ALIA Board meeting report - May 07

Click here to view notes from the May '07 ALIA Board meeting. Points of interest include:

• no new e-lists to be created until a new policy on list use/responsibilities is finalised
• Lesley Piko, an external expert, will be asked to continue on the Finance, Audit and Risk Management Standing Committee with an honorarium
• the Governance Standing Committee has commenced a review of Committees and external representation; its next job will be a Board Readiness project
• a national event celebrating ALIA's 70th annivesary is being planned for the last quarter in 2007
• an Education Summit will be held in early 2008
• ALIA Conference guidelines are currently being revised and updated
• a review of the PD scheme will occur in the second half of 2007; PD participation currently sits at around 9% of total ALIA members
• a qualitative assessment of members needs for training will commence once the results of the surveys on training needs by Dr Gill Hallam (neXus stage 2), CAVAL and AGLIN have been received
• the ALIA Core values statement are to be approved without changes; statements on free access to information and professional conduct will be further amended
• Board agreed to further fund and seek further sponsorship for Alan Butters work on the development of an international ISO Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) standard [http://www.sybis.com.au/Pages/rfid%20new.html]
• The Board identified the following activities as priority for the 2007/08 period:
  * Advocacy (noting that it is a federal election year and ALIA's 70th Anniversary could provide an opportunity for engaging with Ministers and Shadow Ministers);
  *Education - particularly the development of discussion paper and the Education Summit;
  * Supporting ALIA Groups;
  * Engaging with members (including through National Advisory Congress meetings);
  * Management of the Association's finances;
  * Conferences - finalisation of the revised guidelines and working with Committees organising conferences;
  * Reviewing the use of Web 2.0 in ALIA services, including setting up a wikis and blogs.
• NAC meetings will be held around Australia and a "virtual" NAC meeting, using Web 2.0 technology, will be held in late 2007
• survey of members will be held later this yearALIA has been advised that Brisbane along with Singapore and Kuala Lumpur have been short listed as a suitable location for the 2010 IFLA World Congress

How informational professionals add value to their organisations: survey results

LexisNexis has release the results of a survey carried out in the US on how information professionals add value to their organizations through technology and knowledge management. Ninety three percent (93%) of librarians said they currently use intranets for managing and distributing information, and see collaborative workspaces (57%), wireless (44%), and portals (51%) as very important for the future. Click here to read more, in particular the top five responses to the question: "What is the most successful new initiative/service that you have launched in the past year?"

June issue of HLA News now published

Members will have received by email the June '07 issue of HLA News. Content includes:

Wireless connectivity (hotspots) at TQEH | Convenor's report | The role of research in Australian library and information studies | A report on presentations given by Tony McSean and Carol Lefebvre to the HLA Regional QLD group | A report from NLA's Innovative Ideas Forum | EBSCO product update | Left Field: 'Where's the evidence' by NICS | Q'Health Libraries' new director | Anne Harrison Award Winner

Thanks again to our sponsor, EBSCO.

As editor, I hope you find HLA News a valuable publication. Feel free to leave your comments on the blog.

HLA News - April 07 issue up on website

Members would be aware that HLA News is forwarded exclusively to members via email as a PDF attachment.

For interested non-members, the April issue of HLA News can now be viewed on the ALIA HLA newsletter web page. Content includes:

National access to electronic health information | Convenor's report | Searching for Australian grey literature in health | Workshop report: Electronic information in health libraries | HLA symposium report: Information Rx | Book review: Medical Library Downsizing | EBSCO product update | 2007 HLA Executive uncovered | Left Field: Using semantics to generate information | Guidelines for contributors | Call for applications for the Anne Harrison Award.

Australasian Cochrane Centre: Symposium for Australasian Review Authors

For those of you involved in producing reviews for the Cochrane Collaboration, the 2007 meeting for Australasian contributors coincides with a major update to the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions and the release of RevMan 5. The Symposium will be held in Brisbane, July 12-13.

There are pre and post workshops including Introduction to RevMan 5 and Developing a Protocol for a Systematic Review.

New issue of CHLA journal available

Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association Volume 22 Issue 2 Spring 2007 is now available at http://pubs.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/jchla/jchla2-07.html

Applicants sought for the annual Roger K. Summit International Scholarship

Thomson Scientific, part of The Thomson Corporation, is seeking applicants for the annual Roger K. Summit International Scholarship. Thomson Scientific awards two scholarships annually, one to a student in the Americas and one in Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, or Africa.

