Content Creators: Be Creative!

Are you a librarian or a medical librarian? Do you use Twitter? Does your library has a twitter account or a Facebook page? As one of the content contributors to our Reference Department's twitter account, library's blog, Flickr, and Facebook page, I constantly felt it is challenging and time consuming to keep the contents in these accounts rolling effectively and feeding it with relevant information quickly. Ideally, I wish our contents were updated while I'm sleeping...

A recent conversation with a librarian friend about feeding twitter account with RSS feeds on some desired topics. "Well, don't depend on those automatically feeds only. This is why you are here and you are the content creator." What he said really got me thinking. Yes, librarians are well known for being content creators in many ways including Web sites, subject guides, pathfinders, instructional materials, and library tutorials. Now content creators has evolved to include twittering, blogging, facebooking, and more. Librarians becoming digital content creators are the result of digital technology and digital reference services. The difference is digital content creators have to come up with contents in a quick and effective way.

If you are the person behind the scene, how do you manage your library's social media accounts to keep them fresh and relevant?

Make it Easy for them

There is an interesting article, Don't make it easy for them, set me thinking. Yes, students need to learn library research skills. What about faculty members? My point is make it easy for them. Yes, make it easy for them! We call it support faculty teaching, research, and clinical education.

The library outreach programs have provided lots of opportunities for librarians to connect with academic faculties. Years of liaison experience told me faculty members like helpful, personalized, and convenient library services delivered to their desktops. I found myself really enjoy working with them by providing these services. I questioned myself a while ago, "Am I spoiling them by doing so?" One of my librarian friend said, "No, this is called another level of customer service." So, here they are:

• Set up automatic email alerts for each faculty on their research topics with My NCBI. This personalized service includes knowing and understanding each faculty member's research interests or topics, constructing a good search for each topic, creating My NCBI account for each faculty, and writing up instructions on how to manage the alerts.
• Conduct literature searches for faculty members. This involves not only expert search using related databases, but delivering the search results in the format of their preferences. Sometimes it goes further than that such as organizing citations and retrieving full text articles for them.
• Scan articles from the library's print collection to PDFs and send to them via emails. The challenge is basically time especially when I have a busy schedule and when the faculty are rush to need the articles.
• Deliver one-on-one library workshop sessions to faculty's offices. This is especially in demand for hands-on workshops. What makes this service welcoming is the focus of individualization. This requires me to get very familiar with the workshop contents and alter the teaching method based on each individual faculty's characteristics and needs.
• There are some very basic things we, librarians, expect our users to do them themselves while faculty members expect librarians to do those basic things for them. My liaison philosophy is don't ask, just do it. For example, could you get the full text of this article for me (I know we have online access to the article and she can download it from her desktop.); do we have this book in the library ( I know we do. A catalog search will tell her.); I need this article via interlibrary loan, could you request for me? (I know she can do it online by logging onto her library account.); Could you pull these articles for me from the library stack? I will come and pick up after work (I know the library doesn't offer this service. She can come to the library and do it herself.)

Concern and worry was if I got lots of requests, it might be difficult to handle and it would greatly increase my workload. I took it as a challenge. Reference service hasn't change a lot, we just need to do it in different ways: make it easy for them, but might mean make it difficult for us. This brings to the core of my job -- providing excellent customer service!

A Student in Evidence-Based Medicine for the Medical Librarian

So exciting! I'm going to be in this 8-week program(9/13-11/5), Evidence-Based Medicine for the Medical Librarian, co-instructed by Connie Schardt and Angela Myatt. As the course description states:

"This course will focus on understanding the skills clinicians need to practice EBM, such as how to formulate relevant questions, efficiently search medical literature and evaluate the evidence for validity and applicability to the patient. The course also will focus on the roles that librarians can play to support EBM."

This is a great learning opportunity for me to systematically understand EBM and how librarians can support EBM. Thanks to the MLA CE award that made my dream to attend this course came true!

The course will cover four modules. I quickly identified my focus for each module:

Module 1: Introduction and Question Building -- study design and how to construct the well-built question

Module 2: Selecting Resources and Conducting the Search -- framework for formulating the search strategy and basic EBM terminology for searching Medline

Module 3: Evaluating the Evidence -- Appraising articles in therapy,diagnosis,
harm/etiology,and systematic reviews, and understanding EBM Statistics

Module 4: Roles for Librarians and Final Assignment -- EBM and nursing

Looking forward to the first week!

Texting a Librarian Using a GV Number: Pros and Cons

I finally got a Google Voice (GV) number for my library to launch Text a Librarian reference service! After running some tests, it seems to work well so far. To monitor the service, the text messages are forwarded to the library email account. A FAQ page was created to help those who need more information about this service.

There are two ways to send messages (SMS) using a Google Voice (GV) number:

1). Sending text messages from Gmail Chat box

Pros:

• Avoid SMS charges
• Convenient for Gmail account holders
• Convenient for patrons without a cellphone
• Act like live chat or IM

Cons

• Some learning curve for the initial setup. Users have to know where to enable SMS to send a text message
• Have to have internet connection to be able to send and receive text messages

2). Sending text messages from a cellphone

Pros:

• Instant, direct, and fast communications
• Convenient for those who have text message service from their cellphone carriers
• No internet connection is needed
  

Cons:

• display sender's cellphone number

From the stand point of providing Text a Librarian service, here are my wish list for GV:

• Be able to choose a desired GV phone number
• Be able to reply to the text message from any non-Gmail accounts once GV messages are forwarded
• Be able to archive text messages in a meaningful way within GV account (e.g., create folders or subfolders)

You are welcome to share your experience in using GV to provide library services.

Doodle -- Online Signup Sheet

In the past three years, I was co-teaching with our nursing faculty on a 2-credit course--Informatics for Healthcare. We had over 60 students each year and we required them to work on Never Event group project. Each group had three students. We had used Wikispaces, Google sites, and our campus wiki for students to sign up for their topics and wiki served as group project site for online collaboration.

Now here comes this year. This course has a new instructor and we decided not to use wiki as online collaboration tool. When it came to have more than 60 students sign up for their never event topics and areas, what tool can we use except using a traditional paper signup sheet? With this question in mind, I tried Google forms and couldn't make them to work for our purpose. One of my friend suggested trying Doodle, which is known for scheduling events. I hadn't seen people use it for signing up for tasks, at least not among my colleagues and peers. Wow, it only took three steps to create a poll: name your poll, enter choices, set up settings, and done. Then Doodle generated an URL to be sent to participants. From the participants' site, it is even simple: click the poll URL, enter their names, make selections, and save.

Good things about Doodle:

• Create as many options as you wish
• Control how many choices one participant can make
• Make participants' choices visible or invisible to them
• Control who has permission to edit choices or results
• No signup is needed to participate in the poll
• Form display layout in mobile devices looks great
• Explore results to an Excel spreadsheet
• Free

Not so good things about Doodle:

• Can't type a long sentence into an option box, which means you will have to use key words to describe your choices.
• There is no way to create a multiple choice form. For example, if you have a topic, you need to have more than one students to sign up for that topic, you will have to repeat the topic with choices such as this.
• The horizontal layout of the form on the Web is difficult to navigate especially when you have a lot of choices.

In general, Doodle making choices feature serves the purpose of signing up group work quite well. Unfortunately, it didn't get used for this course. The primary instructor decided to stick to a paper signup form. I totally understand a paper form is always the safer and traditional method and most people feel comfortable with.

This got me to think that adopting technology in teaching and learning takes effort and risk. Not everyone is willing to take the risk and go beyond their comfort zone. I also think there might be even better tools out there for signing up group work. Send me the link if you know of any.