ACRL 2009 - Social Networking Literacy Competencies for Librarians

Excellent, thought-provoking papers about the use of social networking in the library and by librarians by both speakers that were well worth dragging my still-sick self out of bed and onto a Metro bus to slog through the rain at 8am on a Saturday morning for!

As usual, some teaser thoughts from my notes (can you tell my brain is on format autopilot?)

• It is not enough to know what social networking is but able to understand nature and roles, importance in research, communication and information life cycle of the social networking site.
• We have to evaluate the tools just as we do everything else and not jump on board just because it's new.
• Librarians who are social networking-literate must be able to apply their current skills and curiosity to emerging and evolving resources.
• Professional associations and library schools can support librarians with CE initiatives
• Require new hires to possess social networking skills (yikes!)
• How frequently do students use Facebook for academic purposes? Most ranked rarely and they feel Facebook impacts their academic study negatively.
• When developing a virtual presence, consider students' actual perceptions of the library. Talk to your students, not student workers or this study's students.
• Becoming a fan of the library involves less effort/awkwardness than friending.
• Don't send apps or poke the students on Facebook.

My thoughts - It is impossible to verify with 100% accuracy any institutional online presence on Twitter. An individual may use a library or library product name, create a profile with the company logo, link to the company website and fill out all the appropriate profile details, follow (and be followed by) others in the field and 'talk the talk'... and not be sanctioned by the library or institution to represent them at all.

I am not going to give further attention to the individuals on Twitter I'm aware of who have done so with National Library of Medicine (NLM) by linking to them here, but be aware that they do exist. As it was in January and still the case now, there is no official NLM presence on Twitter.

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."

A tweet for change: #Pubmed

The official communication portal for your feedback to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) about PubMed is 'Write to the Help Desk' at the bottom of each PubMed page or via email to custserv@nlm.nih.gov This mechanism is helpful for NLM to have trackable data, much like the tickets that are generated by calls to the hospital IT services help desk, however this format doesn't allow for others to see what insights and challenges their colleagues are having.

Medical information professionals have multiple channels of communication ranging from international to regional, state & association listservs, reading each others' blogs, and social networking tools such as Twitter. We can and do share among ourselves! However, each of these communication methods can carry high levels of noise, or information that is neither concise nor relevant to what we are looking for in terms of helpful input.

As I previously explained in my PubMed and the Discovery Initiative post, behind-the-scenes work for the past few years is now manifesting itself in visible changes with PubMed. The main channel for communication from NLM regarding these changes is the NLM Technical Bulletin, where you can quickly browse PubMed-specific entries.

A thought I had for a quick, easy-to-contribute, low-noise feedback mechanism for everyone to see, participate in, and track via a webpage or RSS regarding PubMed is the use of hashtags on Twitter by including #pubmed in your tweet. The hashtagged word works for both a regular message (such as the one from me) and a reply, or @, message (such as the one from dial_m)

Going to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23pubmed
currently brings up the results since I pitched this idea to medlibs, a group Twitter account that David Rothman started & I now moderate:


The RSS feed is #pubmed - Twitter Search

Caveat 1: The 'hashtags' I'm referring to in my tweet is http://www.hashtags.org/tag/pubmed, where currently nothing is displayed. It should since there is reciprocal following of @hashtags on my Twitter account, which displays your hashtags even if you have a private Twitter account. Maybe their system is currently lagged when it comes to new entries?

Caveat 2: If you have a private Twitter account or are sending a group tweet message (such as on medlibs), your #Pubmed tag won't appear on the Twitter search results.

If all of the above didn't make much sense, check out Alison Aldrich's post on the Dragonfly for a great Twitter 101 introduction.

If it did make sense, please contribute your #pubmed thoughts on Twitter separate from your usual discussion of Pubmed (which is still searchable here)! To my knowledge there is not an official NLM presence on Twitter, but I will share this with NLM and encourage them to consider this as a type of social network feedback that is targeted and concise so they won't have to wade through a bunch of noise to get to the point.

Change: Pants, PubMed & Patron Expectations

Thank you for your comments and Krafty Librarian's mention about the PubMed Discovery Initiative post. Since then there have been a number of new RSS subscriptions (welcome all!) and a fair amount of web traffic due to that particular entry, so I wanted to mention that I do have a Creative Commons license here. You are welcome to copy, distribute and transmit any of my work here as long as you link back to whatever post it came from in your work. Drop me a comment if you'd like, I love to see what others are thinking. Keep asking so that we may understand, keep sharing so that we may learn.

