was unable to attend.) I want to try some these ideas out at my library!

Next, Cynthia Vaughn described a new service she and her colleagues at the University of Tennessee Graduate School of Medicine have implemented over this past two years. They have been using Skylight In-Room Television to deliver information to hospital patients. It was interesting to learn that the patient requests they've received have involved 130 different Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and to hear about how they get information to patients in different units of the hospital efficiently.

Terri Ottosen of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Southeastern Atlantic region wrapped up the session with a presentation on patient advocacy. Terri has recently completed a certificate program in patient advocacy and so was able to provide an overview of this emerging field. I hadn't heard of patient advocacy before, but I was excited to learn that health sciences librarians and patient advocates share a number of skills and values. It's definitely an area of healthcare to keep an eye out for in the future!

Welcome Reception with Exhibitors

The Welcome Reception with Exhibitors was well organized and well attended.  Sandra Bandy, Program Chair; Susan Clark and Connie Machado, Local Arrangements, and  I welcomed everyone to the reception. We also express thanks to the exhibitors for their attendance and support. Also, everyone had the pleasure of saying hello to two special chapter members from Mississippi who are enjoying their retirement--Virginia Segrest and Ada Seltzer.

CE: Intro To EBM

This morning's CE class on Evidence-Based Medicine taught by Connie Schardt was excellent! Even though most of the material was familiar, she did a wonderful job of making it clear, well- organized, and fun. I learned some valuable ways of explaining this material, alternative ways to think about the topic, and was alerted to some useful resources. The FRISBE mnemonic (follow-up, randomization, intention to treat, similar baseline characteristics, blinding, equal treatment) will be particularly helpful. So will the online clinical significance calculators such as http://www.healthcare.ubc.ca/calc/clinsig.html. I also really liked the use of shoe prices to help us understand absolute versus relative risk reduction.  I recommend this course both to new librarians and to us older folks who need a refresher and new ways of looking at familiar ideas.

Early Bird Reception

Wonderful to see everyone at the Early Bird Reception last nightt! It was fun to get to meet our hosts from U Miss and to see both new and familiar faces. A huge thank you to the Local Planning Committee, especially Connie Machado who worked tirelessly with me to set up the Hospital Libraries Symposium. Kudos to all involved! This morning the Continuing Education courses start. I'm taking the EBM one. Hope to hear from y'all in the other courses later - it's always hard to choose just one of these courses.

Welcome!

The SC/MLA Public Relations (PR) Committee has created this space as the official blog for the 2013 SC/MLA Annual Meeting in Ridgeland, MS. From now until October 20th, six meeting attendees – who represent different Southern Chapter interests and initiatives – will share any useful information and updates relating to the conference. Please visit the SC/MLA Conference Website for official conference information and the SC/MLA 2013 Facebook page for additional meeting updates.