hslg agm & Workshop

The Annual General Meeting of the Health Sciences Libraries Group was held on Thursday 21st September at the Bridge House Hotel, Tullamore, Co. Offaly.

In true librarian spirit, members participated in a workshop on the subject of Information Literacy despite the absence of the key speaker, who was ill on the day. Following an interesting workshop and discussion, Tony Linnane of HSE Regional Librarians Group held a presentation explaining and demonstrating the HSE library website www.hselibrary.ie

After a break for lunch, the AGM commenced. If you were unable to attend the AGM you can read the HSLG Annual Report The work of the committee and the various working groups over the previous year was presented to the members.

Motions: Catherine Kennedy (HSE West) introduced the following motion, which was voted on and passed unanimously by the members:

“Building on the achievement of the HSE Libraries Online website, the desirability of health care librarians joining forces across all sectors so that we can speak with one voice for the sake of developing a truly inclusive national electronic library for health”

Proposed: Catherine Kennedy (HSE West)
Seconded: Tony Linnane (HSE West)

Election of Committee: 4 new members were elected to the committee. Committee membera are elected for a term of 2 years.

Paul Murphy, Deputy Librarian, RCSI
David O'Regan, Information Officer, Mental Health Commission
Joanne Callinan, Librarian, St Vincents, Fairview
Micheal Doheny, Librarian, Athlone Institute of Technology

There is a full list of HSLG Committee members here

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a day in the life of...

1. Who are you?
Siobhán McCarthy

2. Where are you from?
Boyle, Co. Roscommon

3. Why did you become a librarian?
Met some nice people in my formative training days in NUI Maynooth – I enjoyed working there.

4. Where do you work?
Irish Clearing House on Health Outcomes, based in Limerick city http://www.ich.ie/

5. Who do you cater for?
Healthcare professionals and consumers

6. How do you cater for them?
Information service and website on health outcomes information in Ireland and elsewhere

7. Who works with you?
I generally work solo, but have a good network of colleagues in related and unrelated fields.

8. What is the first thing you usually do in the day?
Put on a pot of strong black coffee.

9. What type of task occupies most of your working day?
Searching for interesting articles for the website, open source and peer reviewed information

10. What is the most unusual request you have had?
Someone looking for their long lost relatives in Ireland – I suppose if someone sees “Clearing House”…well, who’d blame them for trying

11. What do you feel you are good at?
Hunting down information on tricky topics

12. What do you feel you are bad at?
Making really good coffee

13. What do you enjoy?
Running and planning holidays

14. What do you hate?
Waiting on pedestrian lights to go green

15. What are your ambitions /career goals?
To continue to work in health information – where ever it takes me

16. Do you have any unfulfilled personal ambitions/ goals?
To run a marathon (goal for this year)

17. If you had to choose a career other than librarianship what would you choose
Recreational planner for the Google company!

18. What are your plans for your library?
Expanded information service and website

19. How would you like to see health librarianship develop?
I’d like to see it continue to develop in line with changes in the health services and also take full advantage of ICT advances.

20. What is the last thing you usually do each day?
Wash the coffee pot and my large mocha mug

HSLG CPD

2006 was a busy year for the CPD Working Group with 7 courses run in total. This included:

• Writing for the web
• Knowledge Management
• The Cochrane Library for Health Science Libraries
• RSS & Blogs
• Marketing Gives Your Library Wings
• Copyright for Health Science Libraries
• Online Publishing and eZines
  

The CPD working group in conjunction with the Academic & Special Libraries Section of the LAI conducted a joint survey to determine training needs for the coming 2 years. The winners of the prizes will be announced during the week commencing 18th December. If you have not yet completed the survey please visit the http://www.hslg.ie/career website and do so now!

Upcoming training for 2007 includes courses on supporting systematic reviews and managing electronic resources. Please check the website for more details in January 07.

Other upcoming training in January 2007:

CILIP Workshop: Venturing out of the library: managing outreach in health service libraries, 24 & 25 January 2007, London

Shopping for your Library: Procurement and Acquisitions - A one day seminar hosted by the Acquisitions Group of Ireland in the Mercer Hotel, Mercer Street, Dublin 2 on 16th January 2007.
Enquiries contact: Aidín O'Sullivan Library_staff@itb.ie

Aoife Lawton, CPD Working Group Leader

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New Healthcare Library in the HSE-South

The Irish Healthcare Library community received a new addition in December with the launch of a new HSE-South 24-hour library facility in Mallow General Hospital. The new facility was launched on Tuesday the 7th of December by Mr John O’Brien, Director of the National Hospital’s Office.

Speaking at the official opening, Mr O’Brien spoke of the importance of healthcare libraries in the modern healthcare environment, highlighting the importance of accurate, reliable and timely information in patient care and said that the days of healthcare libraries being an “optional extra” are over. Director of Nursing, Ms Mary Owens, emphasized the links between quality information and quality patient care and stressed that it is the patient who ultimately benefits.

The new library consists of a newly re-furbished main library and a state of the art computer/study room, equipped with 8 flat-screen computers with internet access, photo-copying and scanning facilities. The main library is staffed on a nine-to five basis with access to the 24-hour computer and study room being monitored by swipe-card and CCTV camera. HSE South Librarian, Jane Farrelly, said of the new facility, “Hospitals are open 24-hours a day, seven days a week. By aligning hospital and library opening hours, we are acknowledging the hospital as an alternative working environment and are attempting to meet the information needs of staff working in that environment”.