This blog is still the first Google result for Quizno's I fear change commerical from my April 2008 post. I still love the 'I fear change and will keep my bushes!' reaction to pants, it is often on my mind when I come across resistance to change now. I hadn't reread the post for a while, but my thoughts there are relevant once more when it comes to these current changes in PubMed:

Resistance to change, however, is an undeniable part of human nature that is most successfully overcome through extreme patience, persistence and education in conjunction with assessing user information needs (before, during & after) to determine the proposed changes will/are actually work(ing).

From my very limited time in the field I've observed that many medical librarians have persistence bordering on the obsessive (I'm guilty of this), a very large amount of patience for our patrons, not quite so much patience for one another, and little to no patience when it comes to the electronic tools of our trade not looking or working the way we have come to expect & rely upon them to be. Show of hands for those who pitched a fit when Delicious changed overnight this July, for example? How about the new Facebook profile layout during the same timeframe?

These social bookmarking and networking sites aren't even close to the heart of medical librarianship online tools; PubMed is the core and it has had a number of changes that directly affect our search results and the navigability of the database. No wonder there is so much chatter on MEDLIB-L and other venues about it!

We have come a long way in 11 years though. There once was a cost per query ranging from $2-$4 depending upon the amount of information retrieved and time it took to do so by using Grateful Med to interface with the MEDical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS) databases. (source) The title (bold mine) of the article reflects the time: Sikorski R, Peters R. Medical literature made easy. Querying databases on the internet. JAMA. 1997 Mar 26;277(12):959-60. I don't think any of us would consider that 'made easy' with our expectations regarding PubMed today, free full text wasn't an option!

What of the role of education in these changes? I already mentioned how, from my perspective, the Discovery Initiative background behind the changes in PubMed wasn't communicated clearly. Medical librarians frequently serve as educators for our users and our webpage tutorials, Camtasia recordings and classes about PubMed have already needed revision regarding the automatic term mapping (ATM), and will again where tabs are concerned per the PubMed Technical Bulletin on November 14, 2008

PubMed Advanced Search will soon no longer be a beta site. It is now the place to go to use features such as field searching and limits. In the near future the tabs for Limits, Preview/Index, History, Clipboard, and Details will be removed from the basic PubMed pages. History, Limits, Index of Fields, and a link to Details are available from the Advanced Search screen.

What about needs assessment? Changes have been and will continue to be made based on the data gathered from over 3 million searches a day, but I don't know the answer to what the results are from PubMed's needs assessment or usability testing studies. Direct feedback from users is a closed loop: web forms and emails are submitted but we as users do not know what happens next from what we send in although we are encouraged to do so. Sometimes we receive a response back that doesn't seem to address what we said, sometimes we receive no response at all.

It may be too radical and soon to cast an eye to some of the Web 2.0 tactics of transparency in change the upcoming administration is utilizing on the web for feedback, such as the first popular Open for Questions. 10,000 questions posted by change.gov visitors were ranked up or down one million times by over 20,000 people and some of the most popular ones received a direct answer for all to see. How could something similar be used to transparently offer a communication and feedback venue about what is important to all PubMed users, not solely medical librarians but all of the multiple populations that use it?

Research talk: What is the role of informatics in cancer care?

One of the greatest delights of working in an academic environment is never knowing what fascinating research may unexpectedly cross paths with you each week. Last year I held a lunar meteorite, which will probably retain the OMG COOL award for life because how often do you get to wrap your arms around a very heavy chunk of the Moon? I will never forget how I and everyone else around me was beaming with happiness approaching rapture at being able to do so.

While not quite as exciting as a lunar meteorite, being invited to research discussions by those who are passionate about their field and how their projects can help people is equally interesting to me. On Friday I was pleased to be able to attend a research conversation with Dr. Kent Unruh, a senior fellow with the Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics at the School of Medicine here at the University of Washington.

This was a reprise of his 2008 American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) symposium presentation earlier this month of Barriers to Organizing Information during Cancer Care: I don't know how people do it, abstract of

People organize their personal information to conceptualize what they know,
enhance information retrieval in the future, and cue or remember tasks in
everyday life. However, studies also suggest that organizing is difficult and
people fail to use their information effectively for emergent tasks. In the
health-care domain, patients face grave consequences if they cannot access and
use information effectively. Arguably, patients have access to more information
about their health than at any previous point in history. However, information
access is only the first step to managing health care needs. Patients must
organize it effectively to support the underlying tasks required to manage their
health proactively. Ironically, ever-increasing access to information
exacerbates the challenges patients face in using information effectively. In
this paper, we describe five barriers patients encounter when organizing their
information for use during cancer care. We describe each barrier using rich
examples from our triangulated data set, and conclude with four recommendations
to help patients organize information more effectively during active treatment.

