ruts, and the avoidance thereof…..

Being inspired – whether it’s by someone else (common), or through a good idea of your own (less common!) is essential to keeping moving in this job. Big or small, those lightbulb moments are make my day.

Finding, and keeping up with, inspiring people is key. So having a netvibes page of RSS feeds from interesting blogs (either from libraries or individuals) is great but you’re only ever hearing from the same people. Do I hear the dreadful clang of an echo chamber?

CPD23 and cam23 2.0 is going to be great for me as an opportunity to widen my horizons – to find new inspiring people. Perhaps they’ll be new people I don’t know yet:  like EAHIL journey – who’s going to the same conference as me in a couple of weeks time.

Or perhaps it’s through people I know/know of in “real” life, but might get to know better/differently in blog-world: Deborah’s CPD Blog – cause I know she does some great teaching in her medical library in Chelmsford. Or The Ayre Line – since I’ve crossed paths with him back in our Leicester days, or the Health Informationist since I follow him on twitter and he’s a big name in medical library circles.

but what about people outside health/medicine – really important to look beyond the subject side of my job, and look to learn from people who are doing the same generic teaching/service that I do (the research skills, the reader services, the general teaching/training skills)? I might need a couple more posts from people outside medicine to see if they’re going to be talking about things that I can learn from – it’s tricky so early in the game to spot the people that are going to drop the bombshells of learning. But I’ll be scanning around and hoping to read as much as I can of the (jings!) c.600 bloggers who are working their way through the CPD23 and cam23 2.0 programmes

UHMLG ’11

Good meeting in Southampton for UHMLG ’11 – I was busy on twitter, as were a few others, and the pdf of the  uhmlg-11-twitter feed is here in glorious PDF (thanks to tweetdoc)

more thoughts on UHMLG later.

.. so later that day.. I thought I’d reflect a bit on the presentations at UHMLG – the ppts of which I’m sure will appear in due course at http://www.uhmlg.ac.uk/. the most interesting presentations I thought were about the new competencies which would be required of librarians/informationists/whateveryouwanttocallus – the need to stop going on about the same old skill sets but actually go out and get the new skills that will convince the researchers that we can actually contribute something positive and constructive to their work, rather than just saying that a literature search is generally a longer, slower process than they can be bothered with. there were 2 research project going on, talked about by Antony Brewerton (warwick uni) and Rachel Kotarski (BL) which were particularly talking about this: respectively RLUK Subject Librarians: Skills Set Investigation and JISC Defining a new role: the embedded Research Information Manager I’m sure there are plenty of people already out there providing bibliometric support, bibliographic software training (I do this at least) and actually do involved as a member of the team? But where are they? ( pause, waiting to be inundated of “here I am” type responses!) It’ll be really good to see best practice examples when these 2 pieces of work are published in full.

The fabulous @glttrgirl was talking about another new competency: Digital Professionalism

I think this sort of thing is really interesting – (and is the sort of thing that will be address to some extent by Week 2 Thing of the CPD23 programme). There are a number of strands that have got me thinking – recruitment (are we actually testing on competence to carry out particular tasks, or do we just assume that they can do things like blog, keep up to date, take an active role in CPD etc?), traditional problems but in a new environment (eg bullying in an online environment, or helping doctors understand all the issues of talking in public (ie facebook or twitter) and potentially talking with patients in public)

and are we making massive assumptions about the level of information literacy in students/professionals before we start offering them additional support. We assume they know that plagiarism is a bad thing, but do they know it extends to images from the internet? Are students/professionals really aware of the permanence of virtually everything they put online?

and lots of other very good stuff – very very interesting!

Uhmlg2011

View more presentations from SuzanneHardy

2 other talks which I thought were very interesting were from Anne Gray, Knowledge Officer, NHS Milton Keynes (and creator of the MK Knowledge Zone) and Debra Thornton, Knowledge and Library Services Manager, Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Both were talking about the services they developed to better server commissioners and managers in their trusts – a very different set of skills required, not least because there was so much tacit knowledge involved. It took attending loads of meetings, all the time, to ensure that these 2 librarians really understood what was required by the people they were supporting – so much grey literature rather than bog standard journal articles. Both services make a massive difference to the quality of the decision making in their trusts by providing the best/right/most appropriate information to those who need to make those decisions (and we’re not talking clinical decisions, we’re talking management/economic/funding/commissioning/etc)

Very very interesting services, one of which has already be cut off at the knees after funding was not extended after the end of the pilot project (yet, naturally they still wanted the service to continue!), and one of which is feeling concerned for its future since it sits in a PCT, and PCTs may not be much longer for this world. typical, eh?

