Are you loyal to your profession, or your company?

I was reading an article on why everyone hates HR. The post was so so, but what I found really interesting were the comments. Taking them as representative, people really do hate HR! (but of course, who takes comments as representative, or at least representative of what…?). Anyway, regardless of my views re: HR, one of the comments caught my eye:

“Though a bit wordy – I think you are correct.. IT departments do the same aswell – They feel they are separate from the business and by thinking it, make it so..”

… thus making the point that somehow HR professionals consider themselves in some way removed from the rest of the business. And I wondered, are information professionals and librarian-y types the same? If I were to ask you, do you consider your first loyalty to your profession, or to your company – which would it be? If you had to do something that in some way “harmed” your standing as an info pro, or “harmed” the requirements of your business, which would you choose?

For me I didn’t need to think about it at all – my loyalty is to my company; the needs of the business. Perhaps this is why I don’t sometimes feel like I’m a fully paid-up member of the information profession – that and because I joined the profession relatively late. But I think I’m right, aren’t I? I mean, what is the point, from a CEO’s point of view, of having an employee who is not primarily thinking of the needs of the business? Surely we’re doing ourselves no favours if we’re too precious about our profession?

Top alerting services for monitoring drug developments and other things

We had a discussion at work recently about how we should keep up to date with drug topics we monitor. We do this to see what is happening with licensing in this country and/or in the US/Europe and then we might also be tracking disease areas also for other types of work. So what to use? We previously gave the drug topic monitoring job to one person in the team who would scan choice journals and send photocopies of the results but these were often out of date and this is an onerous job for one person remembering perhaps 10s or 100s of topic indications. We narrowed down the following to some essentials and others as optional but I would be interested to know what sources other people use.

1. NeLM or National Electronic Library of Medicine. A “‘one stop’ platform from which users can easily find medicines information that matters in a simple and coherent manner”. Daily email alert delivered as headlines and often includes commentary and links to original sources. Pretty much our gold standard. Takes info from a range of sources: UK medicines information (UKMi), National Prescribing Centre and Medicines Compendium online to name but a few.
2. PharmaTimes. This is on our core list as well although I have to admit I don’t use it, I think there was something weird about their sign up and it didn’t want to sign me up argh. We purchase some similar titles and this is all about e-TOCs.
3. New drugs online. Produced by UKMi and ingested by NHS Evidence as well, NHS registered people can access more info than publically accessible too. Excellent for news and reporting of trials/regulatory stuff for new drugs. Example for lorcaserin for obesity.
4. Medical News Today. US based although however news is captured it is truely worldwide. Sources include “JAMA, BMJ, Lancet, BMA, plus articles written by our own team”. Categorised into sections covering major disease areas these daily alerts are very comprehensive.
5. Drugs.com. US again but good for FDA alerts that may influence European/National decisions. Probably more generalist/consumer level information
6. Pharmalot. Blog from which you can receive alerts along the lines of investigative journalism and debate about pharmaceutical companies and drug development in general. Or “commentary on the pharmaceutical industry and related litigation.” The backstory of what makes the news later e.g. rosiglitazone.
7. And other things: NHS Institute alerts (mainly implementation and while we’re on that see Implementation Science journal), the CASH database which aimed to be the national current awareness service although is reportedly biased towards whoever is updating it weekly and more traditional alerts from saved searches and e-TOCs galore.

How you manage these is up to you. I can’t help but scan them almost daily but do searches of the folder I bung them in in my inbox on a monthly basis…

Problem with exporting search results from Ovid

Just a quick warning that there is currently a problem with the new OvidSP platform when you try and export/download results using the .txt format. Unfortunately it does not tell you there is a problem – everything seems just dandy in fact – but when you look closely you might be missing a handful of records. Quite worrying, if you’re doing a systematic review, and dealing with many hundreds of records. You might miss the key study and you’d never know it…

When I noticed this was happening I asked Ovid what was going on. They confirmed there was a known problem. However, they did not apologise or acknowledge in any way that it might be an inconvenience. Thanks guys, good customer service. They just said my name would be added to the list of customers that have reported the issue and who would be told when they come up with a solution. Nice.

