Tom Roper's Weblog

They order these things better: a review of #hlg2012

@Librarianpocket posted on twitter asking people to give their take home messages from the 2012 Health Libraries Group conference in Glasgow. I didn’t respond at the time, thinking the task too hard. I suppose, paraphrasing Sterne,  I might say, ‘they order these matters better in Scotland’, for I and other delegates from the wrong side of Hadrian’s Wall, the subject of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time on the morning of the first day, were impressed by the progress our Scottish colleagues have made, and spent some time wondering what the secret might be. My other take home message, for which see my running blog, is mind how you go when running on unfamiliar paths. 

The days when I would write a narrative post on every paper in chronological order of delivery are long gone. These days I and others tweet our conference notes, so for this post I shall pick out some of the themes and highlights. For the whole picture there’s:

• a visualisation of the tweets I used Martin Hawksey's TAGSExplorer
• the archive of tweets as a Google spreadsheet
• presentations on Slideshare:  Maria Grant’s slides for her workshop Overcoming Challenges when Writing for Publication; the only other presentation on Slideshare that I could find is mine and Erica Rae's, which you will find embedded below. Of course Slideshare is very much last century's thing, and all the fashionable young things are using Prezi, so….
• there are no presentations tagged with #hlg2012 in Prezi, but I did find Claire Beecroft’s at http://prezi.com/14u5rgltskcc/bite-size-learn-something-new-in-20-minutes/, Tracey McKee’s at http://prezi.com/xvbzepzfvoyi/putting-the-net-in-networking-using-web-technologies-to-engage-with-members/  and Neil Ford’s at http://prezi.com/loqete8jqhle/the-using-information-community-and-beyond-exploring-the-potential-of-online-communities-in-delivering-information-literacy/. There may be more but they’re not discoverable. 
• Presentations are also going up online at http://www.cilip.org.uk/get-involved/special-interest-groups/health/events/conferences/Pages/hlg-conference-presentations-and-posters.aspx, slowly.

We returned, naturally, at several places in the programme to the work Scottish library and knowledge specialists are doing. In plenaries we heard from Gerry McLaughlin, Chief Executive of NHS Health Scotland. He mentioned what, for me, seems the reason they’ve made progress, that they have a single unified system , in contrast to English fragmentation (which will not get any better as 212 CCGs take over). His introduction to the way they have tried to overcome the barriers to getting knowledge into practice was amplified by Ann Wales in the afternoon. See the papers at Knowledge into Action: http://www.knowledge.scot.nhs.uk/together/knowledge-into-action.aspx. The following morning Peter Reid developed similar themes as he discussed the new skills required of the profession. The final plenary, given by Duncan Service, substituting for Sara Twaddle, was on SIGN's guidelines development work. 

I've already posted on the Bishop-Le Fanu lecture, on the topical matter of doping in sport. As for the parallel sessions, a strong theme was how we offer more sophisticated services, particularly in synthesising information, as I learnt from Tracey McKee in her paper on supporting morbidity and mortality reviews, and from Suzanne Wilson and Jan Manson who described the CLEAR Clinical Enquiry and Response service .  I chaired a session in which Lyn Allan and Paul Herbert told us how they had brought order and usability to trust intranets and databases of policies, while Paul Stevenson presented results of a survey of job advertisements on jobs.nhs.uk, analysing their requirements for skills in applying the evidence. 

The vexed topic of current awareness services, discussed at the TFPL Health SIG the previous month,  had an airing, when Ruth Muscat presented on services they have developed; they started with a pilot for physics at http://ceesupdatesphysiotherapy.blogspot.co.uk, and are now developing one for nurses at http://ceesupdatesnursing.blogspot.co.uk, using Yahoo Pipes (controversially perhaps, it seems to be de rigueur to use Netvibes for such things down our way). In the same session, Claire Beecroft's talk on the 20-20 sessions developed at ScHARR caught my and many other delegates' imagination: based on the short cricket games designed to demystify the game (a travesty if you ask me, but let that pass), they were cake-fuelled regular twenty minute sessions for researchers on new social media tools or anything innovative to support research and teaching.

Papers by Enid Forsyth of the RCN and Sue Langley of East Anglia's Children's Hospices gave useful ideas for outreach roles like mine, though I fear I shall not be travelling as Enid does, by helicopter or ferry.

