Only Connect!

My travels, and that darn pesky regular job have kept me from reporting for a while. My next scheduled trip isn’t until February, so I hope to catch up on both sides.

After I was elected president, the first chapter to invite me to attend their meeting was the South Central Chapter. I eagerly accepted, since I know many people in this chapter, and it gave me the opportunity to visit Albuquerque, where I’d never been before. As a bonus, the meeting was to be held in the Hotel Albuquerque at Old Town.

The theme was “Re-Imagining Our Libraries & Our Lives,” and the meeting was packed with activities. The opening speaker was Philip Kroth, MD, MS. He is the assistant director of the Health Sciences Informatics Program at the University of New Mexico, and he gave an enlightening perspective on medicine and research from the librarian’s side, contrasted with a perspective of librarianship from the researcher’s side.The Hospital Libraries Interest Section had a luncheon with featured speaker K. Ann Caudell, PhD, RN. Dr. Caudell is the project consultant for the Magnet Recognition Award that the University of New Mexico Hospitals is attempting to receive. She gave a wonderful overview of the time consuming process involved in getting this recognition.

In between the general sessions, the chapter had 24(!) contributed papers and 16 round tables. This group likes to communicate. I gave the MLA update, as part of a session featuring representatives from several other health library associations in the chapter’s states. A special treat for me was being invited to speak with about a dozen library school students who were able to attend the meeting. They were eager to hear about job opportunities, salary ranges, and participating in MLA.I’ve spent almost no time in the southwest before, so I was particularly pleased with the emphasis that the meeting planners put on cultural aspects. General sessions began with blessings from Native Americans, and one session featured a Native American flutist. The opening social event was held at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, and the closing event was at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. I even had a few hours to visit Old Town. You can check out my photos from the SCC Chapter meeting on Flickr.

An extra special bonus to this trip was a three day visit afterwards to Santa Fe, via the Turquoise Trail. Highlights there were the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the many, many art galleries, and the most amazing blue sky I’ve ever seen. Yep, I got photos.

Next chapter: Southern.

Just two days after my laryngitis in Omaha, and it’s already time for the New York/New Jersey chapter meeting. Fortunately for me this is one of my chapter’s single day meetings, so I won’t have to talk much–I can mostly nod, smile, and point. While this chapter includes all of New Jersey, the New York part consists of counties south of Albany, with membership concentrated in metropolitan New York city. If you’ve ever been to New York city, you know that hotels are exceedingly expensive. To compensate, my chapter usually alternates single day meetings in or close to the city with multiple day meetings outside the city. Past outside-the-city meetings (sometimes jointly held with other chapters) have been in New Haven, Saratoga Springs, Philadelphia, Lake Placid, and Hartford.

This year the meeting is at Montclair State University in Montclair, NJ. It’s about 14 miles from New York city, and McGraw-Hill graciously sponsored a bus to get us urbanites into the suburbs. It’s going to be a rush hour commute, so that means a very early departure. 7:30 AM finds about 50 medical librarians standing on 42nd Street eager to get on the bus and out of the cold. About an hour later (this is rush hour), we’re on the gorgeous MSU campus.

The theme was “Librarians Lead the Way to Long Life & Good Health.” Our keynote speaker was Dr. Rosanne Leipzig from Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She spoke eloquently of the physiological and psychological aspects of aging, and how few adequately trained geriatricians are currently available. She highlighted a very useful tool, the Portal of Geriatric Online Education, a “one-stop shop for geriatric educational products.” If you work with a geriatric program, you need to bookmark this site.

After a break, Kathel Dunn gave the update from the NN/LM Middle Atlantic Region, and I was able, with the help of a lavalier mike, to give the MLA update. Even though the meeting was just a single day, it included vendors, a poster session, a business meeting, and a panel discussion on how some librarians are reaching out to their baby boomer patrons. A quick and efficient meeting, designed for busy city people.

