Tom Roper's Weblog

The informationist again

To add to the references I gave for Scott Plutchak's Bishop-LeFanu lecture, John Hewlett has posted the latest Current Literature column for the edition of the Health Libraries Group Newsletter of 2004 December, vol.21, no.4 to lis-medical, including two articles on the informationist:

Cunningham,D.J., Kronenfeld,M.R. The informationist: a debate. Journal of Hospital Librarianship 2004; 4(1): 1-15.

Burdick,A. Informationist? Internal medicine rounds with a clinical medical librarian. Journal of Hospital Librarianship 2004; 4(1): 17-27.

Also significant as this is John's valedictory column after 23 years of keeping UK health librarians up to date.

The last HLG Belfast post

Finally, over a week and a half later, I get to post about the final day of the conference, which rather gives the lie to the professed immediacy of blogging. But a glass of gin and Dr John will help me get this done.
In any case, this is perhaps the easiest session to describe, not only because it’s only half a day but because it was the day when the conference became worthwhile, and this because of T. Scott Plutchak’s Bishop-LeFanu lecture, which lifted the level considerably. I’ve been going to these events since the days when they were only Bishop lectures (the first one I attended would have been around 1991), and this was certainly one of the best. Incidentally, last year’s lecturer, Abigail Woods who spoke about her work on the history of foot and mouth disease, has just had her book published.
But Scott lifted the conference, which for me this far had been not very inspiring (but bear in mind I missed the first day, including Maggie Haines, who was bound to have been good). He was witty and inspiring, describing the development of the idea of the clinical librarian, initiated back in the 1970s, into the informationist, first proposed in a paper in Annals of Internal Medicine, and further as the Information Specialist in Context (ISIC), now the subject of a pilot project at Vanderbilt.
Scott defined the characteristics of the ISIC/Informationist:
· A foot in both information science and clinical camps
· Has retrieval and synthesizing skills, but also functions as part of the clinical team
· Accredited and certified
· Integrated into clinical care structures
Scott posed the question, is the ISIC the future of the library information profession, and if so what if any place there might be for generalist librarians?
For more on all this, read Scott’s editorials in JMLA:

Informationists and librarians.
Plutchak TS.
Bull Med Libr Assoc. 2000 Oct; 88(4): 391-392.

The informationist—two years later.
Plutchak TS.
J Med Libr Assoc. 2002 Oct; 90(4): 367-369.

Scott was followed by Steve Rose, gallantly standing in for another Oxford colleague who was indisposed on a project on guidelines in practice in an A&E department, and Claire Honeybourne, who spoke on Leicester’s PDA project. I’ve heard Claire before on this, but what was interesting this time was that she described some of the more recent developments, including developing the project to involve all 58 of their junior doctors.
After coffee I unburdened myself of my presentation, the overheads and resource list for which I posted the other day. In the same session, and much more interesting, were papers from Mary Edmunds Otter and Sue Spriggs from Leicester, who used a novel presentation technique for a paper on their information literacy training programme; the technological limitations of the Waterfront Hall did not permit them to do it quite as they had planned, with questions from the audience asked in a random order, but they managed very well in a linear style. Interstingly information skills are assessed inter alia through a Medline station in an OSCPE . Rachael Adair and Wendy Stanton from Nottingham reported on integrating information skills into the graduate entry programme at Derby, a satellite medical school.
One point struck me during this session, which is how keen we are to vilify Google when we talk about information literacy. We happily counterpose a finely crafted and methodologically sound search conducted on a bibliographic database with an end user's cack-handed Google search. But google is not the enemy, and we should be working with google to add our knowledge of user needs and behaviour, and the organisation, description and classification that are the core of our proefsssion

Finally Bruce Madge gave an urbane invitation to attend ICML9 in Brazil and announced that ICML10 in 2009 would be held in Brisbane.

HLG presentation

Here's my presentation from last week in Belfast, and the resource list I provided. Both are pdfs.