I'm not too sure we followed the abstract presentation to the letter, but the implications I came away with for ways to help with information organization for cancer patients were

• Provide a rich intermediate structure (embed pre-organized links to other related information on insurance, necessary customization that is highly personalized)
• Leverage assistance from others (support co-management model, enable assistance from others & organization strategies for their particular situation)
• Provide a functional view of information (integrate descriptive & procedural info (who/what/where/when/who), distinguish information for active tasks, represent patient's view of cancer care system) Discovery of time-sensitive financial info in the stack added significantly to emotional stress, sort information/bills by date due instead of date services given.
• Incorporate emotional considerations (negative feedback loop of not being able to retrieve information when needed for patient involvement in own care)
• What is the role of informatics in cancer care? Clinicians and designers can explore stress reduction techniques, embed cognitive cues & known stress reduction techniques for stress relief in managing information

For the research study background that led to these implications & a great discussion, my notes are over here. I asked about Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) & Protected Health Information (PHI) concerns and he responded that he's currently a co-primary investigator (co-PI) on a portal for patients to manage cancer care information that involves portable workstations where clinicians enter & annotate information. I want to know much more about that although it wasn't really the focus of this particular talk, and will definitely keep an eye out for more of his findings in the future.

I also see social networking (such as Facebook pages) as a way to meet the need of being able to "coordinate in common information space between disparate groups" to help out in areas of emotional support, driving to appointments, bringing meals over, helping with childcare and other related activities in a patient's cancer treatment. I'm convinced Facebook is probably already being used this way and I just haven't seen it yet. Blogs are great for sharing cancer diagnosis, treatment and other information with everyone at once and receiving messages of support from loved ones in return but not so much for group coordination from what I've seen, which is sadly way too much.

Friday Foolery #8: Phishing for Donuts & Bacon

It sometimes takes drastic and unusual measures to raise student awareness about issues. At the University of Virginia, Karen McDowell (a security analyst) & her $60 custom made purple fish costume went on a march to discuss the issues of phishing during Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Lest we think that everyone in the 21st century campus environment would know that phishing means scam emails trying to lure people into revealing passwords or even more sensitive data about themselves, McDowell reports "Sometimes I introduced myself as a fraudulent e-mail because many people don’t know what a phish is."

This is timely in light of a ruckus that broke out on Twitter two days ago. A system called Twitterank asks for your Twitter username & password (while providing a disclaimer) "to determine how worthy of a person you are in Twitterverse." I saw isolated tweets about people & their twitteranks earlier in the day, then by the end of the day saw other people saying it was a phishing scam. Yesterday, the Twitterank author had a say in his defense.

Social network analysis is a real and very complicated process, as I learned in an insanely overpacked conference room in Denver last Saturday. Twitterank and Twitter Grader seem to be stabs in this direction of measuring actors in a network of arcs, trying to determine the geodesic path of least resistance and most influence... or perhaps it's far less complicated and cuts to a core question of humanity that hasn't died since 5th grade: Am I popular?

My Twitterverse answer according to both services: I am still so not popular despite ditching the Coke bottle-thick glasses for gas permeable contacts and having a sharply straight smile after way too many years of braces. That's fine by me.

(Warning: The following is not a political endorsement nor for viewing by those under 19 years of age due to the risk of aging your arteries)

I also have a 22.5 BMI, yet was sent information about Weight Watchers by a former coworker then attacked by the red exercise ball of my colleague this morning. I was beginning to feel self-conscious until another colleague came to the rescue with the ultimate vision of sweet, glorious saturated fat: The Donuts and Bacon '08 T-Shirt advertisement. If this was a button or magnet, I'd be there even as I cringe at the thought of these two wonderful food items together at the same time.

Continuing with last week's theme (no guarantee for next week), here's a free MP3: the Donuts and Bacon song by James William Roy! All the unpopular of the world, sing along with me now...

All us losers and boozers and heroes can't fall
If there's donuts and bacon in the morning!

AEA Day 4: Ten thousand, four hundred and thirty one

That's how many words of notes I took over the duration of the American Evaluation Association 2008 conference here in Denver, not including full session & paper titles (let alone presenter names) in the mad typing rampage.

I'm tired and I want to go home now, but not before a nice breakfast with my aunt before I catch a plane tomorrow morning.

Lots of great information was shared today (social network analysis, relevant cultural information, distance education evaluation practices that make sense compared to what I endured as a grad student, etc.) I've identified the future need for me to see about modifications in Google Docs to make it easier to skip directly to relevant information, but now is not the time.

For the collective record:
Saturday, November 8th notes
Friday, November 7th notes
Thursday, November 6th notes
Wednesday, November 5th notes

I won't be able to coherently discuss any of this information for quite some time until I'm able to synthesize it a bit!