The €5,000 Scholarship is awarded to a graduate student enrolled in an accedited library or information science course. A panel of information professionals selects the regional winner after reviewing academic achievement, interest in electronic information services, proficiency using Dialog online services and faculty recommendations.

The deadline for applicants is October 31, 2007.

Applications are available at here.

Australian Health Librarian wins Thomson Scientific-sponsored Info Pro Award

Congratulations to Stephen Due, Chief Librarian at Geelong Hospital/Barwon Health Service, who was named the 2007 Information Professional of the Year by the SLA Australia/-New Zealand Chapter.

The annual award is sponsored by Thomson Scientific and is given to an information professional who has displayed great achievement in the information industry.

From the press release, which you can read in its entirety here, Stephen "has gone above and beyond to share his expertise and knowledge with his colleagues and peers...He has been extremely proactive in advancing the professional status of health librarianship within his organization and through his involvement with industry associations."

Notes from the HLA General Meeting 2 Feb 07

In an effort to keep members abreast of the HLA Executive's discussions, every effort will be made to get the minutes of meetings up onto the ALIA HLA website. The first to go up are the notes of the HLA General Meeting, held during the HLA Symposium, Information Rx, on 2 February 2007 at Sydney's Darling Harbour Conference Centre.

You can direct any queries or feedback to HLA Convenor,Heather Todd.

Latest SPARC Open Access Newsletter - balancing author and publisher rights

The June issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter "takes a close look at attempts to balance author and publisher rights, primarily in the "author addenda" from CIC, SPARC, and Science Commons, and in the position paper by the ALPSP, AAP/PSP, and STM. The round-up section briefly notes 99 OA developments from May."

As for all those acronyms:
CIC - Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a OA-friendly consortium of 12 research universities
SPARC - Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Constortium
ALPSP - Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
AAP/PSP - Association of American Publishers / Professional/Scholarly Publishing
STM - International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers

You can subscribe and unsubscribe to the newsletter and discussion forum: http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/soan

The current and back issues can be found at:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm

CINAHL on the OVID platform - the real story

Check out the Krafty Librarian's blog post regarding the removal of CINAHL from the OVID platform. Make sure you read Scott McFarlane's (OVID VP) comments at the bottom, which aim to set the story straight.

CHLA 2007, Friday 1st June

The last day of the CHLA conference! The official program closed at the end of the morning sessions, which again were three keynote addresses.
Ingrid Parent, Assistant Deputy Minister, Documentary Heritage Collection Sector, Library and Archives Canada was the first speaker. In her talk, Ingrid focussed on the need for digital archives to be stable since one of the major issues facing any digital archiving of material was to ensure that it would have stable urls to ensure retrieval in the future. There have already been two harvests of government internet domains for archiving of internet pages, and this produced a terrifying amount of data. There are already many collaborative digitisation projects underway, but mass digitisation of print material held in the national archives will begin in the new financial year.
An update from CISTI – partnerships and digital initiatives, was given by CISTI’s Director General, Pam Bjornson. CISTI is part of the National Research Council and has 15 locations around Canada, with its headquarters in Ottawa. A major project is the development of a federal science e-library which involves negotiating government-wide licences of scientific and technical publications. This project, not surprisingly, is very complex, and has been planned for some years. CISTI is also involved in collaborative projects. I’ve already mentioned the National Library for Health; it also works on the OSPRey partnership – a joint submission and peer review system – with Australia’s CSIRO. CISTI’s Doc Delivery service has partnered with My I Library to provide digital ILLs of books – all of CISTI’s e-books are available via My I Library on ILL.
The final speaker for the morning struck a less formal but nonetheless provocative note: “Study says Canadians think cancer news media is blatant product placement wrapped in human melodrama.” The speaker was Alan Cassels, creator of the website Media Doctor Canada (www.mediadoctor.ca) whose main research area focuses on consumer perceptions of health reports in the media. Alan freely admitted that he pinched the idea for his website from an Australian colleague’s site, Media Doctor Australia: (http://www.mediadoctor.org.au/ )
The conference concluded with thanks to the conference committees, and an invitation to delegates to attend next year’s meeting in Nova Scotia.
The afternoon was devoted to more continuing education sessions for those with stamina! The lunchtime session was provided by Embase, during which there was a presentation of how the Emtree heading differ from MeSH, and how they are used in indexing drug-related material.
In the afternoon, John Loy and I conducted an information / demonstration / hands on session in the University of Ottawa Library’s computer lab on Chasing the Sun. This gave interested people the chance to see what it’s actually like and to ask more specific questions. Again, the interest was pleasing, and John and I have many contacts to follow up regarding Canadian participation in the CTS service!
I had two main reasons for attending the CHLA conference – the Chasing the Sun paper and training session, and to take the display material and leaflets about ICML Brisbane 2009. The koalas ran out. Most of the leaflets were taken. I was asked to leave the rest of the leaflets as they’ll be given out at future meetings. Many of our Canadian colleagues are planning to come to Australia – it’s a wonderful opportunity to come, they say! Many Canadian health librarians have also indicated that they’d like to join the CTS service and are keen to work with the UK and Australia in the future. So from my perspective, the conference was an outstanding success. The fact that I also found the papers to be stimulating, encouraging and informative was a bonus, but really to be expected, as health librarianship is much the same in Canada as Australia. In fact, there are many similarities between the two countries. I feel quite at home here – in fact if I weren’t careful, I could end up sounding like a Canadian – eh!

