What Faculty Members Need of a Librarian?

As a library faculty and library liaison to the College of Nursing (CON) and the College of Pharmacy (COP), I've been looking for ways to bring library services and resources to support the educational and research needs of the colleges served. Recently I conducted a two-minute survey with the intend to get to know what faculty members need of a librarian and to bring library liaison services to another level. Only in three days since the survey was distributed, 29 CON and COP faculty members answered the questions. I'm hoping to get more in the next few days. Here is a brief overview of the survey results, which already provided some food for thought.

When asked whether they wanted to receive information or tips about library resources and services, 66% says yes and 86% prefers using email. I'm not surprised only 34% of the faculty are interested in bringing a librarian into their courses to deliver a 20-minute session about using library resources effectively for their students. I think partly because they don't really know what a librarian can do for them. I'm delighted to know 48% of the faculty expressed interests in attending the library workshop, Staying Current for which I'm the instructor. 31% of them already have their own way of keeping up to date. Four (14%) faculty members would like to have one-on-one sessions to learn about tools and resources for staying current on their research topics.

The survey asks "What would you like your librarian to do for you?" and it yielded some interesting responses:

"Assist with complex literature searches. (Which I already get and am very grateful for)."
"Help with student literature searches (when I refer a student to the librarian)."
"An one-on-one session for new tools and methods."
"Reference Manager or Endnote instruction."
"It would be nice to have the librarian present an update on material at one of our Department faculty meetings."
"Searches. Obtain difficult to find articles."
"Assist with a literature search in preparation for NIH grant."
"Come into classes (DNP and PhD) as part of a workshop at the start of the term to help students learn how to conduct literature searches."
"I am wondering if a presentation to our professional staff regarding clinical resources available through the Library? I don't think staff are completely aware of what is available."
"Our graduate students take courses online and many do not live in or near Memphis, so they are limited to online library access. With that in mind, could you set up a repository of on-demand online tutorials and tools designated specifically for students so that they do not have to wade through the scheduled, on-campus, and/or faculty resources in order to find what they need quickly and efficiently? Could you make the workshops available for on-demand online viewing?"

Sounds familiar? For librarians who have liaison responsibilities to CON or COP, the mini survey results might offer some helpful insight and thoughts on what faculty members need of a librarian. Based on the 29 responses, faculty members expect librarians:

• To provide expert literature searches to support research and educational programs
  
• To offer instructional sessions or workshops to their students on literature searching
• To be the information messenger between the college and the library
• To be flexible in offering library workshops considering the needs of distance learning community
  

The faculty members' responses implied that they are aware of librarians' expertise in information retrieval and information management. Their responses also presented a lot of opportunities for librarians to take. I would further summarize the survey results and plan my liaison services in another post. Suggestions and comments are welcome!

Manage Information Manage your Career

Since my last presentation in January for a group of DNP students about how to use My NCBI to manage information, I had several individual literature searching consultation sessions with nursing PhD students. There is no doubt, all students are keen to learn how to conduct an effective literature search using scholarly resources. Set aside literature searches, one thing struck me the most was how to organize information once they were retrieved from either Internet sites or databases. It is like a product assembly-line process. The product won't be a finished product until you carry it out through to the finish line. Again I feel strongly for my saying managing information, managing your career. The ability and knowledge of managing information is critical in conducting research and even leading to career success.

Based on my own experience on using social bookmarking sites to organize information, I found the following sites serve me well for different purposes. I hope my experience can be of help in making decisions. There are many good tools out there that you might find them useful, too. So many choices! What to choose? The key is to get start seriously and devote some time getting to know the tools and stick to those met your needs.

• Del.icio.us -- Collect general Web sites or Internet resources. It is a generic social bookmarking site that can bookmark almost everything from the Internet. I use this site to bookmark my favorite sites. Descriptions can be added to each bookmark.
  
• 2collab -- Manage journal articles especially those from Science Direct and Scopus. Unique features include pre-assigned research fields providing a way to browse and organize bookmarks in a broader subject than an individual tag, the ability to select bookmarks to create a new list, and the ability to create RSS feeds for any list filtered by groups or research fields. I use this site to collect journal articles and assign them to different groups. I also use this site to keep track of my published articles.
  
• CiteUlike -- Manage journal articles. Unique features include the capability of uploading PDF files associate with the bookmarks so that they can be accessed from any computers. I use this site to collect and store PDF articles for future reading or for group projects. Another feature I like about CiteUlike is the article reviews written by site users. You can also write reviews about an article and share with others.
  

Other tools I use to organize information are services directly from database publishers.

• My NCBI -- Organize references, create folders, and save searches while searching PubMed/Medline. My NCBI does several things for me: set up automatically email alerts or subscribe to RSS Feeds on topics I need to get updates on a regular basis, collect references and group them into topics and folders, save PubMed searches, and create my bibliographies.
  
• My EBSCOhost -- Manage references, create collections, and save searches while searching CINAHL@EBSCOhost. I use My EBSCOhost to save CINAHL searches and assign references into different folders. I can also share the folders with my peers. My EBSCOhost is especially helpful when I can't use social bookmarking sites to bookmark an EBSCOhost article due to access issues.
  

