Below, you will find 6 free chapters from Facet books on information literacy, research support and the information behaviour, some of which are written by speakers at the conference.
Picture the scene – you’ve gone to Trip and searched for an article to answer your question. You find a paper that looks interesting and click on the link – and it leads to a dead link. I appreciate the frustration – I really do.
Apart from the design there is a bit of functionality missing – the ability to combine search (called ‘recent searches’ at the top). This allowed users to build up fairly complex searches.
We’re now aware of this and hope to get a fix out early next week!
Original research findings are often distorted in the messages that reach the public. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
Five United States senators and a group of scientists and physicians have called on the US National Library of Medicine to require journals to include information about authors’ competing interests in the abstracts of articles submitted to PubMed, the library’s online database of biomedical literature. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
If you're a Twitter fan, you'll want to take a look at Social Rank. It's a very neat tool to slice and dice the followers that you've got. Simply log in with your Twitter credentials and start to have fun with all of the different filters.
In this context, I am writing to provide some details of my YouTube channel called ‘Psychiatry Lectures’ (www.youtube.com/channel/UCVZhg8unEqo0XUm8cHAIwbA/videos). This is a free-to-access educational channel featuring videos on psychiatry topics targeted at health professionals who see psychiatric patients. So far, I have uploaded 19 videos covering most of the major psychiatry topics, for example, schizophrenia, mood disorders and anxiety disorders. The average duration of the videos is 50 min and most videos end with a set of five multiple choice questions. The videos are in the form of PowerPoint presentations with my narration.
I was set to condemn yet another narcissistic autobiographical account that would be pro-anorexia fodder – but the author herself cleverly forestalls that objection. She acknowledges that we can't stop ‘wannarexics’ from devouring this as a motivational manual. Thus from the start, the book evokes that familiar sense of intellectual duelling between patient and clinician, with anorexia always at least one step ahead. This is one reason why I would recommend this book to any colleague with the stomach to read it, and to anyone who dares trivialise the challenge of working with people with eating disorders.
Great news if you work for NHS England, you can access Trip Pro for ‘free’. Health Education England has entered into a trial, till the end of 2016. This makes Trip Pro free to all NHS staff in England.
If you work for the NHS in England and are not automatically upgraded to Trip Pro (we use your computers IP address) either contact your library or me: jon.brassey@tripdatabase.com
The academic publisher Taylor & Francis is exploring the transformation of the traditional library role through a series of interviews with academic librarians around the world.
Welcome to our new blog: Information Skills for Health.
Here you will find short bite-sized simple tips and tricks, resource features and etutorials that will help you to find and use information, to support evidence-based practice, CPD, revalidation and, ultimately, patient care.
It is aimed at NHS staff and Keele-based students working and studying in Staffordshire.
The library is currently piloting a 3 month trial to make available the latest Table of Contents of selected journals for you to browse in the library. This is a quick way of keeping abreast of newly published articles in your chosen field. Don’t forget that we can also set-up individual TOCs on request, by simply contacting the library on 404681.
Each month we share a day in the life of a clinical librarian. This month we headed over to Essex to interview the Library Services Manager and Clinical Librarian at Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals Foundation Trust.
To coincide with International Children’s Book Day 2016, Amnesty International released the results from a new YouGov opinion poll. In the poll, parents were asked to select from a list the pastime that they thought were most likely to enhance the ability of their child to empathise with others. Over half of the parents polled said that reading a book was the most likely pastime to do this.
This essential guide starts by focusing on the skills required to apply critical thinking to personal reflection and practice. Focus then moves to the underlying principles of practice and evidence-based nursing care. Finally, there are helpful chapters on how to improve reflective and critical writing skills to meet academic standards. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
This book is easy to read and is set out well, with summaries and objectives in each chapter. Despite my initial reservations about the book being targeted at American readers, it is still relevant to British nursing. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
The 2016 Spring Forum, 2020 vision: supporting open access and research excellence, took place on the 4th March 2016 at the Royal Society of Medicine. Many thanks to all of our speakers, sponsors and delegates who made our 2015 Summer Conference such a success.
Please see below for links to the speaker presentations.
On 24 March Parliament launched a new online version of Hansard, the Official Report of all Parliamentary debates
The new website is mobile-friendly and boasts an improved search function that allows users to quickly search for and share transcripts of debates, view all activity by Member, and makes it easier to find and filter division results.
A public libraries dataset published today by the BBC has revealed the extent of losses to public library services and paid staff since 2010.
According to the data compiled from FOI requests returned by 207 authorities responsible for running libraries across the UK, almost 8,000 jobs in UK public libraries have disappeared in six years and 343 libraries have closed, with over 15,000 volunteers recruited to the library service.
The Literature Search Process: Guidance for NHS Researchers has been updated. To access the new version either click on the link or go to our Research tab for more information about how the Library can help you with your research.