I knew and used Health Management Online before the conference, but it was impressive to hear Gill Earl and Alison Bogle tell us about it and outline some the ways in which it is developing while, in the same session, Louise Goswami and Andrew Lambe presented a knowledge management online learning resource that should be better known.

All I shall say about the paper that Erica Rae and I gave is that no one fell asleep and some people were even kind enough to ask questions at the end. If you want to see the slides, they're embedded below.

 

 By the way, shouldn’t we start to number our conferences, just as they used to the congresses of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union? Conversations with old hands get very confusing, especially when you mention places like Cardiff that we've visited at least twice. There have been many over the years, both as HLG and its predecessor, the Medical Health and Welfare Group of the old Library Association. One day, perhaps, I will list them all and write about those I attended; they may give an interesting view of how much our professional concerns have changed and how much they have stayed the same. I first attended one at Canterbury in 1992. In those days we played cricket, delegates versus exhibitors and, to my and everyone else's surprise, I took some wickets. My abiding memory of that conference is of meeting Mike Roddham, now head of the service I have the honour to be part of, in Canterbury Oddbins as he was collecting the organising committee's impressive drinks order.

Doping in sport: the evidence for performance enhancement at the Olympics

Will the London Olympics be the cleanest yet? The audience at the Bishop-Lefanu lecture for 2012 were sceptical, 59% disagreeing with the proposition.

The lecture, given every two years, commemorates W J Bishop, librarian at the Wellcome, founder of the Medical Section of the Library Association, the ancestor of HLG, and William LeFanu, Librarian of the Royal College of Surgeons in England (and husband of the composer Elizabeth Maconchy). This year’s lecturer, in Olympic year, was Dr Yannis Pitsiladis, Reader at Glasgow University’s Institute of Cardiovascular and Medical Sciences and member of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s Prohibited List Expert Group.

I looked forward to his lecture as, apart from his work on performance enhancement, he has worked with studied the performance of East African athletes, studying the physiological factors behind their extraordinary performances, and is also the author of this:

Pitsiladis Y, Beis L.
To drink or not to drink to drink recommendations: the evidence
BMJ. 2012 Jul 18;345:e4868.

 We were handed clickers as we entered the hall, as Dr Pitsiladis promised us an interactive lecture. We were to be members of the committee that oversees the prohibited list. There are three criteria and, to be banned, a substance must meet at least two.

First of all it must have the potential to enhance performance to a significant extent, though races can hang on tiny differences in performance. The placebo effect may also come into play. The Wales rugby team famously endured cryotherapy before and athletes in many disciplines use ice baths but there’s no evidence that either are effective (I thought here that ice baths, at least for distance runners, are taken to speed recovery, rather than enhance performance per se). Growth hormone again is ineffective.

Secondly a substance must not harm athletes. So, Dr Pitsiladis asked us, are the risks of anabolic steroids exaggerated? The evidence suggests they are, perhaps to discourage use. Thirdly, it must violate the spirit of sport. Caffeine was banned until 2004. It enhances performance, and has potential side-effects, but it is impossible to tell what the dosage is. Here Dr Pitsiladis referred to us to study on the amount of caffeine served in single espressos in coffee shops around Glasgow: Crozier TW, Stalmach A, Lean ME, Crozier A.
Espresso coffees, caffeine and chlorogenic acid intake: potential health implications.
Food Funct. 2012 Jan;3(1):30-3

My prejudices were confirmed when I saw how feeble a Starbucks espresso is.

As for energy drinks, Dr Pitsiladis trailed the research published the following week in the BMJ and also the subject of a Panorama programme:

Cohen D. The truth about sports drinks.
 BMJ. 2012 Jul 18;345:e4737.
and

Heneghan C, Howick J, O'Neill B, Gill PJ, Lasserson DS, Cohen D, Davis R, Ward A, Smith A, Jones G, Thompson M.
The evidence underpinning sports performance products: a systematic assessment.
BMJ Open. 2012 Jul 18;2(4). pii: e001702.

Should one of the three criteria, specifically the performance enhancement one, be given greater weight than the others, he asked us.