I am temporarily back in my office for a few days, a respite from the big Fall MLA Chapter Tour. I’ve been to four Chapter meetings, with two more to go. I had really been looking forward to attending the joint Midcontinental/Midwest meeting in Omaha. Many of you know I worked at McGoogan Library at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in the 80s, so this was going to be a homecoming of sorts. The opening reception at the newly renovated McGoogan Library was fantastic. Nancy Woelfl and her staff did a great hosting job. Originally opened in 1970, the Library suffered from the architectural deficits of that period, but the renovations are marvelous, and if you have a chance, be sure to visit.

Unfortunately, as the reception on Saturday evening progressed, I noticed my throat was getting extremely scratchy and tight. By Sunday afternoon, my voice was completely gone, and I was scheduled to give the MLA update early Monday morning. Rather than attempting a Marcel Marceau version of the update, I was able to convince fellow Board members T. Scott Plutchak, Linda Walton, and Margaret Bandy to each give a third of the update, while I silently changed the slides. Both presenters and audience had fun with a somewhat improvised update, turning it into a memorable occasion. Special thanks to my understudies.

I hesitate to report much on the meeting content, since it has been well covered elsewhere, but I will just point out how blown away the audience was by Fred Lee’s presentation. Check out his book “If Disney ran your hospital: 9 1/2 things you would do differently.” I highly recommend everyone look at Conference Call 2007, where the meeting is still being covered by Claire Leibfarth and her blog staff. This is an excellent example of how to build and maintain interest in a meeting. Lynne Fox has also posted an excellent report of the meeting, along with some very useful links. MCMLA’s website has most of the presentations, papers, and posters available, a terrific way to enhance the meeting for attendees and to let non-attendees share in the knowledge exchange. I have posted some of my photos, as have some other people. If you do a search on Flickr for “mcmla2007,” you will find 188 photos as of this morning. Overall, I would have to say this has been the best covered chapter meeting as far as Web 2.0 tools go. It is very heartening to see the membership take up these tools in order to better connect with each other. This was a meeting that other chapters, and even MLA, could take a lesson from.

My fall marathon of chapter meetings started off with the Pacific Northwest Chapter’s 47th meeting. Gathering in Billings, MT for the first time, the meeting had the theme of “Boot Up under the Big Sky.” Some photos I took at the meeting are available on Flickr.

The meeting planners put together a great program. Some highlights for me included keynote speaker Greg Notess, a reference librarian at Montana State University. He spoke on Web 2.0 and medical librarians. As Greg explained to a nodding (that’s agreeing, not sleepy) audience, librarianship is becoming more complicated as the electronic and physical worlds merge in our collections. As difficult as it is for us, it can be very confusing for our users. Greg gave several hints and a brief introduction to some Web 2.0 tools that can be useful for instruction. There were a few I hadn’t heard of before, such as Scribd, where documents can be shared online. I was glad to hear him mention Connotea, a free scientific social bookmarking tool that could be very useful for our researchers, clinicians, and scientists. Greg’s PowerPoint presentation is available online at authorSTREAM, one of many presentation-sharing tools. Check out these Web 2.0 tools, if your IT department lets you…

Another highlight was Dr. Michael Spence, an infectious disease specialist, who spoke on clostridium difficile and methicillin-resistant Staph aureus, a superbug now widespread in hospitals. Both bugs have become more dangerous because of the indiscriminate use of antibiotics. I think all the members of the audience tripled their handwashing after his presentation.

The trip wasn’t all meeting, as Carolyn and I took a few hours to visit the Yellowstone Art Museum, just a few block from the hotel. They happened to have a great retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein’s prints, which knocked us out. We’re lucky enough to own a Lichtenstein print (Haystack #6), so this was a special treat.

I was particularly impressed by the number of attendees who made it to Billings. The Pacific Northwest covers a huge area, and seven people from Alaska made it there. Anne Girling from Anchorage made it after a six day drive, over 2000 miles. That’s dedication, and it’s why this association is so special. Many thanks to everyone who made me feel very welcome.