Mallow General Hospital Library is the first hospital in the region to provide 24-hour access to the library facility with the libraries in Kerry General Hospital and Bantry General Hospital to follow suit shortly.

Jane Farrely, International Liaison Officer

John O'Brien of the National Hospital's Office, opening the library facility

Aoife Lawton (HSE) and Louise Farragher (HRB) at the Eahil Conference in Cluj, September 2006

Poster Presentations from EAHIL
2006 Conference

international horizons

2006 was a busy year on the international front and 2007 looks like being no different. HSLG appointed me (Jane Farrelly) as International Liaison Officer in December 2005 and I spent much of 2006 scanning the web, looking for events that might be of interest to our members. Here’s a sneak preview of some of the events coming up around the world in 2007:

2007 Calendar of Events

4th International Conference on Evidence Based Library and Information Practice
The 4th International Conference on Evidence Based Library and Information Practice is to take place at the University of North Carolina. Submissions for both papers and poster presentations have been extended, until January 8th and February 15th respectively. Further information available from:
http://www.eblip4.unc.edu/call.html

MLA 2007
The 2007 MLA conference is to be held in Philadelphia from May 18-23rd 2007 under the theme “Information Revolution: Change is in the Air”. MLA 2007 promises to help you overcome the challenges posed by revolutions in technologies, user populations, medical advancements and maximize the opportunities presented by these revolutions. Check out www.mlanet.org for further details.

CHLA 2007 The Canadian Health Libraries Association Annual Conference “Capitalizing on Health Partnerships” will be held from May 28th- June 1st 2007 in Ottawa. Major themes to be explored include international librarianship, open access, digital initiatives and knowledge transfer. Have a look at the website of the Canadian Health Libraries (http://www.chla-absc.ca) for further information.

UK Clinical Librarian Conference 2007
The third Clinical Librarian Conference is being held St William's College York, on the 11th and 12th of June, 2007.

CILIP Umbrella 2007
This bi-annual flagship event of the UK professional library association is to take place 28-30 June 2007 in the University of Hertfordshire. The conference theme is ‘Making a Difference in a Changing World”.

European Association for Health and Information Libraries (EAHIL)

The 2007 EAHIL workshop will be held from September 12th to 15th next in Krakow Poland. This workshop should be of particular interest to our members, as the next EAHIL workshop, will be held in Dublin in 2009. The theme of the conference is “Pathways to New Roles: The Education, Training and Continuing Development of the Health Library & Information Workforce” and the good news is that you still have time to submit an abstract for inclusion in this workshop. The Conference Committee are looking for
papers that provide practical "how to" advice. Presentations may relate to the various roles that information professionals play these days, in particular:

• Teaching information literacy
• Supporting the practice of physicians, nurses, managers, policy makers
• needs assessment, health/medical literacy, interpersonal and communication skills, team working, customer handling, knowledge management, dealing with patient information, outreach services
• Managing health libraries
• Providing specialist IT or editorial support
• Conducting research or supporting the research of other members of a research team
• Distinguishing characteristics of health librarian, as opposed to generic librarian, training.

The closing date for receipt of abstracts is January 30th 2007. For further information on how to submit an abstract, go to the EAHIL website www.eahil.net

Jane Farrely, International Liaison Officer

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resources - Alerting services

Use the following sites to create alerts to updates in chosen subjects, previously saved searches or web-pages. And best of all, they’re all free!!!!

Watch That Page

Watch That Page is a free service that enables you to automatically collect new information from sites relevant to you on the Internet. You select which pages to monitor, and WatchThatPage will find which pages have changed, and collect all the new content for you. The new information is presented to you in an email and/or a personal web page. You can specify when the changes will be collected, so they are fresh when you want to read them.

You could put a “watch that page alert” on the publications page of the Department of Health and Children’s website and you will be alerted when a new publication is added there.

PubCrawler is a free "alerting" service that scans daily updates to the NCBI Medline (PubMed) and GenBank databases and was developed by Karsten Hokamp and Ken Wolfe in the Department of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

Pubcrawler searches the NCBI PubMed (Medline) and Entrez (GenBank) databases daily using search parameters (keywords, author names, etc.) specified by the user. There is no limit on the number of searches that can be carried out and your results can be delivered daily, weekly, monthly etc.

Use My NCBI on Pubmed Central to customize NCBI Web services. To use it, you must first register, and your browser must accept cookies. You’ll find it on the top right corner of PubMed
You can use My NCBI to:
• Save searches
• Set up e-mail alerts for new content
• Display links to Web resources (LinkOut)
• Choose filters that group search results
Like all NCBI resources, My NCBI is free. For more information, read My NCBI Help.

Google Alerts
Google alerts provides emails automatically which are sent to you when there are new Google results for the search terms which you have previously set up.

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include: monitoring a developing news story, keeping up with a particular subject or keeping current on the activities of a competitor.

Niamh O'Sullivan Librarian IBTS

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editorial & contact details

HINT is the newsletter of the Irish Health Sciences Libraries Group of the Library Association of Ireland.

It is compiled & produced by the HINT Editorial Team.

Contact details: Send submissions to ContactHSLG@gmail.com

All material in this newsletter is copyright ©, 2006. This newsletter may be quoted or forwarded if the quoted or forwarded passage is attributed to the newsletter.

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