Who cheats? If detection is effective, then it’s a little less than 1%. Weightlifters are the worst, then athletes. Paralympians dope too, at about the same rate. The most common substances detected are anabolic steroids, followed by stimulants and cannabinoids. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's no evidence that cannabis enhances performance, though it may help overcome anxiety. Less often found are glucocorticoids, whose presence on the list is a matter of controversy, beta-blockers and hormone antagonists

Why dope? To cope with injury, to enhance performance, improve strength, because it’s the social norm (especially in weightlifting) and to cope with anxiety (which is why footballers use cannabis). Athletes can be doped without their knowledge, as has been alleged to be the practice at certain football clubs. To detect newer methods of doping, for example the use of EPO, requires a systems biology approach. The window for detection is short, though the effects long lasting. However the effects of altitude training are very similar to EPO, at least as far as haematocrit is concerned and Dr Pitsiladis is working on a study comparing East African and Glaswegian athletes. Blood passports can pick up EPO doping, and potentially could detect genetic doping, the trend for the future.

There was time for one question, about the effect of altitude on training. Dr Pitsiladis replied that it certainly works. No sea level athlete can win in distance events. The answer is to live at altitude and choose your parents wisely. Live high and train low, though Haile Gebrselassie, the world record holder for the marathon, lives high and trains high.

Health Information and Libraries Journal's Silver Jubilee

Health Information and Libraries Journal, or HILJ, pronounced by the irreverent to rhyme with bilge, is 25 years old. The journal has marked its birthday with a splendid celebratory issue, guest-edited by Andrew Booth, or Andrew Boot, as CILIP's Library and Information Gazette dubs him. As well as reflections by Andrew, Penny Bonnett, Assistant Editor and the three editors of the 25 years Shane Godbolt,the founding editor, Judy Palmer who served from 1999-2002 and Graham Walton, the present incumbent who contribute their perspectives in a triptych, there are four sections on learning and teaching, information technology, using evidence in practice and informatics in the international scene. In each of these an article from the archives sits between a retrospective view, a commentary by a practitioner and a look at the future. A final section brings together future perspectives from, among others, Margaret Haines, Joanne Marshall and Muir Gray.

Andrew's editorial brought back memories: when I moved into health libraries in 1992, as Librarian at the newly build David Ferrminan Library at North Middlesex Hospital, I immersed myself in back issues of Health Libraries Review, as it then was, to understand this new part of the profession. I also used runs of another journal Andrew mentions, the Bulletin of the Thames Postgraduate Regions. By the mid-nineties, I found myself working with HLR's founding editor, Shane Godbolt, as Senior Project Officer for the North Thames Regional Library Information Unit's Project Connect. The offices in Millman Street were filled with physical and intellectual bustle. Visitors, senior clinicians and medical educators, librarians from round Britain and the world, came and went, calmly co-ordinated by Shane's PA, Susan Fairlamb. Somehow, I found myself asked to give a presentation to the HLR Editorial Board on electronic publishing, then in its infancy. I turned up at the meeting, and by the end found myself a Board member, serving for ten years.

Something is missing though; the development of the open access movement, probably one of the most significant things to happen in scientific communication in the recent period, is barely mentioned. Martin Tilly, of the journal's publisher, Wiley-Blackwell, mentions briefly that content three years old or more is freely available, though by no means all, as I discovered when searching for an article from 1998. Ian McKinnell of the National Library of Health calls for a more equal partnership with publishers. But apart from that, nothing.

The reason for this silence may be that HILJ's position on open access, in contrast to our North American colleagues' Journal of the Medical Library Association, is not well developed. A three year embargo, when one takes into account the length of time it takes for research to be written up, submitted, reviewed, revised, resubmitted, published and printed, means that it will be more like five years before research results are freely available to the community. Worse, this three year embargo is coupled with the impostion on authors of a six-month post-publication embargo on self-archiving, though pre-prints may be freely self-archived. This journals is, as it should be, owned by the profession and an urgent task for HILJ, and for the Health Libraries Group, whose journals it is, is to make sure access is improved long before the next big birthday.

Making Web 2.0 work for you and your library: further thoughts

I was sorry to miss, thanks to the train timetable, Mark Clowes' overview of web 2.0 technologies and Bernice Baker's presentation on blended learning. But I was there in time for an announcement by Ian Baird from Teeside University of the long overdue merger of the University Medical School Librarians Group and the University Health Sciences Librarians Group. In the afternoon, Heather Gardner and David Brunt demonstrated some practical library applications of web 2.0, in particular current awareness services, based on their experience of the Primary Care Current Awareness Service (PCCS) they run in the East Midlands. David moonlights for Intute, and I was interested in how Intute content can now be embedded in other websites. They also showed how the Royal College of Midwives has used Google Co-op to build a customised search engine and how they used Pbwiki for the nurses current awareness bulletin. On issue is that many NHS IT departments block wikis, which brought to mind the similar restrictions school students face in trying to use social software
Anne Welsh presented on Blogging for the bewildered, based on her experience of using Web 2.0 applications in the information service at DrugScope. I was struck by how they use a wiki for their acquisitions manual, but perturbed that the blogs they run don't allow comments. She showed some good uses of screencasts.