NHS Evidence – feedback session

On May 10th NHS Evidence got a revamp – it’s not just a tart of up of the old National Library for Health – it’s a whole new resources. For those of us who use this site on a regular basis it was a bit of a shock to see some useful resources dropped (specialist collections), some not covered for technical reasons (cochrane library), and a bit of a pain to have to search for the resources we know are still there, but just not where we left them! (eg MyLibrary).

It was good to spend some time with the lovely Anne, Suzy, Katie and Paul from NHS Evidence to get the low down on the new interface and give some feedback (ok, loads of feedback).

It was a relief to hear that the site is a work in progress – it’s constantly under development and they know there are some serious glitches. Their ethos around NHS Evidence is that it’s a “good place to start”, and I think I’d agree with that. TRIP (lovely resource) and NHS Evidence are my first ports of call for a quick and dirty search and/or skimming the cream on a topic.

My first gripe was that the specialist collections have been closed down – these were such a great resource, and one that really helped to sell the site. However they were too expensive apparently,  and to variable in quality. So, instead, eventually, we’ll have hubs. Now I don’t think that nearly enough information was available about what these would cover. I think the hubs are the production process and there wont just be 3 topics covered, but what Anne et al were able to confirm was that one hub would be created around medicines (not least because NICE have incorporated the National Prescribing Centre, and National electronic Library for Medicines).  MORE INFO ON HUBS PLEASE!

a-z medicines

The A-Z of Topics will continue to be populated, and my attention was drawn to the
A-Z of Medicines

- a brilliant resource which could prove really useful, but why not shout about this more?

The search function has got intellisens search and spelling suggestions, which is all very google-esque which is great.

The accreditation process is a good thing, but currently only applies to guidelines. I suspect that a bit too much is made of this – if the resource is good enough to be covered by the NHS Evidence Search (which by definition is supposed to only be the good stuff!) then what is added by having some sources of information accredited (a hoop for that organisation) and some not… But I have to admit, that seeing the decisions of who has been accredited and who hasn’t is interesting (ps – it’s not NICE who accredits, it’s an independent panel facilitated by NICE).

The NICE Pathways are supposed to be helping hands to get the best from the NICE Guidelines, rather than a substitute for Map of Medicine (very lovely resource!) The number of pathways will increase from 18 to 60 by the end of 2011/12 financial year.

The QIPP  (Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention) pages seemed really useful but I’ll need to investigate a bit further. But the best bit on these pages was the fact that there’s Cochrane Quality and Productivity topics . These provide evidence for treatments or services which are NOT cost-effective and which could be stopped. Sounds like a great resource.

We had loads of gripes about page layouts,  and where the links for particular resources were, and some functionality issues (eg why do you have to login to MyEvidence (yet another password since this is not ATHENS related) to get access to a clipboard function – if pubmed can have a temporary clipboard, why not NHS Evidence?)

Also good to get reassurance that there was commitment on the part of NICE and NHS Evidence to continue to support and upgrade the resources available via ATHENS. No clear message about how this would be funded come June 2012 when SHAs will stop contributing cash to the national coffer to pay for these resources, but it’s early days yet to sort out that sort of thing… isn’t it? hmmm

All in all, good to play with the new resource, and good to give feedback and to feel as if we’re being listened to. Obviously not all of our “advice” will be implemented, and it might have saved a lot of heartache and swearing if they’d asked a few librarians before they made the changes, but we need to speak up when asked for comment.

Library TeachMeet 2011

delighted to be able to announce, on behalf of the rest of the camlibtm team, the next Library TeachMeet in Cambridge:

Date: Tuesday 29th March 2010

Venue: Schlumberger, West Cambridge (generously being hosted by @libclare

New dedicated website: http://www.camlibtm.info

Twitter: @camlibtm

Sign in for enthusiastic lurkers and speakers will open shortly, but put the date in your diary!