COMMISSIONING: A £270m community services contract between Virgin Care and East Staffordshire Clinical Commissioning Group has been delayed for a month. Please contact the library to receive a copy of this article - http://bit.ly/1Xyazai
Rapid reviews are becoming increasingly commissioned, used and written about. But why is there this, relatively sudden, interest? Putting it bluntly, it’s because the cornerstone of evidence synthesis, the systematic review, is becoming increasingly out of touch with the needs of today’s healthcare systems.
200,000 homeless, older and vulnerable people have had ‘lessons’ to get online and contact their doctor reducing GP visits and costs to the NHS.
In the first two years of the NHS England pilot scheme ‘Widening Digital Participation’ 14,000 people registered with a GP and looked online first before contacting the doctor.
Half of those who would have gone to the GP or A&E said they would now use NHS Choices, 111 or a pharmacy first.
Run by the Tinder Foundation for NHS England, the scheme works with hardest-to-reach communities giving them the skills and confidence to access online health information.
There is much debate within the improvement field about the value of RCTs in determining the effectiveness of improvement interventions. In 2007, Donald Berwick's monologue ‘eating soup with a fork’ provided a convincing argument for why the RCT was necessary for evidence-based medicine, but inadequate for evaluating complex social interventions such as collaboratives and campaigns. Since then, there has been an apparent ‘cooling’ in the appetite of improvement practitioners to adopt RCT methods in attempts to understand the overall impact of improvement initiatives. Against this backdrop, we applaud the authors in their attempt, which goes against the trend, but disappointingly, once again, offers conflicting and weak evidence of beneficial effect despite adherence to rigorous method. So what does this study teach us about whether or not to embrace RCTs in improvement? To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
This paper draws on information gained from literature on the peer review process and the authors' knowledge and experience of contributing as peer reviewers and editors in the field of health care, including nursing.
This article is the first in the feature to highlight the social network site Twitter as a tool for health information and it reports on a study by Emma Hughes, who completed an MSc in information and library studies at Aberystwyth University in 2014. Emma's research investigated the quality of health information available on Twitter, in particular the information available on UK alcohol consumption guidelines. Her research suggests that users searching for this information would need certain literacy skills to interpret it correctly. However, there is no doubt that Twitter is an increasingly popular resource for information dissemination and health professionals, and organisations should be encouraged to use it frequently as a tool for sharing information.
In a wired, virtual and information rich society, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are leading us into a brave new world in which their key role is to support lifelong networked learning. This feature looks at the broad role of MOOCs and considers them within the context of health, and health librarianship. In particular, it provides examples of where health librarians have developed MOOCs and what opportunities there are in the future for health librarians to collaborate in the development and delivery of health MOOCs.
If you haven't had a look at the HDAS preview, then do have a look. It's available here: http://alpha.hdas.nice.org.uk/
Some of the features that you can currently use on the preview site are:
Saving strategies
Browsing the thesaurus
Using thesaurus terms in a search
Using limits and fields to refine your search
Re-running searches
Editing existing search rows
Saving results
Exporting results
Access to full-text links
Facet Publishing have announced the release of two new books, Practical Tips for Facilitating Research and Dynamic Research Support for Academic Libraries.
Higher education is in a period of rapid evolution and academic libraries must continually evaluate and adjust their services to meet new needs. Librarian roles are changing and new specialisms, such as data librarians are emerging. Activities are being driven by researcher requirements such as the demand for wider dissemination and the impact of research.
NHS England has paid for premium access to TRIP (Turning Research into Practice) on NHS PCs, offering more content and features (users on PCs outside the NHS network can still access TRIP, but may see fewer results).
We just launched the RD&E Research repository
This is an online collection of research publications data of articles, abstracts and conference papers authored by researchers working for our Trust, with full-text of articles included where publisher’s permissions allow.
http://rde.openrepository.com/rde
Its a joint collaboration between the Research & Development department and the Trust library service, to make the research outputs of the Trust visible and available to the general public.
The Royal College of Physicians' (RCP) new report Research for all: Building a research-active medical workforce has noted that the greatest barrier doctors face in engaging in research is a lack of time, even though they are eager to do so. Drawn from the findings of a survey of almost 2,000 doctors, the report shows that respondents cited the lack of time as having a ‘significant impact’ on their ability to engage in research.
A website dedicated to helping people in Staffordshire live a healthier life has been launched, just in time for national No Smoking Day.
Launched today (March 9) the Healthy Staffordshire Hub from Staffordshire County Council gives children, young people, adults and families advice on stopping smoking, reducing alcohol intake, achieving a healthier weight and getting more physically active.
The new website starts by asking people what they would like help with, before tailoring the advice to fit their health needs and help them make those all important changes.