Online: Libqual+

I went to Online at Olympia yesterday. The exhibition itself was the usual scrum, but there is nothing like wearing a badge saying Tom Roper, Unemployed, for protecting oneself against people trying to sell you things.
Much more interesting than the exhibition was the Health Libraries Group event, a presentation by Lucy McCaskie of Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, entitled From radar to radiant users, a review of a pilot of the Libqual+ survey suite with English health libraries. Lucy's presentation is going up on the HLG website, so I shan't give a full account. But very topically, in the light of the RIN study on researchers and discovery services , which Lorcan Dempsey neatly summarises as "researchers [...]- want discovery services to be supported by effective delivery services. They want to be able to get what they find, " the key finding was that users thought library services bad at making electronic resources available to them from their offices or homes. More positively users had a high opinion of the courtesy and caring attitude of library staff, and their attention to individual users. But being courteous and caring will not get us very far if we don't have the resources our users need to do their jobs.
Lucy told us that Libqual+ was developed in the US by the Association of Research Libraries, covering three areas, affect of service, information control and the library as place. Administered through a webpage, the survey asks users to rate 22 core statements on three different scales, so is time-consuming. Ten libraries took part in the pilot, organised by the National Library of Health (NLH), nine NHS libraries, well-distributed geographically including libraries in acute trust, primary care and mental health services, as well as the Royal College of Nursing Library Services. The participating services e-mailed staff in their organisations to ask them to take part. Only 743 surveys were completed, and 25% of those who started a survey completed it, but 53% added comments to their submissions.
The survey data is offered in radar charts. NLH did not undertake a central analysis, so it was left to individual services to look at their data. In Gloucestershire Lucy and colleagues were able to implement some immediate changes, such as to stock, signs and desk cover, and incorporated other findings into their action plan, such as advertise services better, branding services more distinctively to distinguish them form others. They have also used the data in bargaining for better funding for the service and to manage users' insatiable appetite for resources. Lucy asked if the analysis work should be done by librarians, or by statisticians. Now they have baseline data, the survey need sot be repeated at regular intervals. however NLH seem to be thinking of devising their own customer satisfaction instrument. In discussion Lucy told us that Libqual+ took up approximately 60 staff hours. It is a complex survey, and the importance of using other methods such as focus groups was mentioned.

Technorati Tags: libqual , oi06, onlineinformation2006, RIN

HLG: Tuesday afternoon

Tuesday afternoon opened with a plenary at which Peter Morgan gave a very clear summary of open access and institutional repositories. Peter runs Cambridge's DSpace repository when he's not being a medical librarian.
He made some interesting points about the differences between computing and library approaches to repositories, noting that librarians who run repositories think of different ways to use them, particularly to manage other digital resources in institutions. He also pointed out some of the growing tensions between archivangelists and librarians, and drew our attention to a new SHERPA resource, JULIET, which sets out for authors the open access requirements of each of the British research councils.
Then we heard from Danielle Worster on the Seniors Health Research Transfer Network (SHRTN) project in Ontario.

Technorati Tags: eastbourne, hlg, hlg2006, HLGEastbourne2006

HLG: Tuesday morning

The morning opened with another keynote speech, this time by Bernard Barrett of the Irish Health Sciences Libraries Group, who gave his confessions of an information scientist. Bernard spoke about his experiences working outside a library, in mental health in Ireland. , developing guidelines and policies, identifying areas where there might be a lack of evidence and on service development.
He picked up some of the themes about professions that Ian Snowley had mentioned the previous day. He felt that the vocabulary of "user" and "support" used in library and information service discourse holds us back, and that it was more helpful to speak of colleagues and fellow team members when H called on us to be precisionists and ended with his ten confessions of faith, which I'll link to when his presentation goes up.
Next, I attended the sessions on international collaboration, where Emma Farrow spoke of her experience in Sri Lanka, and the work that PHi is doing in Uganda and Sierra Leone, and Tony McSéan spoke on the HINARI project (and also told us of Mike and Bernie Winters' legendary p[performance in the same auditorium...at the start of the act the straight man of the two appeared and began a monologue; when the second poked his head through the curtains and grimaced at the audience, a member of the audience was heard to shout, "oh no, there's two of them".
After the break I went to a very comprehensive presentation by Ina Fourie of the Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria, on current awareness services.