 

Prezi from the Libraries@Cambridge conference where the announcement was made gives a little bit of backgrouund:

http://prezi.com/bin/preziloader.swf

Cambridge Librarians Teachmeet on Prezi

fortress organisations – sound familiar?

I thoroughly enjoyed Simon Andrewes Arcadia seminar this week – describing the very radical transformation the BBC News has undergone in the last 3 years or so. The changing digital environment, financial cuts and common sense meant that a root and branch style re-organisation of the structure and organisation was required.

No tinkering round the edges!

There was lots to enjoy about the whole talk, not least some fascinating facts, such as

• there are 120 hours of news content created in any 24hr period;
• 500 webpages are written every day
• they achieve 80% coverage of the British population (pretty impressive!)

They were also trying to plan the changes with 5 key principles in mind:

Audience / Shared / Simple / Efficient / Flexible

I think there’s lesson in that for all of us.

What really stuck in my mind though was the picture of a fortress organisation – each section of the organisation seeing itself in competition with the other sections, fiefdoms who were suspicious and compartmentalised. The staff within each section were incredibly loyal to that section, and often very long standing employees. But it was “us against the world”. And that one hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing – no communication between divisions since that could give away a perceived advantage.

sound familliar? What a shame, what a waste.

One part of the solution that the BBC used was to to ensure that there wasn’t one overall person in charge, but that on a regular basis the role of “overseer” rotated around the heads of each division so that everyone would have to see the whole picture on a regular basis. They also tried to reduce tribalism by making someone with a background in radio, for instance, head of the online delivery.

However still there were situations where there were loads of people working on the same story, but didn’t realise it.  So they’ve set up a portal which will allow social networking between the jouranlists who might be scattered round the globe, or sitting in the same office, to encourage sharing and collaboration.

we could all learn a thing or two, I think.

teaching in practice – an educator by chance

very interesting blog post by @laikas a Dutch Clinical Librarian who blogs on her MedLibBlog - she describes how she became an educator by chance. Interesting reading.

teaching in practice – reflection on teaching session – recordings

Today in a 2.5hr teaching session with postgraduates, I was recorded. While the student did ask my permission, and I said yes, I don’t think I asked enough about this.

• what was the recording – just audio, or was there a camera too?
• what was going to happen to the recording?
  • would it be posted on the internet?
  • just for that student, or for sharing with the group?
• why was I being recorded?
  • was it a language issue?
  • was the student disabled in some way that I was unaware off?
• is there any university policy about “informal” recording of lectures?
• while I consented, there was quite a lot of discussion amongst the group during the session, which was undoubtedly recorded too – what about their consent?

So now I’m left wondering what to do.

I think I will contact the student who made the recording to ask about the purpose and nature of the recording, and where it’s going to end up. I might ask for a copy as well (though 2.5 hours of my own voice is likely to be too much to bear!).

But it also raises the question in my mind – whether I should be creating podcasts of certain aspects of my teaching sessions, so that I can ensure the quality of the recording is adequate,  and that the quality of the content is clear (I fear that my delivery of certain concepts to a faceless audience would be very different to my delivery when faced with a group whose body language I can try to read, and who can ask questions).

Teach in Practice – thinking point: teaching style & type of learner

Having previously stated that I think that the nature of what I teach requires more didactic and Socratic (at best) teaching methods I’m wondering what sort of teaching styles I actually incorporate into my sessions. There are 4 choices:

• Authority / coach (for those dependent learners)
• Motivator / guide (for interested learners)
• Facilitator (for involved learners)
• Consultant / delegator (for self-directed learners)

I have 2 sorts of training sessions happening at the moment –  about 10 classes for groups of 15 Part2 (ie 3^rd year) undergraduates, and 2 classes of c.15 MPhil students.

Ostensibly they cover the same thing (just with different levels of detail)

• Establish what the group already knows about literature searching
• Introduce the idea that there are other places to look than google
• Present a range of different tools and techniques which can be used to improve search results
• Hands-on searching of some databases to put techniques into practice.