CHLA 2007 Thursday 31st May

Day two of the CHLA conference opened with the CHLA AGM, so I took that as an excuse to sleep in after the previous night’s effort! The first keynote was at 9.30 am and was given by Jeremy Grimshaw, Director, Clinical Epidemiology Ottawa Health Research Institute. His talk concentrated on the new buzz term : knowledge translation (KT) – how the evidence (knowledge) translates into practice, or changes the way in which clinicians practice. Jeremy started by reminding us that it was nearly 10 years ago in 1998 that Schuster et al wrote of the lack of the use of evidence in practice in the Millbank Memorial Quarterly. He warned of believing some of the hype that can surround research results, (beware of the noise to signal ratio) and felt that the development of clinical practice guidelines has been one of the most positive and helpful development of recent years. Jeremy recommended publications by JP Ioannidis, who’s written a lot on knowledge translation into practice. He particularly recommended his articles in Nature Genetics (2001), Am J Med (2003), J Translational Med (2004) and JAMA (2005).
Second speaker of the morning was Anne Brice from the UK National Library for Health. Anne’s brief was to give a summary of the UK situation, and she amused us mightily by describing the changes and reorganisations the UK NHS has gone through in the last 10 years. John Loy, UK Chasing the Sun Administrator, who’s worked for the NHS for 5 years, has already been through two major reorganisations. NHS staff don’t have business cards any more. Their titles and organisations’ names change too frequently! Anne mentioned the work of Muir Grey in creation of the National Knowledge Service, and that within the NKS, the National Library for Health aims to provide a modern hybrid, network-based, library service for the NHS, providing seamless access to knowledge resources. As an aside, Anne mentioned that she works one day a week on a project known as Duets, based in Oxford. Duets = Database of Unknown Effects of Treatment – that is, a database of what we don’t know! She ended her talk with one or Muir Grey’s beliefs – that what will transform health care in the 21st century is the well-informed patient.
After morning tea there was a panel discussion on the progress of the development of a National Library for Health for Canada. Its development is being driven largely by CHLA with input from other large bodies such as CISTI. This session generated much heated discussion, as it’s clear that there are several models for the NLH and sound justifications for them all. One concern that emerged more than once was the importance of local input / badging of any service. Several delegates feared that local identities may be at risk of being lost. Clearly, Canada and Australia face similar issues in the development of any nation-wide service, and CHLA will be sharing information regarding developments of the Canadian NLH with HLA.
Lunch and Learn with Ovid was a light-hearted update from the local Ovid team, with plenty of trivia questions and prizes. (I didn’t win anything!)
After lunch, I attended a session with three varied papers: the first, an analysis of how well various search engines find open access journals, the second, a summary of classes in Google searching and finally, a fun session on using web 2.0 tools. Not surprisingly, paper 1 reported that open access publications aren’t as easy to find as they could be, and some resources do a better job than others. The sample was small (14 titles), but making allowances for the small number it’s interesting that PubMed was 2.5 times more likely to find OA journals than Medline (searched via Ovid).
Google – the course was developed with the idea “if you can’t beat them, join them” and to instil better searching skills into the users. The course was a success, not only because they were well attended, but also because it raised the profile of the library, the librarians were perceived as “knowing stuff”, and the users came back for training in the more traditional library databases, realising that they needed those skills after all! Hmm.
The Web 2.0 tools paper covered some of the tools that can be used effectively by libraries – blogs, podcasts, rss feeds and instant messaging are right up there. I want to start playing with these toys – I mean tools – and soon!
After the break, John Loy gave a talk on the Chasing the Sun service, with both of us fielding questions afterwards. There’s a lot of interest on the part of Canadian health librarians in the service, and John and I continued discussions after our session and through into the gala dinner at the Arts Centre.
Don’t worry – we stopped enough to enjoy a Shakespearean Troupe’s execution (note the word) of Romeo and Juliet (rap style), and what was probably one of the funniest renditions of the wall scene from Midsummer Night’s dream I’ve ever seen. It had nothing to do with the liquid refreshment at all! Another late night.