Here came another question: "I have collected my references in several places. How am I going to pull them into one central location for my paper?" The solution is to log in each of these sites and export your references to reference manage software like EndNote and RefWorks.

I always believe finding the right tools to mange information can save time and boost productivity.

Cool Tools for Physicians and More

There is a saying managing your credit, managing your life. My saying is managing information, managing your career. In today's information explosion era the ability to manage information effectively and efficiently is critical. I believe anyone who wants to be professional in their field needs to stay current and keep themselves up to date. To do so, a bag of cool tools is essential. I'm trilled after reading the Internet Cool Tools for Physicians by Melissa Rethlefsen, David Rothman, and Daniel Mojon. I would say those cool tools are not only put together for physicians, but for anyone who wants to be professional in their field. I found them useful, relevant, and interesting for my career as a medical librarian.

Earlier in March 2008, MLA host an eight-week online CE course Web 2.0 101: Introduction to Second Generation Web Tools to MLA members. Currently MLA Social Networking Software Task Force is offering CE opportunities entitled Dig Deeper with Social Media: short courses on emerging online tools for MLA members. The Southeastern Atlantic and Greater Midwest regions of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine also offered an online CE course, Geeks Bearing Gifts in both regions. What does all this for? It's a call for medical librarians to explore, experience, test, and discuss Web 2.0 technologies and Internet tools and its potential uses in medical libraries. Internet Cool Tools for Physicians takes a deep look at these cool and neat tools that are useful not just for physicians. I would suggest reading and even owing this book if you have these questions or if you are asked these questions:

1. Where to find comprehensive tips in searching Google from basics to Scholar?
2. How to use RSS feeds to keep current?
3. How to create a RSS feed for the information that doesn't offer it?
4. How to export Google Reader subscriptions to another aggregator?
5. How to combine multiple feeds into one single feed?
   
6. What if I still want RSS items delivered to me via email?
   
7. How to use iGoogle as a personalized start page?
8. What can a wiki do to meet a professional need?
9. How to create a live survey using Google Docs?
10. How to take notes on the Web pages I like and share with others?

Internet Cool Tools for Physicians provides answers to all these questions and those tools can make your life a lot more easy in the Internet world. I'm guessing the 2nd edition of the book will have have a section on micro-blogging in health care. While physicians, let's expand this group to health care professionals and health care educators, are using those cool tools, what medical librarians should do and can do in terms of providing library services? Medical librarians are challenged. This is not in the future, it is happening now whether you like it or not.

I love trying new stuff and believe good information should be shared. Since my library is undergoing financial difficulty, adding a book to the collection is hardly possible. I'm thinking of donating the book to the library and let more people benefit from those cool and neat tools.

Did Google Read Me?

I didn't pay much attention to the new Google Reader layout since it came live until T. Scott's recent blog entry showed up on the right panel of my Google Reader. I don't think I had subscribed to his feed. Why did it show up in my reader? Digging deeper, I finally woke up. It was a recommendation list generated automatically by Google. According to Google, the recommendations list is automatically generated. It takes into account the feeds I've already subscribed to, as well as information from my Web History, including my location. Aggregated across many users, Google collects the information that it thinks I might be interested in. Isn't this scary? Where does Google go from here?

Personality, Interests, and Social Media

Canadian medical librarian Dean Giustini's recent post wondered why not more Canadian librarians were on Twitter. I also have the same feeling here since most of my librarian friends are not on Twitter, either. Dean's post got me to think about whether there is a link between personality and social media. What is social media? I don't quite like the definition from Wikipedia, so I came up with my own version. Social media is composed of all sorts of Web 2.0 tools (e.g., blog, micro-blog, wiki, video, online photo sharing, social networking, and social bookmarking) that people use to interact with each other on the Internet. Social media provides a platform for users to generate content, share information, and communicate with each other.

It has been more than one year since I started exploring and experimenting Web 2.0 tools. I've been a blog reader for over a year. The blogs I subscribe to including those from librarians, library associations, med students, healthcare professionals, library school faculty members, and tech geeks. I'm on Twitter for a year following different people I'm interested in. My observation and experience told me that those who are active on social media have shared some common interests and personalities. I think this connection might explain something as to why some librarians are active while others are not in using social media to interact with library patrons or their peers.

People who are active on social media:

• Love to share themselves online
  
• Enjoy writing
• Are willing to put effort and spend extra time to embrace new technologies
  
• Are literal not conservative
• Are eager to interact with people online
  
• Are not afraid of inviting people into their solitude

Those are the group of people who are more likely to use social media to communicate with others online. Another key is interests. I always believe interests can motivate people to do the impossible. No interests, no motivation, let along participation. Consequently, they would never know the benefits and the goods of those tools and they would not think about applying the tools either to their work or to their personal life. Of course, there are other factors that might be in the way such as lack of time. Again, back to motivation. Interestingly, when people have no motivation doing something, they can easily find 100 excuses not doing it. This is just my personal observation and feelings. Shot me if I'm wrong.