Clinical Reader: Ooops! but not forgotten

This is my intended final post of substance (maybe this week's Friday Foolery, we'll see) over here.

Do Not Panic.*

As this year and Blogger gig comes to a close there may be another ending to report as well. If you're not already familiar with the Clinical Reader saga you can see the bottom of the original post or this summary: I blogged to call out false endorsements and images weirdness, they threatened to sue me on Twitter unless I took down my post, all sorts of weirdness occurred, and librarians are a pack of rabid wolves.

Here's what things looked like on November 28, 2009 according to Google:



Since then, there's been this:


Some subpages are still publicly accessible but dropping off the Google radar like flies, which still holds 'clinical reader twitter' steady as a suggested search term and has since at least September.



Speaking of Clinical Reader Twitter, another related Twitter account has been deleted (@allan_marks) though the highly inactive @Clinical_Reader still references it as a last tweet:



What's the scoop?

I don't know.

According to a comment supposedly made by Clinical Reader staff over at David Rothman's post last month about their unauthorized use of a New England Journal of Medicine video, "We’re currently in the process of being taken over by a large publisher who intends to integrate our technology into their own systems."

If anyone sees the publisher press release about that or the latest Clinical Reader Twitter account/website incarnation, do let me know.

Even if this strange story is now over and done, it showed us how ephemeral and difficult it is to efficiently reference and archive social media discourse. This will live on as a case study submitted by Marcus Banks as part of his chapter for a grey literature book that will be published in early 2010. I agree with Marcus' point that

it [Twitter, Facebook, etc.] is also not meaningless, from both an evidentiary and anthropological standpoint. This is how many people are communicating today.

QuoteURL was of great assistance in capturing deleted tweets in June yet it is already broken, TwapperKeeper and related services are helping to archive hashtags today, but what will be the WayBackMachine of social media discourse tomorrow?


*Very soon you'll see what's in store thanks to the awesome (thanks Cynthia!) fabulous (thanks Joelle!) hard work (thanks Mel!) of, as my beloved husband put it, winning the Boobiethon. I can hardly wait to share it all with you!

Crashing the #hcsm party

I can never attend the designated Healthcare Communication Social Media (abbreviated hcsm, affix a hashtag and you get #hcsm) community chat on Twitter in real time on Sunday nights, but have usually seen several medical librarians actively engaged and I enjoy catching up on the conversation when I can.

Tonight I also noticed mention of a blog entry entitled The Pew Internet/Health FAQ by Susannah Fox on epatients.net about how people search for quality health information that contained a shoutout to the Medical Library Association (MLA), a comment from medical librarian Luke Rosenberger with an explanation about how the 'Google as diagnostician' article isn't necessarily accurate, and offered a comment of my own with more quality health information evaluation resources.

Part of the #hcsm discussion?



Bring it on!

While I'm happy about steps that MLA is taking to advocate for the role of hospital librarians, such as the recent Vital pathways for hospital librarians: present and future article and others from the October 2009 Journal of the Medical Library Association, I'd love to see the profession take a more active role for medical librarian advocacy in non-traditional settings as well. There are plenty of us there already at @medlibs on Twitter and elsewhere.

Free Webinar: Social Media Communication for H1N1/Flu Outbreaks

What: FREE webinar from social media, technology, crisis communications and health experts on quick, proven and cost-effective ways to communicate with the public, your emergency response team and government officials for seasonal flu and a potential H1N1 outbreak.

When: Wednesday, September 23, 2009 3-4pm Eastern Time (what time is that for me?)

Who for: Public health officials, healthcare practitioners (physicians, nurses, emergency medical services), public safety responders (fire and police), emergency managers, and government communicators.

Presented by: Dr. Marsha Vanderford, Director of Emergency Communication Systems, CDC; David Stephenson, Principal, Stephenson Strategies; Nigel Snoad, Lead Capabilities Researcher, Microsoft Humanitarian Systems; and Phil Dixon, Business Product Manager, Google.

Register here

Courtesy of In Case of Emergency, Read Blog

Social Media & Emergency Preparedness: Can Your Family Text?

Thanks to a news release at NextGov I learned about an upcoming drill conducted by a national safety foundation and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) over the next few months to use texting and social media channels for emergency communication.

