Bringing evidence to practice: a team approach to teaching skills required for an informationist role in evidence-based clinical and public health practice

Objective: The objectives were (1) to develop an academic, graduate-level course designed for information professionals seeking to bring evidence to clinical medicine and public health practice and to address, in the course approach, the “real-world” time constraints of these domains and (2) to further specify and realize identified elements of the “informationist” concept.Setting: The course took place at the Division of Health Sciences Informatics, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University.Participants: A multidisciplinary faculty, selected for their expertise in the course core competencies, and three students, two post-graduate National Library of Medicine (NLM) informationist fellows and one NLM second-year associate, participated in the research.Intervention: A 1.5-credit, graduate-level course, “Informationist Seminar: Bringing the Evidence to Practice,” was offered in October to December 2006. In this team-taught course, a series of lectures by course faculty and panel discussions involving outside experts were combined with in-class discussion, homework exercises, and a major project that involved choosing and answering, in both oral and written form, a real-world question based on a case scenario in clinical or public health practice.Conclusion: This course represents an approach that could be replicated in other academic health centers with similar pools of expertise. Ongoing journal clubs that reiterate the question-and-answer process with new questions derived from clinical and public health practice and incorporate peer review and faculty mentoring would reinforce the skills acquired in the seminar.

Highlights

• Interdisciplinary faculty designed and offered a graduate-level course to teach the skills required by an informationist in clinical and public health practice, further elaborating a model for preparing informationists.

Implications

• This scalable approach to teaching skills for the transfer of evidence into practice could be replicated in academic health centers with similar pools of expertise; such replication could contribute data toward validating this training approach.
• Greater clarity on an appropriate, or “good enough,” standard of evidence for supporting point-of-action decision making is needed.
• Based on the assumption that practicing skills increases confidence and the likelihood that skills will be applied, this course included mentored practice of oral and written evidence presentation skills. Further research could determine whether a course that includes such mentored practice increases the likelihood that students will apply their newly acquired skills.

     

Insourcing library outreach: Engaging technical services in outreach to student organizations

Abstract

In recent years, library outreach has become an increasingly important aspect of public services work. In order to expand capacity and engage patrons, libraries should consider expanding their library outreach programs to include the efforts and expertise of technical services personnel. In this article, librarians from Texas A&M University will share how public services librarians, cataloging experts, and preservation librarians collaborated to provide support for a student-led textbook lending library for student veterans. Through this collaboration, the library was able to develop new outreach opportunities that highlighted technical services expertise as well as lend support to an important campus effort to improve the affordability of college textbooks for veterans.     

Outsourced library technical services: The bookseller's perspective

This paper looks at outsourcing library technical services primarily from the perspective of the relationship between outsourcing libraries and their suppliers. It first looks at why businesses outsource and how suppliers gain sufficient advantages to benefit those businesses. The author then extends these concepts to libraries and the booksellers who provide them with these services. Based upon business literature and practical experience, the author outlines some of the potential pitfalls in outsourcing arrangements and what can be done to minimize them. The author concludes with a call to temper enthusiasm for outsourcing in view of the sober realities of doing business in a complex, fast-changing environment.     

Transcending widgets: the nature of technical services

This paper was presented as the keynote address at the Ohio Library Council, Technical Services Division conference,“Technical Services, 2003: Inspiration, Example, Synthesis” at Mohican State Park, Ohio, May 7, 2003. The keynote was to fill the role of “inspiration.” The author considers why technical services personnel may feel isolated, misunderstood, or dispensable; why technical services personnel may be misunderstood or underappreciated by others; the nature and mission of librarianship and how technical services relates to them; the consequences of having a bad image and a bad self-image; and how harmful opinions and actions might be countered.     

Indigenous knowledge for development: Bringing research and practice together

Information and knowledge are an increasingly important part of trade in today's knowledge society. The concept of access to this information and knowledge is at the heart of such a society. Basically, this access depends on two types of factors, technological and cultural. The technological factors determine the physical requirements for disseminating information including communications, transportation, printing, and the technology of organizing information. The cultural factors determine to what extent the people who possess the knowledge are willing to share it and place it in social domain. (Adapted from Mokyr, J. [(2002). The Knowledge society: Theoretical and historical underpinnings. Retrieved May 22, 2005, from http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan011602.pdf]).To make effective use of information/knowledge, it has to be shared and distributed, and its transmission through learning is essential. The world vision of a truly global knowledge partnership becomes possible only when the people of the developing countries participate as both contributors and users of knowledge. There is, therefore, a need not only to bring global knowledge to the developing countries, but also to learn about indigenous knowledge (IK) from these countries, paying particular attention to the knowledge base of the poor.     

Allocating the technology dividend in technical services through using vendor services

To achieve operational efficiency and a high level of productivity, technical services departments in libraries have often sought technology-based services provided by vendors. Vendors are able to provide significant savings, personnel support, and expertise to the library that needs to devote its own capital (personnel, equipment, funding, etc.) to new initiatives. Developing a strong, positive working relationship between libraries and vendors will not only result in resource savings and expand profits, but also create a sense of teamwork and trust. In this article, authors present their practice in using the technology dividend generated through the beneficial investment in a partnership to provide enhanced services to library users while maintaining adequate vendor profitability.     