Business support, on the job training and creative learning – HLG round up

The 2010 HLG conference earlier this week offered an opportunity for health librarians and information professionals to share knowledge and experience in the positively sunny Salford Quays location. Alan F and I presented on this very blog and I also presented about work I do on clinical guidelines. This meant that with lots of parallel sessions I may have missed some great presentations and look forward to catching up on those I couldn’t see in person when they’re posted on the HLG website. I tried tweeting from the conference as well but couldn’t get a signal on my phone and the organisers did seem to miss a trick when they announced the hashtag (they switched from #HLGconf to #hlg2010 or maybe this was not organised, haven’t checked) but in the next breath said please turn off your phones…

So what did I take away from the conference? One inspiring session came from librarians supporting the information needs of managers in Leicester where Louise Hull talked about building on experience of a successful clinical librarian service and Debra Thornton in Blackpool had recruited Trevor Morris to provide a dedicated management librarian service. Trevor was so successsful he has now moved into a care pathway coordination role so the library is providing integral support to improving quality for patients. Stephen Ayre spoke about how his service in Nuneaton started offering literature support for clinical audits being carried out at his hospital and how picking up the phone and having a chat to people about their needs could increase new business for the library. He ended up collecting useful information for the clinical audit team about who was registering audits (nurses don’t have to do this for their statutory professional development so slip under the radar) and even becoming a first check of audits before they are registered proved that library services can be tailored to the information need for non-clinicians. I felt their case studies were inspiring as a way of raising your profile in an organisation even if other people might think ‘why is a librarian interested in audit or quality improvement’; in the right culture and with drive and determination you can push the boundaries of traditional library services. Even in my work place, a more corporate/research setting, we don’t specifically address the needs of managers who are our budget holders and paymasters. Perhaps it pays to think that managers have information needs that stretch the imagination in terms of not needing Medline searches but need to know what other organisations are doing , what the latest management technique du jour is and what is on the horizon in their domain of interest be it commissioning or implementation or planning…

Emily Hopkins set up a ‘library’ service in NHS North West and discovered that there was no need for a physical collection but that there were plenty of projects that could use a bit of information or records or knowledge management. Which linked quite nicely to a talk about strategic planning (or looking beyond things like PEST and SWOT analyses which are part of my vocabulary) as most of us don’t have the luxury of starting from scratch but work with a history which means our services need to be revised and developed as we reflect on where we are going. Sheila Corrall talking briefly about a range of other tools such as information ecology whereby you think about the different environments in which you work, strategic information alignment where we explicitly map our goals with that of our organisation and my favourite way the issues priorities matrix where you are trying to think about what to tackle first.

The plenary session featuring a professional development model based on training by doing (yay!) or on the job checklists of specific skills was brilliant for having an overview of how this was developed from Sara Clarke and a reflection on how this felt to progress through by my fellow grad trainee Zoe Thomas. Of course it couldn’t be called common sense or just recognising my argument that I learnt a limited amount about library work at library school and library schools are often a bit too academic and will inherantly always be so they plumped for ‘Legitimate Peripheral Participation’ model which is just brilliant.

Tony Warne, Professor of Nursing at Salford University, offered us a talk on creative learning and and insight into the blog I’d like to write only I should be approached by the estate of James Joyce for breach of copyright. He actually titled his talk around Vannevar Bush’s 1945 paper ‘As we may think’ and meandered around library services being beyond bounds of physical space and the joys of open access (yes indeed I thought) and then spoiled this by talking about the interface between knowing and not knowing and perhaps his interest in psychanalysis took over…but going back to Bush who was thinking about the limits of organising knowledge in a logical way (albeit Andrew Booth had argued earlier in the conference that us info pros are happier when information is ordered in this way) he said humans think in terms of associations and how about we have a machine called a memex that captures this in some way, storing and organising information in a mechanized fashion, allowing more than one person to look at something at once. How far the internet and contemporary knowledge systems have achieved this is up for debate. I definitely agree with creative learning approaches which builds on Warne’s exposition that creativity and rational approaches to knowledge organisation are not mutually exclusive, almost by being open to different ways of thinking will encourage a broader landscape of a topic, building on the collective knowledge of something (and now I’m falling into the academic that turns me off but his talk was definitely intellectually stimulating!).

Lastly I caught two posters from SCIE the Social Care Institute for Excellence which looked at scoping searches and the fact there is no defined way of rapidly gathering evidence about a topic and how far to go as well as how to choose databases for searching in social care. This latter problem was approached in a systematic way whereby a range of databases were searched and unique references identified to map where overlap in coverage was found. Presumably a few more cases might need to be tested to see if there were any general trends. This is certainly a question we have when searching for medical literature and whether we should search every database we have access to or whether it is a peculiar fear of librarians that we’ll end up in a meeting where we missed a paper and all hell will break lose…

NHS Microsoft licence not renewed

Report from e-health-insider that the NHS has not renewed the £500Million contract with Microsoft for an NHS England wide licence.  Comments highlight a likely issue for those using Sharepoint for their Intranets. 