"In an emergency traditional phone lines may be down and traditional methods of communication may not be working," said spokeswoman Carla Shaw. "We want people to rehearse what would you do, and what other forms of communication would you have at your disposal."

She said drill participants should pre-load emergency messages onto their cell phones and pre-load useful communication Web sites, making these tools accessible in an emergency. Families should also discuss how they plan to use these tools and let each other know what types of signals to look for during a disaster, she added.

The agency, SafeAmerica Foundation, has a page about emergency texting and references a video podcast that I couldn't find so I looked for them on YouTube.

The texting video there is a bit cheesy but makes a valid point. How many of us have families that include Uncle Joel? Would your family & friends who don't normally text on their cell phones have a clue how to send one in an emergency?



I'm teaching my mom how to text when I next see her. We've had a family communication emergency phone plan with our out-of-state family for years (and put it into action once) but not once have we talked about texting and we need to.

In September 2008 I mentioned texting as a disaster communication method for the Red Cross Safe & Well list (I still don't see it as a viable option) and the use of Flickr to share photos after a disaster, and am looking forward to hearing about how the drills go.

Medlibs Round: PubMed and Discoveries

PubMed class at StanfordEdTech

It is a pleasure and honor to host Medlibs Round here at Eagle Dawg Blog after a few delays I apologize for. The theme this month is PubMed, one of several databases in the the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) Entrez life sciences search engine developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), and third party functionalities.

There is much more to the NLM than this single database though, and understanding the Entrez connectivity helps to explain some of the changes that are happening in PubMed today to lead to more research and better medicine for tomorrow. I hope you enjoy the ride!

What is this "Discovery" stuff NLM keeps mentioning?

NCBI's "Discovery Space" Facilitating SNP Research

The above chart refers to information in genetics but it was the 'discovery space' label that caught my attention. This illustrates NCBI's main purpose as not solely being the PubMed administrator but developing resources "for the better understanding of molecular processes affecting human health and disease" (source) which involves information in the other Entrez resources.

In December 2008, I did some research on the Discovery Initiative, "one of the most important projects NLM is working on." If you're not already familiar with the Discovery Initiative please take a look and here's the gist of it:

The bottom line for us is discovery. We want people to make discoveries, and if we’re using up real estate on the Web page for things people don’t click on, and if we can put things on there that would have been associated information, then we should do that.

The Discovery Initiative is behind some of what we are seeing with PubMed changes now after several years of work behind the scenes to encourage cross-referencing within Entrez. We are also starting to see communication from NLM including reference to the Discovery Initiative and suggested resources that appear in PubMed being called Ads. There still is not a clear description/explanation of the Discovery Initiative from a PubMed perspective in either the NLM Technical Bulletin or PubMed New/Noteworthy RSS feed, the resources we're encouraged to subscribe to for current PubMed news. The Discovery Initiative has received coverage in NCBI News in June, March, and February 2009.

Discovery is in the eye of the beholder

Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) seal on the Lillie Laboratory

With that background about the Discovery Initiative covered, Shamsha Damani at MD Anderson created a very clear guide and commentary for her clinicians about the recent and upcoming changes in PubMed: What's New and What's Ahead, These include a great description and screenshots of the Discovery Initiative ads with the suggestion that "they are handy and are a great discovery tool when you are grasping at straws or have too many results to wade through." PubMed: My NCBI changes by Miner Library mentions the new ability to create custom filters as "a terrific new development."

Custom filters in PubMed. Fail. by Mark Rabnett of Gossypiboma begged to differ with this assessment of the custom filter changes due to encountering a failure with the saved searches tab.

In the second incident of NLM staff replying to blog complaints that I know of (the Harvard student being the first), an anonymous comment (supposedly a developer at NLM) was left on Mark's post saying the problem would be fixed. Shortly thereafter Mark posted PubMed custom filters: where the bee sucks which includes

I must apologize for the flippant remarks I made in my previous post. It must have been the nicotine. I hope that the snag with the NLM health literacy filter can be fixed. I intend to use Custom Filters frequently and uncomplainingly when all the kinks are worked out.

In a second comment, the supposed NLM developer replied

Enjoy your filters, and thank twitter’s re-tweets for getting your message across.

