ICML and EAHIL 2017: Friday

The final day came after an exuberant ceilidh the night before, and I found myself in the penultimate papers session on education and learning. First was Richard German of Otago University, New Zealand, on Researching Smarter. an online modular course, designed in-house by the library. Designed to develop research skills, it contained four core topics used across all programmes. It was successful and expanded beyond Medicine to the whole Health Sciences Division Their feedback elicited contradictory views: on videos for example, but they trimmed them from 3-4 minutes to 1-2. Note that online learning didn't reduce workload: the development and testing were very labour intensive.

Sarah Clarke, formerly of the Royal Free, though now working in a Norwegian nursing library, spoke on the Royal Free competency framework. This was timely, with the release of the MLA's competencies earlier this year, and Britain’s  PKSB for Health. There is little health content in the British library school curriculum. In 2009 she developed the first RFH competency model, covering three domains, searching, teaching and evidence-based medicine. In each, the librarian moves from novice to master. After trialling the framework, Sarah found it needed more online learning, and to be mapped to the CILIP PKSB for Health and MLA competencies. The RFH framework is more detailed than PKSB/MLA. Can it work outside university? She used a Delphi technique survey to validate it and found that it would work with the MLA competencies, though not with the PKSB for Health. (I wonder why not). I asked a question about its availability at the end, and Betsy Anagnostelis said that the EAHIL's new TrEDMIL group (Training, Education and Development for Medical and Health Information Specialists and Librarians - a group interested in a European medical librarianship qualification) will be taking the framework forwards and publishing it.

Then John Castle, a medical student, spoke on the James Lind Alliance’s Critical and Appraisal Resource Library (CARL) which aims to allow public to assess treatment claims. There are few freely available resources of quality that teach critical appraisal so CARL will find such resources, evaluate them, and promote their use. John mentioned previous work: Krause LK, Schwartz L, Woloshin S, Oxman A (2011). Interactive tools to teach the public to be critical consumers of information about health care: What's out there? Poster presentation at Cochrane Colloquium and the ECRAN project among them. CARL takes their key concepts from Testing Treatments. Covering 34 concepts in 3 groups: claims, comparisons, choices, CARL will populated with resources from systematic reviews, a snowball web search and systematic searches of MEDLINE and ERIC, categorised by format and user group. Of 500 resources, only 11 pass rigorous evaluation, e.g. Know your chances by Woloshin. Since our library's copy of this has vanished, I was delighted to find it's available as a free e-book. John's fellow speaker, a Norwegian librarian whose name I didn't catch, took us through their search methods for evaluations for resources.

Finally, Gethin White of @DrSteevensLib, urged us not to get fat on full text content. We collect lots of statistics about library resources. Library surveys, he said, correctly in my view, are too often a tool to find the answers you want to hear. They invited 100 stakeholders to 30-45 min interviews and achieved 83% participation! The interview format was hard to keep bias-free. Responses were generally favourable, but highlighted marketing; 60% had never attended library training. ‘Soft’ audiences are easily lost. They then developed self-published lib guides, more focused marketing, and made themselves more accepting of criticism. Gethin stresses it's not all about content, but communication

The EAHIL Assembly found me in a minority of one on the question of opting in or opting out of mailings from suppliers.

In the final parallel session on education and learning Linda Murphy presented a paper already published in the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine:

;Hansoti, Bhakti, Mark I. Langdorf, and Linda S. Murphy. “Discriminating Between Legitimate and Predatory Open Access Journals: Report from the International Federation for Emergency Medicine Research Committee.” Western Journal of Emergency Medicine 17.5 (2016): 497–507.

Linda explained models of subscription and open access publishing.In their paper she and her fellow authors had misidentified a title as predatory; its editor complained. Her search strategy consisted of variants on predatory or hijacked with the words journals or publishing.  Librarians, she said, were not contributing to the literature on predatory journals. Among the signs of a predatory publisher are orthographical and grammatical errors, poor websites, and parasitic titles that mimic reputable ones. Editorial Board members are frequently added without their consent. They may claim legitimate impact factors, or use fake impact factors. Adding insult to injury, they may also ask for payment for the removal of articles. Their officers may claim to be in European or North American city, but in reality are in India or China . She and her fellow authors Identified 150 emergency medicine journals using variety of tools. 98 were hybrid OA, 52 Gold OA, 25 legitimate, 21 predatory, 6 probably legitimate. The US Federal Trade Commission is now suing OMICS and two of their associated publishers. She offered a checklist for identifying predatory websites. Reading her paper, it seems that Jeffrey Beall played a unspecified part; Beall’s methods have been questioned, and in some circles he has been accused of using predatory publishing as a stick with which to beat the open access movement. Certainly his argument that, 'the real goal of the open access movement is to kill off the for-profit publishers and make scholarly publishing a cooperative and socialistic enterprise’ seems a little far fetched. His list no longer exists. 

The last three speakers in this session presented a paper on CPD among health librarians in Manila, an online course at Turku university in Finland, and supporting clinical public health, a paper mostly about curriculum development for an American university. They teach critical appraisal skills based on the JAMA users guides to the medical literature. Student choose an area, such as AIDS-free generation, childhood asthma, obesity, opioid epidemic and have to create a public health action plan, and a wellness and resilience action plan

At the closing ceremony there were very well deserved thanks and flowers to the local organising committee. We were invited to bid to host #ICML2021, the next  International Congress on Medical Librarianship.  The successful bid will be announced by November 2017, and launched at #EAHIL2018 in Cardiff, who invited us to attend with a well-made video including, inter alia, Nye Bevan, sheep and a male voice choir.