The undergraduate version of this session is very much more motivator to begin with(inspiring, goal setting – ie you want your dissertation to be as good as possible don’t you? Do you think current startegies are adequate to the task?) and coach (informational lecture – ie these are the buttons you press to make pubmed do what you want) with a little bit of facilitator in there as well (discussion around the range of language in any one topic).  The group are very much in the dependent stage – I send out a pre-session questionnaire asking if they’ve used, heard of but never used, or never heard of Pubmed, web of knowledge and endnoteweb. They know that their skills are pretty much non-existent in relation to what I intend to cover in the session (although they are yet to be convinced perhaps that it matters – that hopefully comes in the session!). But I would hope that they’re also an interested learner – at least when I try to suggest why pubmed v google is no contest. So hopefully my teaching style is pretty close to the types of learners who attend.

In terms of teaching style, the postgraduates get pretty much the same mix of motivator and facilitator (particularly since they are definitely interested as learners – they know why the stuff I’m talking about is useful/valuable, and they know they’ve got an intense year ahead). And I do try to be more of a delegator as well – establishing what skills they already have, and what they might like to focus on in the session – they’ve already got a deal of experience in searching to get the information they need (a lot of the time gathered through self-directed learning ie they’ve taught themselves), it’s just perhaps a longer, more frustrating process than it needs to be. But it’s interesting how much I still return to being a coach when it becomes clear that their techniques have some holes in them.

There’s a couple of activities I do in the postgrad session which hopefully encourage more reflection on their part, and which also encourage me to let them dictate the pass and content of the session:

• After inviting the group to introduce themselves and their experience of searching, I ask them to plot themselves on a graph with x-axis = experience and y-axis = confidence. What I should do (but didn’t in todays session, was to close the circle at the end of the session, and ask the students to re-position their plot if they’d like to after the end of the session. This wouldn’t be intended to make them feel rubbish, but to encourage them to reflect on how much they could improve their technique with a better knowledge of what they could actually be doing.
• After presenting a very complex search strategy I ask the students to write on post-its the question the strategy is try to answer. We then deconstruct the strategy. To improve this task, I should pause half way through the deconstruction to ask if anyone would like to rephrase/edit the question they posted. And allow time for the group to consider the changes.
• Having established the experience of the various students attending, it would be better to ask them to raise one or 2 issues they struggle with, and then ensure I address these in the rest of the session – perhaps ticking them off to emphasise that I’ve addressed their specific questions.

teachmeet – the morning after (well, a week later….)

well, it’s a week later, and we’ve had our first teachmeet! crickey – it felt such a huge flurry leading up to the day, and now a week has passed and I’ve only just got round to blogging about it.

I really enjoyed the whole process of working with Niamh, Katie, Chris and Celine – 3 of whom I didn’t know before they commented on my initial teachmeet post.

Just to prove I was really there, and really did contribute enjoy(?) the video of my 7minutes on Cephalonian inductions, and some photos (such as this one)

I was really please how the event ran – Celine did a marvelous introduction, and we had some very intersting presentations – full details at http://tinyurl.com/camlibthm, but we have presentations and evaluation via slideshare, photos on flickr, videos on youtube, and answers to questions raisedd on the night on the wiki – plus lovely comments on twitter (#camlibtm). And frankly, the glass of wine when we finally sat down for teacheat never tasted so good!

here are some reflections about the whole event (and these are entirely my own reflections, not necessarily those of the rest of the organising group)

Good:

• that we had fewer speakers than had signed up (illness of speakers unfortunately meant 2 had to drop out) – gave more time for change-over between speakers, even if we still didn’t allow questions as part of the evening. To allow for decent amount of networking time as well as hearing the speakers, might need to think carefully about the balance for next time (assuming there is a next time!)
• post-it notes – great to get the questions gathered up since we didn’t allow questions during the event. Also means we can allow full enjoyment for non-attendees,  and allow speakers to gather their thoughts before answering!
• names out of a hat – order of speakers was only announced one speaker in advance. great to make it fresh, and casual
• range of different speakers – perhaps some first-timers
• videos – perhaps have the flip positioned somewhere else next time (brightness of the screen meant speakers often in the dark) – very useful as a learning tool for me as a speaker to be able to see myself presenting for the first time!
• teacheat – good to unwind afterwards, great that people I didn’t know were there

Room for improvement?