Mark Rabnett of “Shelved in the W’s” has a recent post that points out the potential danger of physicians doing “quick and dirty” Internet searches upon which to base clinical decisions. As Mark points out, many physicians have received proper training (many times from a librarian), and can use the Internet to answer clinical questions intelligently. But the publication of a “how-I-do-clinical-research-using-a-complete-sentence-I-typed-into-Yahoo” article in a peer-reviewed journal is very discouraging, and points out the importance of librarians’ training efforts. The Internet is a very powerful sword, but it cuts both ways. Does anyone have any horror stories they can share? (Please change the names to protect the guilty.)

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The Krafty Librarian had a posting the other day pleading for hospital IT departments not to block YouTube. It seems that a physician wanted a simple video of a beating heart, but the blockade of YouTube prevented any attempt to find one.

This appears to be a common fact of life for hospital librarians. The Social Networking Task Force did a survey this summer of MLA members’ use of and attitude towards Web 2.0 technologies. They got a good response of 495. An important part of the survey was to find out about certain web sites or applications being blocked at work. Here are the results of that part of the survey:

The data haven’t been broken down yet by type of library, but I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of the respondents indicating some form of network blockage work at a hospital. Hospital IT people have different concerns from academic IT people, which have led to their restrictions. If MLA wants to better connect our members using these new technologies, we need to convince IT people that not all Web 2.0 sites or applications are a frivolous waste of bandwidth or a security risk. In fact, this problem even goes beyond MLA activity, in that useful medical information is sometimes blocked, as the Krafty Librarian pointed out.

It’s sometimes difficult to talk with IT people. Like librarians, they have their own culture, values, and lingo that many of us don’t completely understand. But most IT people do understand each other. Which leads me to an idea. While many hospital librarians reported some form of blockage, there are probably some hospital librarians with little or no blockage. Can we get the enlightened IT people at these hospitals to explain to other IT people why they have not blocked these sites or applications? If you are a hospital librarian with little or no internet blockage problems, talk with your IT people. See if they might be willing to write a few paragraphs explaining their choices, and how the hospital is still standing nonetheless. We can put these rationales up on the Social Networking Task Force blog, where MLA members can download them and use them as potential talking points with their IT people. We might be able to change some minds. So who has unblocked internet access in their hospital? Speak up.

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I’m back from IFLA, Thanda, Victoria Falls, and the MLA Board of Directors meeting. I’m pretty exhausted, and unfortunately the work in my main job at Weill Cornell still piles up while I am gone, so I am digging my way back into my office. I’m actually here at work for two weeks before I go back to Chicago for a site visit of the 2008 Annual Meeting, then I go off for several chapter meetings. Until I can gather my thoughts about my travels, please enjoy some photographs.

In just a few hours Carolyn and I will leave to attend the IFLA Annual Conference in Durban, South Africa. From JFK, we have an overnight flight to Zurch, landing in the morning. We get to spend all day in Zurich (there’s an easy train to catch downtown), then we have another overnight flight to Johannesburg. At the conference, I’m delivering a paper on Open Access. After the conference, we’re going to a private game reserve called Thanda for three days. Then a quick visit to Victoria Falls at a lodge called The River Club. Interesting pictures reveal that the lodges have only three walls, and is open to river views. Should be interesting. I hope to have some pictures to share when I return. Except for the days in Durban, I will be off the grid for the next two weeks, arriving back in New York on September 29.

In a comment by Lynne Fox to my first blog posting, she said:
blogs are all the pressure of writing a really great Christmas newsletter 365 days a year.
While I wouldn’t even contemplate a daily post, I already understand the pressure. Once created, a blog must be fed regularly, or it dies. It is so easy to create a blog that millions have done so, only to abandon them quite soon thereafter. But what am I to feed this blog? (Which I have nicknamed Audrey II.) Rachel suggested discussing the “big issues” facing medical librarianship, and also using the blog to create more transparency for MLA activities and priorities. So let me talk a bit about my presidential priorities, and how they fit in with the big issues.