Why not have an official PubMed Twitter presence to directly offer feedback in the first place? Clearly someone there wants to engage. Often we hear complaints about PubMed and related services but with the email-only "official" feedback channel frequently is no acknowledgment from either NLM or users that a problem is taken care of, nor a way for others to see if an issue is Down for everyone or just me.

What's your Discovery?

Blue lobster at the Woods Hole Science Aquarium

PubMed Impact Factor from Alisha764's Blog explores the role of offering impact factors of journals and author information as a quality indicator in the wake of fake articles, journals and changed/fabricated data. This is not without controversy but indicates that many are seeking additional ways to check the quality of information. Merely saying something is indexed in MEDLINE is not enough to say it is authoritative health information since Time Magazine is there in the consumer health subset.

Five ways to improve PubMed from Gossypiboma includes his top results from the brainstorming suggestions during the recent Canadian Health Libraries Association conference about improving PubMed. A trick for #5 (Simplify the creation of permanent links to PubMed records) is to begin with http://pubmed.gov, take a look at an article for the PubMed identification number (PMID), then tack that on to the end for http://pubmed.gov/16719081

Shamsha Damani's guide includes

My one hope is to see NLM participate more in social media (especially Twitter!) so more voices are heard. The NLM reps at MLA’09 were extremely nice and open to suggestions; it would be nice if they could extend their presence in social networking venues as well.

I share this sentiment about social media as an official feedback channel for PubMed. This should not be via anonymous comments to blog entries but a sustained, active effort by both NLM and PubMed users utilizing some of the best practices learned from online participation formats such as the Open Government Dialogue.

There is hope for change on this front with the emergence of official Department of Health and Humans Services (HHS) Twitter accounts. @NLM_SIS is a legitimate account from Specialized Information Services (as is their SlideShare account... check out Semantic Processing of Twitter Traffic for Epidemic Surveillance) although considered experimental at this time. For the time being many, but not all, government agency presences on Twitter are essentially push-out news information sources similar to RSS feeds that don't usually interact with followers.

What have third party vendors Discovered?

Fiddler crabs in the Marine Resources Center at MBL

Got PubMed? Pubget Searches and Delivers Scientific PDFs from Bio-IT World news shares the news that this full-text PDF retrieval service has expanded quite a bit from when David Rothman covered it in April 2008, and has just announced it has partnered with 500 institutions including NIH itself (NLM is one of the 27 institutes of the National Institutes of Health).

Hope Leman posted GoPubMed: Interview with Michael Alvers at Next Generation Science where she asked some great questions of GoPubMed's CEO about why medical librarians and others should use this search engine instead of regular PubMed in addition to theoretical (the blended future role of search engine and social networking) to the practical (What's the difference between "find all" and "get all"?). This is a comprehensive interview well worth reading and reflecting upon over a coffee break.

Some non-PubMed but related tangents that were submitted along the discovery lines include Dr Shock MD PhD's posting about Online Medical Book Search and Clinical Cases and Images Blog's coverage of how to Create an automatic differential diagnosis list with Google Squared.


Panel at the MBL Associates Gift shop, home of cool socks

I recently attended the MBL/NLM BioMedical Informatics course and am still reflecting upon what Dr. Don Lindberg, Director of NLM, said regarding the emerging role of interactive publications. Wouldn't embedding an actual rhythm strip in a journal article involving electrocardiograms be a better use of online publications than a snapshot of one still image? I'll conclude with this image from his presentation:


You have seen what everyone else has seen. What do you think?

Medlib's Round delay & near-pandemic social media progress

Due to a combination of people preparing for the Medical Library Association's upcoming conference in Hawaii and the global outbreak of H1N1 influenza, the Medlib's Round blog carnival is delayed until June 6th with publication on June 9th.

Many are, as usual, wondering if "the media" has overblown the H1N1 outbreak. I haven't watched any television news or talk shows recently (I rarely to never do anyway) so I can't comment there. However, when it comes to online and social media outlets, two things in particular impress me for signs of how the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are opening up to these tools as high quality information resources during a near-pandemic situation.