HLG on Tuesday

Day 2 and I attended the conference, starting off with a National Library of Health breakfast meeting, though there was little new since their round of roadshows over the summer, onme of which we hosted at BSMS. The morning keynote speaker was Frank Dobbs, who gave us an insight into diagnostic thinking, followed by Karin Dearness, who told us about NICE and how they produce their technology appraisals, and Hilary Ollerenshaw and Caroline Plaice from North Bristol NHS Trust who showed off their knowledge4health project. One thing that struck me about this and another paper later on was that these local portals are probably very much what the National Library for Health might look like if localised.
I see I’ m not the only delegate blogging the HLG conference: the loopylibrarian is also at it, and is much more up to the minute than me and pithy.
After coffee, I attended a rather over-crowded session on information skills training given by Anne Parkhill of Monash from Australia.
Then an agreeable lunch and a visit to the General Register Office in Belfast for a little family history.
In the afternoon I attended a session on developing librarians skills, made up of papers by Linda Ward of Leicester on teaching critical reading, the inimitable Andrew Booth on the e-learning lessons of the Folio programme and Ursula Ison on using action learning sets in the West Midlands. After tea, and another search for a wireless signal outside (one could just be had on the benches outside the Waterfront Hall), to a session on future proofing the profession where the recommendations of the CILIP Health Executive Advisory Group were discussed (which were to go before the CIILIP Executive Board on Thursday, so very timely). After a presentation by Jackie Lord on the recommendations, we split into groups for discussion, which was animated, though we failed to cover all the questions set for us by Jackie. The group I was in concentrated on the old chestnut of the plethora of groups that health information professionals have formed; I’ve never been sure that this is actually the problem that people claim it is. The tendency to form groups to reflect different specialisms, employment sectors and subject interests can be seen in all professions, and people don’t form organisations with all the attendant work for frivolous reasons, but because they meet real needs and have real things they want the organisations to do. Of course organisations can ossify and outlive their usefulness; but if that is the case, in the end they die. People are rational, and in the main will not devote time and energy to keeping things alive that should die.
The other difficulty I have is with the very idea that we need to future-proof ourselves: at best this sounds unnecessarily defensive. The task of our profession when looking forwards is, it seems to me, is not to make sure that our children and grand-children can grow up to become librarians who work exactly like us, but to look at what a changing world will need. If we can lose some of the more humdrum and mechanical tasks that we are traditionally associated with, so much the better; it could free us to rediscover the scholar-librarian, someone who both organises, but more importantly plays a part in the creation of, knowledge. I mean knowledge here in every sense: not only the scientific/biomedical knowledge with which I am most closely professionally associated, but the creation of literary and artistic works, and so forth.
In the evening, after the odd experience of trying to get a before-dinner drink in a champagne bar which only opened during the day , to Belfast City Hall for a reception and dinner. It seems to me the most magnificent City Hall I have ever been in, even more impressive than Manchester. It’s a monument to the great days of Belfast, when the city was the leading industrial force in Ireland. After dinner Muir Gray spoke, and paid tribute to Veronica Fraser who is moving on from the post of NHS Libraries Adviser, making a presentation to her to which Veronica replied with a graceful speech enlivened with some fine swipes at civil service jargon.

Monday

A fine day, spent not at the HLG conference but travelling to Edinburgh and participating in the METRO Workshop, a fringe event at the AMEE conference. I rose early (no run) and arrived at Belfast City Airport where I used their wireless network; but whereas Belfast City has one, there’s no networking at all at Edinburgh, although it seems to me to be a larger airport. How can this be? The Waterfront Hall has no wireless either (in general, fine building though it may be, its IT provision is decidedly limited…when it came to my presentation on the Wednesday, I had to rely for internet access on the technician’s own Vodafone card which he kindly put at my disposal.
METRO workshop was good, and was struck by how the medical educationalists there were able to think in classificatory terms as well as any librarian. The workshop consisted of presentations by members of the METRO project team: Alex Haigh on the history of the project and the need for a set of reliable and authoritative descriptors for medical education, Don Liu on the principles and practice of the taxonomy, and Marshall Dozier on the blog they use to discuss and develop the taxonomy collaboratively. Then, led by Caroline Selai, we had a practical exercise, using the taxonomy to index two articles from the medical education literature.
After lunch I had time to kill before my flight back, so visited the Royal Scottish Academy for their fantastic Titian exhibition (though a lot was by Titian’s contemporaries and students) and then for a drink in the magnificent North Bridge bar. which was formerly the office of the Scotsman.
In the evening I took a flight back, in time to see the British Library team triumph over Oxford University press in the finals of University Challenge: the Professionals, before going to the famously much-bombed Europa hotel to see Scott Plutchak and Bruce Madge entertain with their guitars and Scott’s vocals. They played without a break for around two and three quarter hors, to general delight and acclaim.

Travelling again

Now in Belfast for the CILIP Health Libraries Group conference, but I'm also popping over to Edinburgh today for the METRO workshop at AMEE.
I'll post reports on both events as time passes.