I cannot help thinking this signals bad things for the NHS Copyright Licence.

University of California fights Nature over price increase

So reports the BMJ.

The California Digital Library of the University of California is threatening to cancel all its subscriptions to publications from the Nature Publishing Group and to encourage the university’s academic staff to submit their papers elsewhere for publication after a proposed 400% rise in licence fees for electronic access to journal articles.

I meant to blog this earlier but this issue is going nowhere. Good is a mild way of expressing how I feel about this. As public sector myself and subject to increasing cuts we are having to scrutinise journal subscriptions which indeed do not increase by ‘just’ 7% a year (inflation busting as this is). More debate here in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

NICE’s plans for the specialist collections

I noticed today a tender notice from NICE outlining their broad plans for the specialist collections. Here is an abridged version:

“Today, NHS Evidence provides access to 30 collections of specialist evidence content, the ‘Specialist Collections’. In April 2011, NHS Evidence will launch a redesigned and improved specialist evidence service. As well as the technical developments, topic coverage will be extended and greater emphasis will be placed on quality assurance and standardisation of processes and products across topic areas. The current Specialist Collection service is contracted out to 21 distinct organisations (with an overall headcount of approx. 80 staff). The contracts for these services are due to end on 31.3.2011. In order to achieve the quality, consistency and standardisation objectives listed above, NHS Evidence are aiming to rationalise the provision of the core service to three Clinical Hub Centres. One of these will be in-house and Manchester based. The other two will be contracted out. The purpose of this tender is the provision of the service of these two Clinical Hub Centres from 1.4.2011. Each contracted out hub will cover 8 to 10 speciality areas. Key activities of each centre will include hand-picking content from sources routinely ingested by NHS Evidence, searching and identifying content from specialist sources, tagging resources / allocating to an agreed taxonomy, identifying entries for UK DUETs (UK Database of Uncertainties about the Effects of Treatment), preparing and programme managing Evidence Updates on selected key topics within the hub’s remit (there are currently over 60 Evidence Updates in total across all specialist collections, but this number is likely to increase). Managing and quality assuring the activities of each hub will be part of the service.”

There you are then. Make of that what you will. Nervous times for all involved, no doubt. Presumably the Kings Fund will go for one, given that they already manage three of the current specialist collections. Maybe a consortium up in Oxford (Oxford Radcliffe/CEBM)? They have their hands on a few. The University of Surrey currently manage three. The universities of Southampton, Sheffield and Warwick all have experience, as do a few London teaching hospitals (e.g. Royal Free). Any thoughts or inside information from anyone out there?

**Update 9th July**

It has been suggested that idle speculation about who might go for these Hubs is unhelpful, and that given people are stressed because some might lose their jobs etc. that it should best not be discussed. It is also noticeable that, apart from co-blogger Danni (thanks Danni!), there have been no comments made on the post, even though our stats suggest it has been viewed quite a number of times. I suppose I have four things to say:

1. I’m just delighted when people other than my Mum read my posts
2. We rarely get too many comments anyway *sigh*
3. I’m a chatty blogger who likes to idly speculate. I also find it difficult to finish off blog posts. Ending after “… (e.g. Royal Free)” seemed a bit abrupt. I therefore lazily tapped out “Any thoughts or inside information from anyone out there?” just to round off the post in classic blogging style with a meaningless “what do you think” kind of way. I certainly never thought that I would get much response, let alone “Yes, I am a representative of organisation X, and we’re going for it”!
4. I am aware that jobs will go, but also that new jobs will be created. I would never make light of the nervousness that we all feel during this time of uncertainty – for better or for worse, none of us have a job for life any more, and we all suffer from job anxiety. I apologise if it seemed to be in bad taste to speculate. However I do maintain that it is a topic of interest to a wide range of people, both inside and outside the NICE/specialist libraries axis, and that it’s right and proper that it is a point of discussion. Of course people on the inside will already have been speculating for a while, and will be much much better informed than I – they also would not start tapping out their inner thoughts on a forum such as this! But there are also people on the outside who are nevertheless interested in what’s going on, and some would be interested in speculation as to what’s going to happen next; and, I would suggest, why wouldn’t they be?

Basically, good luck to anyone who’s going for it, and double good luck for anyone whose job might be affected by it.

Transliteracy – new word, same old web 2.0?

