Many hospital librarians complain about the inability to create and implement certain technology projects because of their hospital IT departments policies. Some libraries just want an web page while others would like to do some more involved things such as hosting a few instructional multimedia files. Personally, I think this is one of the biggest areas where hospital librarians see big difference between their work environment and the work environment of academic medical librarians. We see a lot of the cool technology and we can envision how it would work in our hospital if only we got approval from our IT department.

As many of you know I have been working on using Athens for providing off site authentication for my users. I love it. However it has led to a new problem. Now that I have all these products available off campus to my users, how are they going to be aware of these products to actually use them? Most public libraries and academic libraries have web pages on the Internet so that patrons can browse through resources and use them. However, all of my library web pages are hidden to the outside world because they are on the Intranet. My users can't see the hospital's Intranet when they are off campus. So I need an Internet web page.

It took me a while to find the right person to contact for this specific request, but color me surprised that he was open to the idea. We had a great conversation as to how we could do it in the easiest, most logical way. Whoa. I had to double check the phone number to make sure I was indeed calling the IT department.

I was so prepared for failure that I had begun to look at other solutions. Like many other hospital libraries we do not have the budget or time to buy and maintain our own server. So that wasn't an option. One option I was looking at was getting a third party hosting service. There are a lot of companies out there that offer hosting services. You need to do your homework to determine necessary account features like disk storage size, bandwidth, support, programming, etc. You also want to see what kind of technology platform they provide i.e. Windows, Unix/Linux servers, or both, because that can impact what type of applications you can run.

Two hosting services that come to mind are LISHost.org and DreamHost. LISHost started by Blake Carver is librarian focused and already hosts several small public libraries. Cost is a major concern for many small hospital libraries and these services can be actually quite reasonable. For example, DreamHost has multiple package levels ranging from $10/month to $80/month depending on your needs

You also need to start talking to the appropriate people in your hospital. Start first with IT. They may have some ideas and solutions that might work without the need to go to an outside company. If they don't they might be able to give you an idea on technical requirements that you might need. You also want to make sure they are kosher with the library getting services from an outside hosting company. Some IT people I have talked to were fine with it because it is one less thing they had to worry about. You will also probably need to talk to somebody in administration and quite possibly legal. After all, you are putting up a web site with the hospital name on it. They will want to make sure you are not including medical advice or slandering the hospital in any way. You need to stress that you are not going to be dealing with patient information and dispensing medical advice in any way. Try to get them to see it as something similar as university's medical library on the web. They don't provide patient or medical information.

It is second nature for librarians to look outside of the institution to provide articles, books and "library stuff." However, many of us have been so locked into the tunnel vision of what we can't do because of IT policies, that we me have forgotten to look outside of the institution for technology solutions. Perhaps outsourcing and using a third party hosting service offers us a way to provide better electronic services to our patrons.

Labels: Social Software, Technology