"That he who runs may read," read the epigraph to a legal reference work, whose monthly updates it was my duty, as a humble Senior Library Assistant in Hendon Reference Library, to interfile. It's a misquotation of Habbakuk Chapter II v 2, which reads in the Authorised Version in full as "And the Lord answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it". Be that as it may, the legal publishers intention was clear: they wanted to save the busy lawyer time, as we do with Ranganathan's Fourth Law: save the time of the reader.
I'm also aware that the way this blog is laid out, unchanged since 2004, does not make it easy to read large passages of text. So here are the six things I thought worthy of reporting back to my colleagues after ICML and EAHIL 2017
- What opportunities exist for us to get involved in teaching critical appraisal to patients?
- Evaluating search services: we presented on this, so did Sandra McKeown of Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario: what actions should we now take?
- Text mining tools for searchers: I, at least, really need to understand these, and srart using them systematically
- Clinical librarian services: so far we've developed ours in an ad-hoc way. I was interested in Victoria Treadway's approach, where they conducted a knowledge needs survey, and built the service on that
- CADTH have provided some excellent resources for searchers
- There's lots of hard thinking to be done about librarian's competencies