Allocating the technology dividend in technical services through using vendor services

To achieve operational efficiency and a high level of productivity, technical services departments in libraries have often sought technology-based services provided by vendors. Vendors are able to provide significant savings, personnel support, and expertise to the library that needs to devote its own capital (personnel, equipment, funding, etc.) to new initiatives. Developing a strong, positive working relationship between libraries and vendors will not only result in resource savings and expand profits, but also create a sense of teamwork and trust. In this article, authors present their practice in using the technology dividend generated through the beneficial investment in a partnership to provide enhanced services to library users while maintaining adequate vendor profitability.     

Proactivity in digital public services: A conceptual analysis

Public organizations are looking for new ways to use digital technologies to increase the efficiency of their internal processes and improve their interactions with clients, whether citizens or businesses. In response, scholars suggest that public organizations be proactive in digital public services such that the organizations approach their clients, rather than the other way around. In the most extreme form of proactivity, clients do not have to do anything to receive a public service. Although various examples of proactive public services are in use, how proactivity changes the conceptual understanding of digital public services remains unclear. Therefore, we derive the changes that proactivity causes in a conceptualization of digital public service by means of a conceptual analysis through the lens of a seminal theoretical work on proactivity. The results indicate that proactivity can ensure equal accessibility to a subset of public services, rely on more comprehensive integration of IT systems on the back end, and change how value is co-created in the service process. We formulate the changes as propositions that future work can investigate empirically and discuss proactive digital public services as a way to reduce clients' administrative burden. We contribute to theory by clarifying the conceptual changes in digital public services that proactivity invokes and call for joint research by scholars of public administration, information systems, and service management to relate the research streams of administrative burden and proactive digital public service.     

Access to Research: the experience of implementing a pilot in public libraries

The Access to Research project is a collaboration between scholarly publishers and librarians to provide free licensed access to research journals via terminals in public libraries. The project is an element of the ‘balanced package’ proposed by the Finch Working Group on how to expand access to published research in the UK, which reported its recommendations to the UK government in June 2012. We describe the setting up of the project and the findings from a three‐month technical pilot prior to the launch of a two‐year national pilot in February 2014. The project has already attracted support from the major scholarly publishers, with about 8,400 journal titles now available. The access platform has been shown to be usable by public librarians and library patrons. We are now addressing the challenge of understanding how the public will make use of the system and exploring how best to provide training and education for librarians and users.     

Electronic services in the public sector: A conceptual framework

Electronic services provided by governmental organizations, here referred to as public e-services, are frequently discussed in the e-government literature. There is, however, little consensus on the meaning of the concepts used to describe and discuss these e-services, and hence, the literature is full of synonymous terms and concepts. This paper is conceptual and presents efforts to understand e-services in the public sector domain by unpacking the public e-service concept into three dimensions; as being (1) a service, (2) electronic, and (3) public (as contrasted to being private). Based on a hermeneutic analysis, these dimensions are discussed in a number of combinations, illustrating that a multi-dimensional take on public e-services must be adopted in order to capture the complexity of governmentally supplied e-services and contribute to theory development, as well as practical utility.     

Managing streaming video: A new role for technical services

BMCC Library is using streaming video technology to extend the electronic reserves service to include audio and videos. We have found that a streaming video project can be managed by non-technical staff with results that empower staff and impress students and faculty with their ease of use. The role of technical services in the library has evolved considerably, a process driven in part by technology. Consistent with this trend, our technical services department was asked to manage an electronic reserves program a few years back. Adding streaming video to its portfolio will invigorate a vital service department in the library. This article will illustrate the process we undertook from start to finish, demonstrating the major concern of streaming media is copyright consideration, not technology.     

Aiming for continuous improvement: performance measurement in a re-engineered technical services

In 1996 Griffith University Library undertook a major re-engineering of its Technical Services Section. Features of this re-engineering included automation of repetitive processes, vendor supply of USMARC records, and a partnership with the Blackwells Group for supply of shelf ready books and consolidation of serials. The outcome of this process was a reduction in staff numbers in the section from 34 to 17. The new section was organized into two self-managing teams, with each team responsible for all its own functions from acquisitions through cataloging. The change in the section was as much cultural as structural. Team members were actively encouraged to take responsibility for their own work areas and to participate in all decision-making processes. The concept of “continuous improvement” of work processes was emphasized, and a system of performance measurement put in place. Unit costs (i.e., the average cost of adding a book or serial issue to the collection) and labor productivity are measured on a quarterly basis, and turnaround time annually. The methodology for calculating these figures and their use as a management tool is outlined.     

Use of teams in technical services in academic libraries

A review of library literature shows a general trend of technical services in academic libraries to reorganize into teams. This paper analyzes the results of a survey conducted in 2010 in order to answer four research questions: how extensively technical services in academic libraries have moved into the use of teams in organizational structures; how extensively technical services in academic libraries have done training related to teams; what team characteristics are demonstrated by teams in technical services in academic libraries; and how the effectiveness of teams is perceived by staff and faculty who work in technical services in academic libraries.