CHLA 2007 Wednesday 30th May

Here is a brief report of what was a very full start to the CHLA conference in Ottawa this week.
As with the MLA conference, there were some continuing education offerings on Monday and Tuesday before the conference proper started on Wednesday. On Tuesday, the UK coordinator of Chasing the Sun, John Loy, and I had a meeting with a lengthy agenda (the usual for our irregular face-to-face meetings!). We discussed the developments in the QuestionPoint software and went through the paper on Chasing the Sun and training session material for later in the conference. There was a 6pm "getting to know you" function for first time attendees to the CHLA meetings, which was fun. As an ice-breaker we were all taught the salsa. I'm a changed woman. The exhibition opened on Tuesday evening. I'd taken most of the display material for the ICML 2009 Brisbane with me, and assembled it in the exhibition area, where even at the opening it attracted quite a bit of attention.
Three keynote speakers supplied the morning programme on Wednesday: Greg Notess from Montana State University spoke on using the best of both web 1.0 and web 2.0. Web 2.0 applications offer some interesting flexibility in the way services can be delivered, and Greg demonstrated a couple of sites / applications which could be useful. See http://www.slideshare.com/ – a site which enables sharing powerpoint slides and Scribd – an alternative to pdf files. Greg also demonstrated embedding files on web pages, which while meaning that the embedded document is always current, it takes away the evidence of where it’s from, giving rise to questions of quality assurance and authenticating sources. Embedded items are not trawled by all search engines.
Greg also mentioned custom search engines such as healia http://www.healia.com/healia/ in the health area, but stressed that these are still in beta stages, so we’ll have to wait to see if they will last in their current forms. However, customisation of search engines will probably be a development to watch.
One interesting beta site is Google Co-op which includes different subject areas, one of which is health. Contributors’ credentials can be seen, and some key organisations such as the Mayo Clinic are starting to get involved. http://www.google.com/coop/
And Greg made some comments about federated search engines: they don’t always do a thorough job and can be superficial, and because of the scope of what they’re doing, they’re SLOW, and don’t always produce the concise results required by a quick search.
Heather Joseph from SPARC – www.arl.org/sparc gave an excellent summary of the state of play in the area of open access publication. She feels that it’s now in the mainstream and is here to stay, but the models of scholarly publication are still undergoing change. Recommended reading on OA and the gains to the community: Steve Lawrence (2001) Nature 411 (6837) 521. Gunther Eysenbach has also published in PLoS Biology. See also the sites of OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) and DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals). Heather felt that one of the big issues for authors was retaining copyright rights of their articles: SPARC has produced an Author Addendum which authors can add to publishers’ contracts in which they require that the copyright remains with them. (Of course, not all publishers like this approach. Authors unite!)
Cameron Macdonald from NRC Press, a smallish Canadian publisher (his words), had a hard act to follow. As a publisher, he saw his main clients to be the authors, who, of course, want their works to be read. Cameron covered that thorny issue of mandatory open access to publically-funded research results, indicating that publishers did need to cover their costs and somehow these costs need to be met in the publishing continuum. He mentioned the ‘A’ word – Advertising!! and brought up the issue of potential conflicts of interest in peer review. Would OA improve the peer review process?
Three afternoon sessions I attended provided three case studies of provincial health libraries forming consortia of various sizes for various purposes – resource sharing and joint purchasing being the two prime movers. The quote of the afternoon came from the Ontario Public Health Libraries Association: “Availability more than quality determines which information resources will be used.” Not all worthwhile resources are necessarily available on the internet! We know that, but it’s nice to have it confirmed occasionally.
The final session of the day was a reception in the poster area and presentation of poster awards.
Today, someone said that the occasional personal note was okay in a blog. Okay. It's 11.20pm now. Can I go to bed?? Night!
Mary.