Three Supervision Modalities for Training Marital and Family Counselors

Three supervision modalities (live, delayed review, and verbal reports) in training marital and family counselors are discussed with attention given to goals, supervisory considerations, advantages, and disadvantages of each modality.     

Meta-analysis: a tool for medical and scientific discoveries.

Medicine has made increasing use of meta-analysis, largely as a quantitative procedure for combining results of clinical trials. Meta-analysis begins with a comprehensive review of the literature. The next step is a systematic analysis of the quality and content of each study. Finally, results are combined statistically and conclusions are drawn from this new overview of the data. This paper presents a brief historical perspective on the use of meta-analysis in medicine with emphasis on the medical library. The authors conclude that in the future, medical librarians will play a significant role in the application of this useful technique.     

Chaos theory, informational needs, and natural disasters

This study applies chaos theory to a system-wide analysis of crisis communication in a natural disaster. Specifically, we analyze crisis communication during the 1997 Red River Valley flood in Minnesota and North Dakota. This flood, among the worst in modern American history, consumed entire metropolitan areas, displacing thousands of people. The conditions and decisions leading to the disaster, and the subsequent reactions are retraced. Communication related to river crest predictions (fractals), the shock at the magnitude of the crisis (cosmology episode), novel forms of reorganizing (self-organization), and agencies that aided in establishing a renewed order (strange attractors) are evaluated. Ultimately, we argue that preexisting sensemaking structures favoring rationalized, traditional views of a complex system led officials to make inappropriately unequivocal predictions and ultimately diminished the effectiveness of the region's crisis communication and planning.     

New measures for new roles: defining and measuring the current practices of health sciences librarians

The roles of academic health sciences librarians are continually evolving as librarians initiate new programs and services in response to developments in computer technology and user demands. However, statistics currently collected by libraries do not accurately reflect or measure these new roles. It is essential for librarians to document, measure, and evaluate these new activities to continue to meet the needs of users and to ensure the viability of their professional role. To determine what new measures should be compiled, the authors examined current statistics, user demands, professional literature, and current activities of librarians as reported in abstracts of poster sessions at Medical Library Association annual meetings. Three new categories of services to be measured are proposed. The first, consultation, groups activities such as quality filtering and individual point-of-need instruction. The second, outreach, includes activities such as working as liaisons, participating in grand rounds or morning report, and providing continuing education. The third area, Web authoring, encompasses activities such as designing Web pages, creating online tutorials, and developing new products. Adding these three measures to those already being collected will provide a more accurate and complete depiction of the services offered by academic health sciences librarians.