AEA Day 2: Those with authority may fear sharing it

The most frequent searches that unsuccessfully lead people to my blog involve my old Quizno's/EBM post with 'I fear change, I will keep my bushes.'

It was the title statement by the president of the American Evaluation Association during a plenary today that made me think about organization structures. Those in hierarchies both know and execute the flow of authoritative power because it is a controlled factor that also carries an easy amount of blame on 'the system.' I use it myself to describe how things are easily lost in the massive bureaucracies we juggle.

These flows of power don't work the same way in a horizontal organization structure, yet the latter seem to be where most social networking and collaboration occurs. Sharing is not only easy, it thrives here with substantially decreased turnaround expectations compared to the hierarchy. Why is David Rothman apologizing for what really isn't a delay? In my current conference (which is rather un-Web 2.0), the onus is on us to contact presenters via email for copies of presentations. Is part of social networking an acceleration on turnaround time and the expectation that we as creators of knowledge resources will always & immediately share our material online? I'm not certain.

In the nature of sharing, (I saw others with laptops today, yay!) today's conference notes are here containing mostly unedited raw material that I'll turn into at least one lengthy blog post in the future and possibly two. I'm too pooped to put all 5 proper session titles, all the presenter names & affiliations and will edit them later. I need sleep because I have 6 sessions on tap for tomorrow!

Week 3 Assignment: Social Networking Tools

Caveat: I'm still a recent graduate who is not yet employed at a health sciences library, although that should be changing soon :)

I have to admit laughing when I saw our class assignments for this week involving Facebook & LinkedIn. I finally joined Facebook two months ago when I realized the networking possibilities to stay connected both with old classmates and new colleagues vs. adding more email addresses to my address book that may not work with a job change or my frequent typoes. I was invited to LinkedIn by my best friend's mom several years ago but only updated my profile there and started reaching out to others again last week.

How can social networking be used by the Medical Library Association (MLA) to connect members?
This is an excellent question because, from my perspective, the majority of MLA members are resistant to participating in social networking. The MLA groups we have on Facebook don't seem to be utilized much, if at all, although there are plenty of connections between MLA members as friends.

I believe there is a perception that social networking is one more thing to add to an already overloaded plate, with frequent mention of 'I can't manage my email, how can I handle this?' For a contrast as a new graduate, I'm currently reluctant to join many well-established listservs in our field because I don't want to add to my inbox deluge.

I see social networking (RSS feeds too) as a way to reduce email volume and be more open to communication with users where they are at and point them in directions they may not have considered otherwise (i.e. the library's online catalog). This requires staying on top of new technology and communication channels, but isn't that what we as information professionals are supposed to be doing in the first place to understand the flow of data and our users' information needs in society? Several innovative UW librarians (Lally & Dunford) sought to integrate the digital collection with Wikipedia with very positive results several years ago, and I'm curious for an update on this project in addition to learning more about UW Libraries' web 2.0 presence below.

Should your library have a Facebook or MySpace page?
As a collective UW whole (not specific to the Health Sciences Libraries), we already do. I took the same picture as the group's profile shot from a slightly lower angle in the Suzzallo Reading Room several years ago and won second place in a photo contest. I love that room! It looks like the Facebook page has been there a while but is (as of this week) starting to be updated again, which is great and I hope the trend continues with current events, news, etc. along with some outreach. There are other fragmented UW library-related Facebook pages that don't appear to be run by UW library staff but I could be mistaken.

Are there privacy concerns for individuals when using social networking sites?
Goodness, yes. I'm actually somewhat surprised that extensive privacy filtering options were not available on Facebook until a week ago! There is definitely a need for appropriate education on how to set social networking profiles and application information to be beneficial yet safe for comfort levels, and I'd love to see MLA address this as part of the curriculum from the start instead of encouraging the use of false profiles for its members to try things out. I do understand that even covering web 2.0 technologies with MLA members is a big first step which is appreciated though.

What did you like or not like about your experience with Facebook or MySpace?
I have really enjoyed learning more about my colleagues' backgrounds (regions, education, employment, groups, etc.) in addition to what makes us all human, like seeing what others are reading and who else likes the same obscure music and movies I do. In my opinion, the interactivity of Facebook and other online game applications (such as Scrabulous, both Scrabble & a private chat board for a game with 1 or multiple other players) serves to strengthen these interpersonal connections in much the same way as staff retreats, but in an asynchronous fashion that doesn't require time off work or registration fees.

I'm hazy on how connecting with users on the same level as colleagues would work (thus group Facebook pages pointing to resources vs. personal librarian pages may be best for now), but who knows what concepts of networking the future may hold. I certainly didn't envision the platforms we now take for granted when I poked around in online bulletin board systems (BBS) & internet relay chat (IRC) last decade!