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.