The first is MedlinePlus and PubMed with the placement of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) H1N1 widget on the front pages. In addition, the very first hyperlink offered for the H1N1 Flu (Swine Flu) MedlinePlus page is @CDCemergency, an official Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) Twitter account. When I began writing this post the morning of May 6th, it had 104,266 followers. As of 10:25 that same evening the number had jumped up to 108,698! Others without Twitter accounts may be subscribing via RSS feed, those numbers are not included.

The second is the inclusion of Patricia Anderson's iGoogle H1N1 swine flu tab as an information resource within the NIH Library. To be clear, this is not NLM as NLM is the medical library for everyone and the NIH Library is for the 27 entities that make up the National Institutes of Health.

Are these uses of online & social media and the resources wiki I started all hype? Of course not. As is always the case for work and our own personal sanity, we must enable our own filters to narrow in on quality resources, share them, and tune out misinformation. A bit of humor now and then for you is good for you too.

This is a good opportunity to review your own emergency preparedness plans too... H1N1 isn't too severe now, but nobody can say that will continue to be the case during the flu season this fall. Will your library be prepared to still function if social distancing measures are enacted? Check out a pandemic planning exercise for more details.

I'm still hopeful for the day when we will see an NLM social media presence. CDC are truly the 2009 HHS social media pioneers who have had their hands full between the peanut recall and now H1N1. Hopefully things will settle down to allow for evaluation to determine some best practices to be shared by all, but in the meantime keep up the amazing work!

IntenseDebate & PubMed: Do you see me?

I see you, some would say 'hear' even though much of online communication is visual. We all see each other across the blogs, the tweets, and so many other social media/networking venues.

We've developed social media information filters that help us to identify, learn from, share, and discuss the crucial from the chaff (sometimes mocking the chaff!) to varying degrees. This is amazingly sophisticated cognitive activity, but that is a post for another time. Questions of policies, procedures, and 'what to do' with this information in an unregulated and non-standardized world are a natural and expected response. We always seek order in the inevitable chaos.

What is the answer, the conclusive research pointing to the utmost in best practices for this? I don't know. If you stumble across it out there, let me know?

When it comes to the flow of information in channels we may not necessarily be familiar or comfortable with though, we have to try them out. This has been and always will be the case if the library and information sciences field will continue to not only survive but thrive. Sitting back and watching it fly by without interaction will not cut it in the 21st century, nor result in understanding your users and their information needs... and they can & will go elsewhere to have them met.

You don't have time to try things out? I encourage you to read this and reconsider.

A few examples of trying things out that I'm excited about from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)is the authentication of HHS Twitter accounts (although @healthfinder is legitimate and new as of yesterday) and the use of IntenseDebate on newmedia.hhs.gov. Newmedia is where various parties across HHS are collaborating on ways to incorporate social media in their institutions. A comment and invitation follow:

This is an experiment in social media, in using the tools of social media to inform, shape and educate about social media. As such, it really ought to involve everyone. . The site was conceived by and run by folks across HHS. But we've opened it to the word. We do so for both altruistic and selfish reasons. Altruistic because it costs nothing and benefits all if we share what we learn. Selfish because the bigger the crowd, the greater the wisdom. We're interested in what you think, not who you are or where you work

I see you. I see your frustration, feeling that your feedback about the changes in PubMed are not being heard. For context; PubMed is one of many services of the National Library of Medicine, which is one of 27 organizations within the National Institutes of Health, which is one of 11 agencies under HHS.

About a month ago I was told about newmedia.hhs.gov, asked for my own feedback, and posted this with bold emphasis mine here & not in the original comment:

Thank you for this venue! From my perspective (NIH /NLM /NN/LM) there is a need to gather all the news & information-sharing resources within each agency to one central (and easy to find) location on the agency website with RSS feeds available for each resource. On my own time I've researched & blogged some of the frustration encountered trying to locate news about NCBI's (part of NLM) Discovery Initiative and how it affects PubMed at http://eagledawg.blogspot.com/2008/12/pubmed-disc... and http://eagledawg.blogspot.com/2009/02/hidden-in-b...

Would also LOVE to see IntenseDebate as a feedback forum for PubMed!

Do you see me? If so please consider joining IntenseDebate, visiting my link, and clicking the thumbs-up icon. Share your own focused, specific, helpful ideas not just about PubMed but all that HHS encompasses.