• layout of the room – the venue was lovely and generously available for free, but depsite our best efforts the chairs were still effectively in rows. Perhaps have it in a pub function room next time, for truly relaxed unconference feel?
• lack of time for chat during and afterwards – maybe have longer session, but with longer break?
• timer – we had timers for the speakers loaded on powerpoint and visible to everyone, including the speakers. But my “one  minute face” to alert speakers to the passing of time seemed to throw one or 2 of the speakers, so while over-running is undesirable, I think finding a different method of keeping speakers to time would be good.

critical appraisal session – reflection

for 2 x librarians, 4 x Dr, 1 x OT, 2 x lay members of ethics committees

Aims:

To provide participants with a structured basis for critically appraising quantitative research papers.

Objectives:

By the end of the session participants will be able to:

•Understand the principles of critical appraisal

•Know about the resources that will help you

•Critically appraise a piece of research as a group

Plan of the  1/2 day:

• • Start with introductions & expectations – a bit of history about me, and a clarification that I’m not a statistician and that if it takes a statistician to understand clinical research then I bet there’s more than just me in hot water!, also disclaimer that I’m not a clinician, so I might skip over some aspects of a paper that are terribly interesting to the group from a clinical view point, but that from the point of view of the paper are perhaps not that important.
  • Go round table asking about experience, and expectations for the day (mix of drs & OTs & lay ethics group members)
  • Start with a quiz – mind gym after lunch to get them refreshing/thinking about research methodology and terminology
  • Work through quiz, getting people to suggest reasons for correct answers, and to suggest reasons why an answer might be incorrect. For the OR (odds ratio) section, draw a blank forest plot and ask group to draw on diagram where the CIs would lie, and therefore why a result might be significant or not. Trying to encourage theose with stronger skills to explain to those with more rudimentary understanding – helps them refresh, and encourages idea that I don’t have all the answers, and that colleagues and books might help
  • Break
  • Actually do the critical appraisal of a paper using CASP RCT checklist – small enough group that we worked through it as a whole group, rather than dividing into groups. They were already well socialised, and were happy to speak up and raise areas where they were unsure or unclear. We spent quite a long time on the first 3-4 questions, and so had to rush a bit through the final questions, but did manage to squeeze in final round up
  • Info on the other sources of help – websites, books , practice!

Reflections – 2^nd half was very rushed – I perhaps spent too much time raising areas for them to consider. Perhaps the group hadn’t read the paper so very thoroughly in advance, and certainly one had only received it on the day (late applicant)

Good things

• quiz
  • raised lots of issues early on, and encouraged group to share and discuss reasons for correct answers with each other. Lay member raised issue that sometimes the quantitative slant of the questions wouldn’t be the most important sort of research to help/influence patients – the qualitative stuff was just as important (sometimes more so) when considering hierarchy of evidence.
  • Interactive and engaging but not confessional – nobody knew who answered what, so it allowed people to discuss without shame/ embarrassment

• Critical appraisal
  • Again, very group oriented – lots of discussion and explanation from the group,
  • Questions raised from lots of different perspectives
  • Point raised later that having a mix of “dispassionate” reviewers plus clinical reviewers helped to tease apart some issues, helped focus the mind on the paper as opposed to the clinical issues which might actually just be a difference of opinion
• Flipchart
  • Liked that I drew diagrams to give visual presentations of some of the stats, rather than relying on verbal explanation
  • Liked that members of the group drew too, and contributed.

Bad things/ areas for improvments

• time – very rushed at the end – I’d spend too long asking them to look in more depth at the population
• fairly stuffy room – glad I put in a break half way through, but it could have been a little shorter, which would have given more time
• should have perhaps done a little more introduction to some of the main themes/terminologies before the quiz to (could use a prezi??) to soften the blow for those for whom it really was almost the first introduction
• should have remembered the clickything to move the powerpoint on, which would have meant I could have moved around or been sitting more (less of a teacher?), rather than standing
• didn’t refer to the books or get any of the group to look up the “answer” in the books, though a couple of the doctors were interested in the books we’d brought along
• given that some of the group were very much more “begininer” than I’d realised, so it was pretty harsh to drop them in quite so hard – so need to get much better understanding of who’s coming along to be able to pitch it at the right level – bit it did make it an opportunity for the rest of the group to test/demonstrate their understanding of p-value/confidence intervals etc – if you have to explain what it means, then it can highlight just how well you understand the topic!