The website, www.staffordshirecares.info/healthy is being launched as part of national No Smoking Day in a bid to give those wanting to kick the habit a bit of extra help.
Conclusions - The mystery shopper exercises provided the UNCG University Libraries with the opportunity to examine our services and customer service goals more closely. Conducting the mystery shopper study identified several areas to address. We realized we needed more clearly defined standards for staff to follow. We saw that we needed to discuss what “going the extra mile” means to us as an organization. We also needed to develop a scalable training method for student employees.
Conclusions – In sum, the number of article processing charge funded open access papers has grown tremendously in recent years. Furthermore, open access papers have a citation advantage over toll access papers, both annually and across disciplines.
Conclusion – Dynamic e-reference titles and collections experienced increases in usage each year while static titles and collections experienced decreases in usage. This indicates that collections and titles that offer new content to users each year will continue to see growth in usage while static collections and titles will see maximum usage within a few years and then begin to decline as they get older. Fresh content is strongly associated with usage in e-reference titles, which mirrors the author’s previous work examining static and dynamic content in e-monographs.
Main Results – Cost-per-article use for journals from Big Deals varied from $2.11 to $9.42. For individually subscribed journals, the average cost-per-article ranged from $0.25 to $84.00. Pay-per-view charges ranged from $15.00 to $80.00, with an average cost of $37.72.
Conclusion – Those students who used library guides reported the guides helped them get started on their research paper or assignment and find research materials, two areas for which previous studies show students have great difficulty. Since the majority of students did not notice the link to the library guide in the LMS, librarians could emphasize it in the news section of the course, which gets much more attention. Within library guides, simpler groupings of links might be easier for students to use, but this conclusion would require further research to confirm. In any case, nearly half of all high use guides were not promoted in any way by librarians, but simply automatically embedded in the LMS, a sign that passive embedding may provide an easy way for the library to reach a large number of students early in their academic career. Since the automatic embedding of guides began, guides have seen a dramatic increase in usage.
Conclusion – The authors conclude that integrating information literacy into the undergraduate curriculum as part of the small group seminar series is effective. They suggest future directions for research, such as a study to assess the impact of the training on specific skills rather than student confidence and evaluations of other teaching methods.
Can't keep up with all the tweets? Did you know you can create lists of different users on Twitter, so that you never miss an important tweet again. For example, if you're following someone who tweets about the latest diabetes evidence, you could add them to a list called, Diabetes Evidence. When you're next online, you can catch up on all those lists/subject areas you're interested in. It's a form of cataloguing your twitter feed and that's second nature to us library folk!
Each month we share what a day in the life of a clinical librarian looks like. This month we've had the great pleasure of interviewing Cathryn from Derby.
This online webinar and short course will engage you in an exploration of the social roles of collections and what has made them valuable to scholars, teachers, students, and the public at large.
It starts with a live webinar on the 19th April 2016 led by Karen Calhoun and Catriona Cannon, and will be followed by an online short course.
The article by Smith et al (2016) provides a valuable summary on the usefulness and interpretation of systematic reviews. This commentary adds a discussion of confirmation bias and a summary of some of the most useful influential systematic reviews and meta-analyses in mental health. Login using your SSSFT NHS OpenAthens for full text. SSOTP - request a copy of the article from the library - www.sssft.nhs.uk/library
Keeping up to date with the best evidence on treatment interventions is an essential part of clinical practice, but it can seem an overwhelming task for busy clinicians. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses provide a useful and convenient summary of knowledge and form an essential part of an evidence-based approach to clinical practice. However, these reviews vary in methodology and therefore in the quality of the recommendations they provide. Clinicians need to feel confident in their skills of critical appraisal, so that they can assess the relative merits of systematic reviews. In this article we discuss the strengths and limitations of different types of evidence synthesis to enable the reader to feel more confident in assessing the scientific information to use in clinical practice. Login using your SSSFT NHS OpenAthens for full text. SSOTP - request a copy of the article from the library - www.sssft.nhs.uk/library
As the first nurses and midwives start to pass through the revalidation process, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) continues to produce supporting materials for employers and registrants.
Over the next few weeks, look out for new resources designed to help you and your nursing and midwifery workforce go through the process.
Positive discussions have taken place between Telford & Wrekin Council and Madeley Town Council with a view to saving the town’s library & First Point Service.
Madeley Library was one of six earmarked for possible closure in Telford & Wrekin Council’s budget proposals – as the council strives to make £30m of cuts.
However, since then a drive to establish community partnerships to enable libraries to be delivered in a different way has resulted in announcements that Hadley, Dawley and Newport libraries will all continue.
No final decisions have been taken but one of the preferred options is for the Library to move into the Anstice Memorial Hall – which historically used to house Madeley Library.
Stirchley Library is set to soon be run by Stirchley & Brookside Parish Council.