This is not The Way, not by a longshot. I'm still reflecting on the feedback about crowdsourcing from President Obama's recent usage of Open For Questions as a communication channel. This is trying something out in a very transparent channel.

ACRL 2009 - Have we engaged in a cultural Ponzi scheme?

I still have not refined the fine art of concise, witty & accurate conference blogging.

In the interest in sharing the scene of the ACRL 2009 conference here in Seattle, however, I can share my notes quickly so here they are.

The title is included as teaser thoughts in them from our keynote speaker from the Institute of Global Ethics, Dr. Rush Kidder:

• As ethics drains out of culture, law rushes in the fill the void.
• We can live either by self regulation (ethics) or enforced regulation (law)
• We do have a choice about this and don't have to go into a compliance mentality by regulating everything.
• As we move on to the 21st century, our technology leverages our ethics. A single unethical decision can wreak havoc globally almost instantaneously.
• He is not concerned w/Facebook or Twitter, library storage/legacy issues, take it to the meta level.

Today's are brief because I only attended the first-timer's orientation and the opening keynote. Thankfully fellow University of North Texas alum Jack Bullion stopped me at orientation and Marie Kennedy met up with us along with Anthony who, if he blogs, I can't link to it since he hasn't accepted my Facebook invitation yet!

First impressions: I am thrilled with how social media usage and networking is so openly encouraged by the availability of free reliable wifi for attendees at the Convention Center (this is NOT the norm there), along with mention by the conference chair to post pictures on Flickr, join the Facebook page, and use Twitter with the #acrl2009 tag, etc.

Unfortunately I am getting a brutal cold so I'm not involved in the social scene... I just want to get a good night's sleep so I have enough energy for the next day!

Emergency preparedness: Library services at a glance (and a photo & tweet?)

It's been a while since I've touched on emergency preparedness here, and driving the web conference for work last week that covered the disaster communications plan that went into place during Hurricane Ike reminded me of that. I highly encourage checking out the Dragonfly to get the scoop on what's behind this scenario filter & how to make your own for your library (click to enlarge).




Including these as part of an emergency procedures binder (maybe even a wiki!) could be a very valuable and easy way to provide information to colleagues at other institutions who are often eager to help you after disaster strikes.

I haven't forgotten about the use of Flickr for sharing photos in the wake of a disaster, and you may have heard about how a photo on Twitter broke the news about the plane crash in the Hudson River last month. I'm not currently aware of anyone writing up these or other social networking & media methods up as part of emergency preparedness plans, but think they've certainly shown a high return on very little investment and should be considered.

2/27 edit: Apparently I was picking up the Twitter/social media emergency communication vibes from the Seattle Times while I was writing this, check out the suggestion from a King County council member below in response to some bus service meltdowns due to snow in Seattle yesterday

"Given the increasing sophistication of modern phones and wireless Internet providers, I encourage Metro to take immediate action to use instant messaging, Twitter, neighborhood blogs, and customer self-reporting systems to keep Metro operators and riders connected," Constantine said in a statement.

He said inexpensive ways exist to reach riders. "It doesn't seem like they've got people who are savvy at that."

Hidden in the Bookshelf: PubMed & Discovery Initiative

Many thanks go out to Kathel Dunn, Associate Fellowship Coordinator at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), who sent me an email and Amy Donahue, Associate Fellow at NLM, who wrote a #pubmed tag on Twitter (what does that mean?) at about the same time this morning.



The news?

Buried within the NCBI Bookshelf, yet not the same as the Bookshelf announcement listserv or linked from the Bookshelf front page (check the 'breadcrumbs', or filepath below), are NCBI News archives including a February 2009 article with details about the Discovery Initiative and PubMed.



Please read Featured Resource: Improvements to NCBI Services Promote Discovery in its entirely (not too long & very informative) and click on the links of the PubMed screenshots highlighting the Document Summary view of the Gene Sensor, 'Also try..' and 'Recent Activity' in addition to the Abstract Plus summary view of the pre-computed Related Articles and Recent Activity. See how the article title is the hyperlink in the Document Summary view but not in Abstract Plus view as noted in the PubMed Update guide?