I went to a really interesting LIKE (London Information and Knowledge Exchange) meeting last week about transliteracy. What is transliteracy? I’ve blogged at LIKE so take a peek to find out! They use Posterous to post via email, very intriguing…

CILIP Future – thoughts

A while ago I blogged about my role on the CILIP Defining our Professional Future project board.  This work has been rolling on as you will have seen on Twitter on the conversation blog and you can find a lot of strands gathered at Netvibes. 

With my Project Board hat on I would ask again for people to have their say and get involved.

I would like to take that hat off now and make my contribution – so these thoughts are my own.  I have been mulling them for a while and they also had the benefit of being partially tested by talking about Defining our Professional Future at the Perfect Information Conference.

I am not going to spend a lot of time on crystal ball gazing about where we will be as a profession in x years time.  At PIC2010 I summarised it as:

•More mobile?
•More stuff?
•More diverse?
•More personal?
•More specialised?
•More proactive?
•Everywhere or nowhere?

People can draw their own thoughts on those.

I am more interested in what I might want CILIP to do.

I want CILIP to speak loudly on quality.  It should be crystal clear to people why they should want to be chartered and employers as to why they should hire chartered staff.  For me this means mandatory tracking of CPD to reach and maintain Chartered status.  CILIP need to provide the tools to do this electronically (UKCHIP are currently working on this and I am sure we could learn from other bodies) .  Tracking should be convenient and I would expect that most people would meet the requirements to maintain chartership.  We are all doing the CPD - lets demonstrate it.   Update could offer a choice of quick reflection points with input fed directly back into the tracking system. 

Beyond the handy tracking tool I would want CILIP to allow me to chose to share selected details of my ongoing development via a public facing website www.cilip.org.uk/alanfricker .  This would be something I could use for job applications, if I was a freelance or generally for networking.  Importantly this would also display my current level of chartered status - MCLIP, FCLIP, uptodate etc.  This would be a benefit to employers who would then be able to readily check if I had the qualifications and experience I claimed on any application.  At the same time it would prevent people claiming post nominals without having done the work.

I want CILIP to be an enabler.  Networking is vital for professionals and CILIP should be actively working to help members to do just that.  This should be enabled by CILIP Communities and the public profile I have just described.  My private profile should be richer to allow better linking.  We should have LinkedIn style tools through these systems.  These should be open to linking to other systems to allow those outside CILIP to interact with our networks (and perhaps over time convince them of the merits of being in them as members).  Along side these electronic tools there should be a specific role within central CILIP to support the creation of networking opportunities.  Want a speaker on topic X?  Here is a list.  Want to know who in your region (or nationally) is working on this?  Here is a list.  Want to set up a supper club?  Here are good venues (regions could help), a simple booking system, an effective means to reach people and so on.  Want to run a virtual journal club?  Here are models, here is the corporate webex account, here is the means to reach those with a similar interest.

Another support to this would be CILIP raising the profile and becoming a thought leader.  I want to see CILIP offering regular public events that set the agenda around professional issues.  These should be free to members or very very low priced with a small fee to non members.  Events might take the form of panel debates, talks by researchers, by people with a strong view on important issues.  So lets present Cory Doctorow on copyright, Michael Stephens on Library 2.0, David Nicholas on the Google Generation, get the relevant person from DCMS to speak.  I want to see informed debate on IP, social media, archives, the information society, information for the health of the public, the role of reading etc etc. They could be sponsored and in partnership with other bodies, think tanks and so on.  When I flick to the List in Prospect I want to find an event with a CILIP badge every month.  This is about raising our profile, establishing what we do as a profession – all the while providing CPD and networking opportunities.  It is important that events are open to the world outside CILIP to get the most relevant people along and get it all linked up.  Generally the events should be recorded where ever possible with digital streams available for those unable to attend in person.

There should be support for Special Interest Groups and regions in putting these events on.  This could be balanced by an obligation on these to participate in sourcing venues, speakers and so on.  We should be making sure those who speak at events like Umbrella then go on to elaborate their research beyond that event.  This might also help bring research into practice.

I think that will do for today.  Thoughts?

New interfaces

 Jumps out from Cochrane Collaboration page now. Seems to be that you can’t log-in unless you go and try retrieving your results hmm.

OvidSP has been urging me to try their new interface.

It has a liking for small boxes. And looks quite smart with your saved searches in My Workspace which is now more prominent:

Anyone tried it for an actual search? Only other thing I noticed was it has a multi-field search but it may have had this in an earlier version…what else would people improve? I’m generally quite a big fan of Ovid and find it very user friendly. Worst database I have to use is HEED eek