Technorati Tags: eastbourne, hlg, hlg2006, HLGEastbourne2006

HLG: Monday

Today, the morning of the first day of the HLG conference in Eastbourne, we heard a keynote speech by Ian Snowley, CILIP's President-elect. Ian's presentation, entitled I am a medical librarian and including a clip fromMLA's video of the same name, discussion stressed how professions and professional values are changing, citing a recent Demos report Production Values: Futures for professionalism. Everyone is now a professional and the relationship between professions and government, the media and society generally are different and more critical. We can continue our core tasks, setting standards and qualifications, advocacy and CPD.  Above all rank-and-file CILIP members need to become advocates for the profession.

Professor Mike Pringle of Nottingham University gave a succinct and at times humorous description of progress to date on the electronic patient record, in a session chaired by Veronica Fraser.

The venue is charming,  the exhibition spectacular and the posters impressive.  After coffee there was a choice of interactive sessions. I went to the anatomy of e-learning, led by two staff from the FOLIO programme, Lynda Ayiku and Anthea Sutton, who described the development of FOLIO courses. They then got us to divide into groups and design a e-learning programme, using different pedagogical techniques. This was a slightly artificial exercise, as we had no curriculum content, not any learning objectives, which normally would have influenced our choice of methods. Nevertheless it was an interesting insight into electronic course design.
I'm afraid I missed the sessions after lunch, as I had to prepare some papers for the HLG Annual General Meeting.

Technorati Tags: hlg, hlg2006, HLGEastbourne2006

Technorati Tags: hlg, hlg2006, HLGEastbourne2006

Health Libraries Group in Eastbourne

There's less than a week to go till the Health Libraries Group comes to Eastbourne for its 2006 conference. All police leave has been cancelled. This venue is comme il faut; conferences are always better by the seaside, with its atmosphere of hedonism and abandon. Tomorrow I go on a reconnaissance mission, and may bring back photographs.
I'm looking forward to all sorts of things in the programme: keynote speeches by Ian Snowley, (CILIP President-elect) and Bernard Barrett of the Irish Health Sciences Libraries Group who kindly gave me an audience at their Kilkenny conference earlier this year. Bernard speaks on Questioning one's mental health: confessions of an information scientist. Dr Steven B Kayne gives the 2006 Bishop LeFanu lecture on the controversial matter of homeopathy, under the title Christian Samuel Hahnemann - the first independent prescriber? I trust he will take a robust attitude towards mumbo-jumbo.
In a plenary Peter Morgan speaks on open access and institutional repositories, and I hope will describe Cambridge University's efforts in this area. There are also plenaries on the National Library for Health and the topical matter of work with public libraries on health information, and parallel sessions on collaboration, evidence based librarianship, harnessing information technology, international collaboration, information literacy and expanding rôles.
In the special interest group sessions, I'm particularly interested to see that CHILL, of which I was once a member, is organising one, as are Libraries for Nursing, IFM Healthcare and the NHS Scotland e-Library.
Of course there's a social programme too, and the conference dinner is at the English Wine Centre.
I shall be blogging the conference. if anyone else is, in order to make our offerings more discoverable, may I suggest we agree on some Technorati tags (and Flickr tags too if anyone's taking photos). I'd suggest HLGEastbourne2006.

Technorati Tags: eastbourne, hlg, hlg2006, HLGEastbourne2006

HLG Chair

Today in Belfast I stood down as chair of the Health Libraries Group. Alan Fricker takes over from me and will bring a lot more to the post than I ever did.  I still have some duties to discharge at the annual conference in Eastbourne.
It was liberating to be able to sit through most of the committee meeting and not have to give my mind to procedure, steering the committee towards a decision, making sure everyone could have their say and so on.
Belfast was fun. I had a fry at Maggie May's and some Guinness in a bar.

Technorati Tags: belfast, hlg