Every year, the MLA president-elect creates a set of priorities that he or she would like to accomplish during their presidential year. These priorities are submitted to the MLA Board of Directors, where they are discussed, modified, and eventually approved. The approved priorities are used to help set the annual budget for MLA. They don’t represent everything that MLA will work on during the year—they are usually a combination of an emphasis on some ongoing projects and the creation of a few new projects. My priorities emphasize creating more connections between our members. By using Web 2.0 technology, my hope is that our members can not only share and learn more easily than they do now, but various MLA activities can become more transparent to our members.

All of us are facing similar problems in our libraries (you don’t need me to name them). But instead of us uniting together against these problems, most of the time we end up in our individual library trenches, fighting the problems by ourselves—some effectively, others not so much. Once a year, a few of us are ambitious enough to write a paper or create a poster, sharing research or strategies that helped in one library trench. Web 2.0 technology lowers dramatically that effort bar of doing a paper or poster. Librarians either fearful of presenting a paper, or unable to attend the annual meeting, can share their techniques or their successes from the comfort of their computer—no HTML skills necessary. Bottom-up, grass root responses to our problems are far more likely to help in our battles than the slow, cautious approach by the hierarchy of an association.

What an association can do is provide the tools to enable the connecting of our members. The newly appointed Social Networking Task Force (SNTF) is already laying the groundwork for bringing Web 2.0 technology to the association. One of the first things they are doing is a survey, partially to discover what barriers many of our members face in even accessing these tools. Please complete the survey if you haven’t already. The deadline is August 10.

These technologies will be used not only to connect our individual members to each other, but also to conduct association business. The SNTF is creating a public blog so members can comment on their activities, and give immediate feedback. The SNTF is determined not to work in a back room, then present tools fait accompli. They want to work with the members to give them the tools they need, not what the Task Force thinks they need. Other units of the association will also start to use these tools. T. Scott has already blogged quite eloquently on both the importance of association transparency, and the difficulties involved in becoming more transparent. I will not attempt to elaborate on this, but will send you to his post instead.

I want to mention a bonus advantage of our association bringing Web 2.0 tools to our members. I attended the American Library Association’s annual meeting last month. One of the sessions I attended was called “Ignite Your Library’s Public Relations and Outreach Using Hot Technologies.” The speakers were Helen Blowers (LibraryBytes), Steven Bell (The Kept-Up Academic Librarian), and Michael Stephens (Tame the Web). After presentations by the facilitators, the audience, in small groups, discussed what their libraries were doing with Web 2.0 tools to reach out to their users. There was an amazing mix of podcasts, instant messaging, YouTube videos, Flickr photostreams, blogs, and wikis. Most of the attendees were public and academic librarians—they generally have their own IT departments, and a fairly large staff for support. In contrast, many of our members are in small libraries, with little to no support. My hope is that after gaining confidence in using Web 2.0 tools in association business, our members can start using these tools in their own libraries, and then share their experiences with us. Both Helen’s and Michael’s presentations are available. Take a look, get inspired, and stay tuned.

I’ve been thinking for several days about what momentous statement I should make in this first posting. I’ve decided that I really can’t make one. Actually, the fact that this is the first blog by a president of MLA is probably its own statement.

That’s not to say that past presidents haven’t communicated with our members. Since 2001, MLA presidents have had web pages on MLANET: Carol Jenkins, Linda Watson, Pat Thibodeau, Joanne Marshall, M.J. Tooey, and Jean Shipman all had pages. These pages usually included their inaugural address, their priorities, and updates from their travels.

Before web pages, MLA presidents had a “President’s Page” in the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. This was usually a one or two page editorial or commentary on the Association or the profession. This practice stopped in 1993. However, we continue to have the “President’s Page” in the July issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association, where the new president is introduced to the membership by a colleague. I was lucky enough to have my friend and mentor Bob Braude write my bio.

So I have this new toy. What do I do with it? Like my predecessors, I will probably write about my travels and adventures. I’ll also be playing around with WordPress plugins for photos and other cool things. But I hope that this form of communication can be more than reportage. Can we actually develop some kind of dialog? This is as new to me as it is to you. I want to hear from the MLA membership. What do you want in a blog by the MLA president?

Remember: play nice, and no hitting.