As an update regarding #pubmed on Twitter: I have heard from NLM that several there are 'aware of' this as a user feedback venue, yet feel that 'it is too brief.' Again, to my knowledge there is no official NLM presence on Twitter or other social media venues, although the National Institutes of Health (NIH, which includes NLM as 1 of 27 Institutes and Centers) does have two Twitter news accounts.

I offer as a contrast the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)'s involvement in social media, which David Rothman has covered well.

Andrew P. Wilson, who describes himself as "Member of HHS social media team," (The Department of Health and Human Services - HHS - includes NIH, CDC, FDA & many others) noticed that many people stopped following the FDA recalls Twitter account today. Note his approach to soliciting and responding to user feedback below (read from the bottom up):



Later he wrote as an additional response "Thanks - an experiment and there will be successes & failures (and in between). Appreciate everyones feedback, & support though."

An experiment. Willingness to try. Soliciting and appreciating user feedback. Placing so much information on a single page instead of having to dig through various venues to find relevant news.

Mr. Wilson, you have my thanks for your approach during the increasing number of peanut product recalls, and I hope NIH (and NLM) is included within the scope of the HHS social media team.

My soft spot: Healthcare journalism

With all the current discussion regarding Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, as the nominee for Surgeon General under President-elect Barack Obama, I thought I'd offer a glimpse into my own history for the perspective I'm coming from regarding healthcare and journalism.

In the fall of 1995, I was a young and idealistic student at Sonoma State University and part of Project Censored. Each week we received a stack of paper news media reports to review and match against selection criteria, then discussed them the following week to see if further research (mostly on the Nexis database in the library which contained records of news stories for journalists, quite different from what LexisNexis is now) would be justified to forward it to the much smaller batch of articles a national panel of journalism experts would review & vote to be one of the top 25 underreported stories of the year. The exact criteria and methodology of review have since changed, although so has the news media and the accessibility of information in ways I don't think we could even comprehend over 13 years ago. I was the last class with founder Carl Jensen & am no longer too familiar with the direction Project Censored (now under the Sociology department instead of Communication Studies) has gone since then.

The often-cited 2000 To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System report about medical errors being the 3rd highest killer in the United States? Old news to me by 5 years at that point. Two articles that ended up being combined into one and voted #12 for the spring 1996 book (1995 news stories) were in my article stacks: 180,000 Patients Die Annually From Treatment in Hospitals, based in part on a July 1995 JAMA adverse drug events (ADE) study. I apologize for the typos/funky wording in that HTML copy which may be from an optical character resolution (OCR) scan that wasn't post-edited well. I guarantee I used proper grammar in all text I wrote above my name. Can you see my writing style there? I still can. I used way too many commas in my youth and now I only use slightly too many... right? I remember balking at the emphasis on the names and careers of individuals in Chicago but being overridden by higher ups who wanted the personal touch in there.

Investigative journalism and librarianship are not all that far removed in the ability to research with ruthless efficiency under tight deadlines. Where there is a drastic difference between the fields is the pressure in journalism to not have your corporate owners, board members and advertisers look bad and lose revenue as a result of your research. For medical librarians (or any specialization), think about the amount of time you have personally invested in learning the medical and health care field, the information needs in it, and the specialized tools of the trade to be an effective researcher there. Journalists, even those with an MD or focused on health issues, do not usually have such background training nor much time or comprehensive access to the information sources we librarians do. Industry deregulation and the rate of media mergers that was a concern in the 1990s is eclipsed by the extent of the corporate media empires today.

This is why I can't offer an opinion about Dr. Gupta; I never watch CNN. It is hurting greatly in this economy but we always have and will continue to subscribe to a daily & Sunday print newspaper, The Seattle Times, from the independent and family-owned Seattle Times Company. They did an excellent job of researching methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in the state of Washington that led to the Department of Health announcing they would track MRSA rates as I mentioned in November. It's no longer common to see investigative journalism stories in corporate media since it takes a substantial amount of time and money to do the research for them... and you must also watch your back. This is why I hope people will continue to understand the value in and support independent media sources. They are truly better for our health!

Should we serve bagels or croissants? An irreverent look at library assessment

Assessment and evaluation of programs is a major component of my rather non-traditional librarian job of a whopping 3 months. I can't say I'm any good at it yet but I'm optimistic, relatively good at picking up things quickly and running with them, and surrounded by phenomenal resources on an everyday basis.