Meanwhile talks are progressing well with community organisations led by the Brookside Big Local Partnership (BBLP) and supported by the parish council on the future of Brookside Central.
Stirchley Library was one of six earmarked for possible closure in Telford & Wrekin Council’s budget proposals – as the council strives to make £30m of cuts.
At the beginning of last year I was asked to design and teach a new course with one of the nursing instructors that would teach students how to write professionally and value inter-professional communication. As an academic librarian for nursing and health sciences, I do a lot of teaching as part of my day to day role, but I had never taught an eight week course. And, not since before library school had I taught anything that wasn’t directly related to libraries or where I was not in the role of librarian.
First to the rather disturbing 85% figure. This originates from a 2009 Lancet article that suggests much research is wasted due to asking the wrong questions, being badly designed, being not published, being poorly reported and more. The paper has been cited some 400 times in Google Scholar which indicates that it is an area of interest and concern.
So where where do librarians fit in? A recent paper (“Impactful librarians : identifying opportunities to increase your impact”) suggests that they can play a very important role in improving research quality in their organisations. At the same time, this will help raise the profile and value of clinical librarians, which is increasingly important in the current economic climate.
If you're into medical information, take a look at MedNexus, which claims to be the Google for Medicine. I can't pretend to any great medical knowledge, so please take that into account when reading this post. Their 'about us' page says: "Through our search engine, you can find the most relevant content from a variety of sources: medical journals, patient forums, government health sites, etc. We want to empower patients to educate themselves and cut through the noise and pseudo-science of typical online health information. No more WebMD scares, no more endless Googling"
I was asked to take a look at Check Them, which purports to be a people search engine. It's US only and covers all 50 states. However, it left quite a nasty taste in my mouth, since the whole engine was based on fear.
What a treasure trove of images! I finally got around to looking at the collection of digitised images from the New York Public Library, and it's a wonderful place to spend a while. Maps, posters, ancient texts, drawings and manuscripts - over 600,000 images, without use restrictions.
A website full of ideas about inpatient mental health care. Covers areas such as activities, mindfulness, involvement, culture/atmosphere, communications ...
Background
Systematic reviews have found limited evidence of effectiveness and impact of clinical librarians (CLs) due to the poor quality of reporting, scale and design of previous studies.
Objectives
To measure specific CL impact on organisational and patient outcomes using a robust approach that helps CLs develop research skills.
LB: Sorry I can't see this Journal on the spreadsheet, I assume access is via CILIP/HLG
Staff at Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust are asking people to donate items they can use to support patients.
Helping to keep patients at the Community Hospitals in Bishop’s Castle, Bridgnorth, Ludlow and Whitchurch occupied and stimulated plays an important part in support their mental and physical health needs. This is especially important for patients with dementia.
Academics from across Australia, Wales and England will join with University Centre Shrewsbury (UCS) tutors to launch their new book which provides an introduction to mental health at each stage of life.
The publishing of Mental Health Across the Lifespan will be celebrated at a free event on Tuesday 8 March 2016, held in partnership with Routledge Publishers at UCS’ learning and research base.
People are invited to Guildhall in Frankwell Quay to hear from seven of the authors who have contributed to the book, representing a diverse range of expertise.
Shropshire Libraries and company Bibliotheca are delighted to announce the launch of a new Cloud Library e-book lending system for library users.
The Cloud Library can be accessed online or through many popular devices, including iOS and Android, via the new easy-to-use app.
Below is the new homepage for Trip. I've blurred it, a bit, to retain some mystery. The homepage has changed considerably the results page less so. NHS have a one year free trial of TRIP!
I'm still hopeful to get a test version by the end of February and then - hopefully - a full release by mid-March.
Albrighton Library and Customer Service Point will be temporarily closed for six to eight weeks from Monday 29 February 2016 for refurbishment, as part of the transfer of the library to Albrighton Parish Council.
The transfer follows a public consultation led by Shropshire Council, in which proposals for the future of the library and Customer Service Point were put forward for residents to consider. A total of 95% of respondents opted for the transfer of the library to Albrighton Parish Council.
Broseley Library and Customer Service Point will be temporarily closed for around six weeks from Monday 29 February 2016 for refurbishment, as part of the transfer of the library to Broseley Town Council.
The transfer follows a public consultation led by Shropshire Council, in which proposals for the future of the library and Customer Service Point were put forward for residents to consider. A total of 87% of respondents opted for the transfer of the library to the town council.
Having recently gone through the process of revalidating my Chartership, I thought I’d share three tips, things that worked well for me or that I will be doing differently in future and that might just help you. So this is for all of you out there currently working on your portfolios! Good luck.
Volunteering opportunities come in all shapes and sizes at your library; we have new and varied volunteering roles available in libraries across Staffordshire. The possibilities are endless, but here are some of the things you could get involved with: