Doing research? Think Anne Harrison Award

Following on from my previous post about the research-practice gap, give some thought to applying for the Anne Harrison Award or at least encouraging someone you know who's engaged in research to do so.

And don't discount the possible significance of any action-research you might be conducting in the workplace. If you're unsure whether your local project is up to par, check with the AH administrators (all lovely, approachable indiviuals) or drop me a line and I'll pass it onto the right people.

The other group of professionals who should consider the AH Award are those doing relevant post-grad studies, where the course includes a research component. What better way to support and/or get that hard work out to the masses...via the AH Award!

The Award makes available $3000 for:

• A research project which will increase the understanding of health librarianship in Australia;
• Exploring the potential for the further development of health librarianship in Australia;
• Assistance towards enrichment of knowledge and skills of Australian health sciences librarians, including funding to help meet expenses of an approved course of study or study tour, or to help meet expenses arising from a publication in the field of Australian health librarianship.
  

EBLIP Vol 2, No 1 (2007)

Remember to take a look at the first issue of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice for 2007. While not the only paper of interest we have to give special note to our own...those SPICE girls, Suzanne Lewis and Lisa Cotter, and their paper Have the Most Relevant and Answerable Research Questions Facing Librarians Changed Between 2001 and 2006?. In their paper, Lewis and Cotter reason that the disparity between questions being asked by information professionals and the evidence being generated by researchers equals a research‐practice gap. They also found that of the list of "focused and answerable questions representing current workplace issues" (p.1), as reported by delegates attending 2 EBP seminars in June 2006, the most commonly asked fell into the management and education domains! Interesting stuff. For the full list of questions, refer to Appendix A of the paper.

2007 ALIA BOD elections: VP candidates blog

Elections are being held to fill two positions on the ALIA Board of Directors and to elect someone to the position of Vice-President. Members should have their ballot papers by now. Voting closes at 5pm on 11 April.

Of interest, there are 2 candidates standing for the VP's position and both have blogs. Should you like to know more about them, visit Kevin Dudeney and Derek Whitehead.

We've moved our feeds for HLA Blogs!

...to Feedburner.

While the old feed URL has been redirected to FeedBurner, we encourage all existing subscribers to rescrubscribe using the new feed as this will allow us to accurately track user statistics and better know our subscribers' interests.

Feedburner is compatible with your preferred reader or you can subscribe to receive new posts once a day via email.

Breaking news: Lisa Kruesi, 2008 MLA Cunningham Fellow

Congratulations go to Lisa Kruesi who has been awarded the Medical Library Association's Cunningham Memorial International Fellowship for 2008. Lisa is the third Australian to receive this award after Frances Bludhorn in 1987 and Saroj Bhatia in 2003.

Lisa is the Manager of the Health Sciences Library Service at the University of Queensland (UQ) Library. She is also Treasurer of the ALIA HLA group and joint convener of the 10th ICML (International Congress of Medical Librarianship) that will be held in Brisbane in August/September 2009.

Well done, Lisa!

New book on on assessment and evaluation for hospital librarians

Using Benchmarking, Needs Assessment, Quality Improvement, Outcome Measurement, and Library Standards: A How-To-Do-It Manual by Ros Dudden has just been published. Neal-Schuman are offering a discount to MLA members but you will need to contact the publisher regarding the cost of international post (so it may be easier to contact your local bookseller!).

Learn more about social software

About Five Weeks to a Social Library "is the first free, grassroots, completely online course devoted to teaching librarians about social software and how to use it in their libraries." Though the course was run back in February all the course content is freely available via screencasts, webcasts, podcasts and links to readings, among other things. The course covers Blogs, RSS, Wikis, Social Networking Software and SecondLife, Flickr, Social Bookmarking Software and Selling Social Software @ Your Library. This site looks well worth exploring.

Upcoming professional development opportunities

FOLIOZ - Designing & Delivering Information Skills Training Courses: presented by ScHARR and ALIA, this online course is designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills to design and deliver successful information skills training courses. Register now! The course runs from 26 March to 25 May 2007.

Survival of the Fittest: Strategies to Prove Your Library’s Value: pay to access video-on-demand of the original Webcast (available March 13–April 12, 2007) and the participant's manual.

Negotiating E-Licences: an ALIA/CAVAL workshop being held in most major centres from the end of March through to early August.

Copyright Council 2007 training: the Copyright Council is holding training aimed at libraries and archives in major centres throughout 2007.

4th International Evidence Based Library & Information Practice Conference: EBLIP4 is being held from 6-11 May 2007 in
Chapel Hill-Durham, North Carolina.

MLA ’07 Information Revolution: Change Is in the Air: the MLA conference is being held in Philadelphia from 18-23 May 2007. Early bird registration is available until April 16.

28th International Association of Technological University Libraries Conference: the theme for this conference being held in Stockholm, 11-14 June 2007, is "Global Access to Science - Scientific Publishing for the Future".

Members invited to attend ALIA GM, 15 May 2007

The ALIA General Meeting is being held at 6:00pm on Tuesday 15 May 2007 at The National Library of Australia, followed by drinks.

Motions are due by Thursday 15 March 2007. If you plan to attend, RSVP to Kamara Schlegel/02 6215 8214.

Donate your hospital's history to NLM

Becky Lyons recently posted to the MLA's Hospital Library Section's e-list.

The National Library of Medicine holds some 2400 hospital histories from around the world. We would be delighted to receive donations of hospital histories that we do not already hold.

Information on how to donate books to NLM is here: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/services/donate.html

Health-e-Nation Conference, 21 March 2007, Star City Hotel, Sydney

Members may be interested in the upcoming Health-e-Nation Conference and Exhibition being held in Sydney starting 21 March. From the website:

Health-e-Nation conferences provide a unique opportunity to learn, network, participate and most importantly to challenge the status quo of Health ICT activity.

The conference will be exploring the theme "Health-e-Wellness: consumers participating in their own health management."

The conference is hosted by CHIK Services (CHIK) Pty Ltd which is a not-for-profit company established to provide global communication services bridging the health and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sectors.

Latest issue of JCHLA now available

The first issue of the Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association for 2007 contains the rewritten Standards for Library and Information Services in Canadian Healthcare Facilities 2006. Our Canadian colleagues have adopted to follow the shorter MLA model of outcomes based standards.

Also, those of you interested in Web 2.0 should check out Allan Cho's introduction to mashups.

2007 HLA Executive

The HLA Symposium, held in February, marked some changes to the membership of the HLA Executive. Below is the HLA Executive for 2007. Feel free to approach any committee member with feedback, suggestions or issues of concern.

Heather Todd (QLD) - Convenor
Lisa Kruesi (QLD) - Treasurer
Mary Peterson (SA) - Secretary
Cheryl Hamill (WA) - Committee member
Veronica Delafosse (VIC) - Committee member
Jenny Hall (QLD) - Committee member
Bronia Renison (QLD) - Committee member
Sheelagh Noonan (NSW) - Committee member
Melanie Kammermann (Hong Kong) - Newsletter Editor

Each committee member will be profiled in the upcoming March 2007 issue of HLA News.

Finally, Lindsay Harris, Greg Fowler and Janiece Michael have now officially stepped down from the committee and we thank them for their hard work.