At the same time, I think every one of you can relate to this...


The conference I crashed on Monday (sitting on the floor in the back of the room without a conference badge, let alone a single ribbon from it) was the Library Assessment Conference. We had kinda-but-not-really been invited to attend sessions of interest to us as long as we didn't eat the food or attend their social events. Fair enough. I scanned the schedule to see what was possibly useful to me from my job perspective and found something I couldn't miss:

Plenary Session I: The Most Important Challenge for Library Assessment
Three visionary library leaders each present what they see as the most important challenge for library assessment in the future. The session promises to be provocative and stimulating, but never boring.

I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting with a buildup like that, but I can assure you it wasn't along the lines of the provocative future Andrew Zolli had at MLA 08 in Chicago.

First up, with the best-designed Powerpoint for clarity in a large room, was Susan Gibbons, Vice Provost of the River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester. She challenged our field's obsession for focus on quantitative data (suggesting maybe The Count from Sesame Street was partially to blame) and instead to consider what are we counting, why, and what the numbers actually tell us. Reference queries are down: is the Internet to blame? On the surface it's easy to say yes, but their deeper look found other barriers. Users did not want to leave their spots at the popular library computers (they did another study that found students walking 2-3 miles a day, thus why they didn't always want to haul laptops with them) to ask a reference librarian a question. They had students photograph what they always carried with them; cell phones appeared in every picture, yet both their own & 41% of the Association of Research Library (ARL) websites didn't have a phone number on the front page.

Next up was Rick Luce, with an overwhelmingly detailed dark blue background/white text with yellow headers Powerpoint I couldn't read most of the time, who is Vice Provost and Director of Libraries at Emory University. He whipped through his presentation with amazing speed about the $100 million investment approved for his aggressive strategic plan that wasn't based on ARL statistics and emphasized staff understanding for the need for systems-wide improvement. He suggested studying the criteria for the Malcom Baldridge National Quality Award winners, to get beyond assessment as a "happiness meter" (level 1) or just asking what's important (level 2) and considering 'How do we rate against the best in the industry?" (level 3). He ended with a charge of avoiding measures not focusing on strategy, a lack of accountability, a lack of discipline, and an emphasis on no action without a plan, and no plan without data. Whew!

Last but not least was Betsy Wilson, with another blue background/white text/yellow headers Powerpoint but she used minimal text with clear pictures for a better effect, Dean of Libraries at the University of Washington. She focused on 'accelerating relevance', of looking to the past to think about the future with a clear vision in mind. What got everyone's fingers tapping on laptops or scrawling on notepads was when she asked us to consider something I'll highlight and get back to later:

What will the scholar of 2050 want us to preserve? Blogs? Mashups? Wikis? How can we stem the data deluge? How can we make quality data convenient?

She continued with two main points of how assessment can help listen, look, connect & replenish; and that we are not the first to wrestle with the relevance of the library of the future. President Suzzallo at the University of Washington was canned by the Governor over the campus library's vision and construction, but then the voters sacked the Governor in the 1932 election. (source)

My brain merged obsession with front page library phone numbers (can you tell from yesterday's post?), level 3 thinking about (perceived) 'best in the industry' (can't you just Google the information and get it?), and what 2050 would want us to keep about today's information torrent.

For the last one I wasn't thinking along the lines of blogs (plenty of backup opportunities there) but the vast stream of both data and ephemera in various forums of social networking and instant messaging. What is useful for 2050 about now? Is it pointless to write a traditional journal article about these media when it can and will morph into something else within 6 months & have a shorter half life still in the future? Or is this part of what we need to document about the data flow in society now?

These communication methods are a part of everyday life for most students and what many of our library users are used to while many librarians are not. I believe in the use of wisely applied assessment measures, but not in using them as a crutch to keep from trying out new things without reams of data first and/or fear of the unknown. Get the mammoth when it's in sight! If we spend much time looking for our ribbons instead of encouraging users to use their cell phones to call us or efficiently respond to their Meebo widget queries, they'll never even know about the fine quality cheese to go with the bagels and croissants.