Wow the Hls-list is on fire! I rarely get this many emails a day from it, usually the Medlib list is responsible for the bulk of my inbox messages. So what has got the Hls-list people all speaking?
It all started from a little email from Cathy Boss surveying hospital librarians asking if they are planning to attend the 2007 MLA annual meeting whether they would be interested in attending a symposium on open access.

Thomas Hill had a very interesting response regarding a symposium on open access.

No, that would be at about the bottom of the list of what I feel hospital libraries need. We need programming on: 1. how libraries support clinical care, i.e., are part of the support of the hospital's income stream; 2. what are the myriad of research pieces hospital libraries need to conduct to help create the full picture of what we do to support the hospital's bottom line; 3. how hospital libraries can choose a piece to research, develop a research project, accomplish it, and get it published to the library world so we can start to assemble the picture; 4. what are things like Zoomerang and SurveyMonkey that we can use; 5. how can hospital libraries get more value from MLA and meaningful requirements for JCAHO; 6. what are standards of service or performance hospital libraries need to benchmark with others; 7. how do we hospital libraries get NLM to respond to our needs by CONSULTING and ASKING us BEFORE they implement such
things as the new AbstractPlus format?

In other words, I find MLA more irrelevant to our survival and lacking in support and impact for what we need. MLA seems dominated by the large academic medical centers and open access is their concern. I have not attended the last several MLA meetings because the programming has been irrelevant to us.

We can use such things as "Information searching by the millennials," "Creation and use of
blogs and rss feeds in the hospital setting: is it possible, how do you communicate with IT departments about it?", "Firewalls and ways around, over or under them", "Consortium resource purchasing: making it work." "What federated search products really work for the hospital library, and can we afford them, can we afford not to have them?"

My real concern, however, is that hospital libraries MUST show we support patient/clinical care, that we support the income generation of the hospital. Otherwise, we are an easy way to cut and save the hospital $100s of thousands of dollars because there is so much freely available on the internet.

Many other list members are echoing Thomas's thoughts. I agree with a lot of what Thomas has to say and if I haven't been on my soap box too long regarding JCAHO comments, permit me to climb back on and utter my .02 cents as well.

1. We need help and information on how libraries support clinical care and a part of the hospitals income stream. Many hospital librarians at MLA this year did a great job at providing information on how to justify our expenses and look at our programs/products/services in terms of administrators understand namely return of investment. For example a new updated study similar to "The contribution of hospital library information services to clinical care: a study in eight hospitals" by King. (Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. 1987, v75 (4) 489-95. Or we could use a tool kit on how we can physically show how we effect clinical care through numbers and facts, not just anecdotes.

2. We as hospital librarians need to find the time to contribute and participate in MLA, our organization. Margaret Bandy noted in her reply on the Hls-list, "Hospital librarians are the largest block of members in MLA, but as Tovah Reis, Section Council Chair has noted, underrepresented on section council because of the limited number who join other sections and thus exert influence." If we are the largest block of members then our participation is ever more important so we can get the programming and support we need. If we are lame duck members, then other more vocal and active members will influence the decisions. If you just belong to an organization but don't participate then are your gripes about the direction that organization is taking justified? Hospital librarians, get more active! Just recently (the last 2 years) I have gotten the professional courage to be more active in the medical librarian. I can't tell you how many times I have been told by other medical librarians that have commented about how wonderful it was to have the opinion and contributions from a hospital librarian. You don't have to spend your all of your free time participating, just do something. I have a life and I am participating. Added up, I spend maybe 1 hour a week of free time doing something related to medical libraries but not my job. That is one television program. How hard is it to do that!?!? The benefits far outweigh it. Heck, participate on an MLA committee http://www.mlanet.org/members/directory/committee/

3. Communication and getting more out of MLA and NLM is really part of participation. If we don't participate how can we expect to get anything back from them. Only once we start participating and show the amount of vocal hospital librarians there are, how are we going to really have any effective communication with these organizations.

Ok I comming down from my soap box to let you know that if you are interested in hearing more about what hospital librarians are saying, follow the Hls-list at: http://hls.mlanet.org/mailman/listinfo/hls-list_hls.mlanet.org

The Hls-list archive is available to list members at:
http://hls.mlanet.org/mailman/private/hls-list_hls.mlanet.org/