Failure to Connect Somewhere
My mom would sometimes say, "If you can't say anything nice, then don't say anything at all." She often said this while my my brother, sister and I were squabbling at each other over something. There is only 4 years separating the oldest from the youngest so while we could be the best of friends we could easily be the worst of enemies and our sibling sense of justice demanded that we each got our fare share of zingers in at the others' expense.
After all these years and 600 miles away from home I heard my mom's voice in my head say that exact phrase on Friday after I read the posts MEDLIB-l and the comments on Nature Network about Harvard PhD student Anna Kushnir's hatred of PubMed post. It took a weekend of working on two projects to understand that Anna's post doesn't represent her lack of knowledge, it represents a failure to connect.
Anna is a PhD student, not a high school student or an undergraduate student. She has gone through many years of school where she would have had to go to a library to do some sort of research at some point in her life. However, somewhere in that whole long educational process we (librarians) failed to connect with Anna. We failed to impress upon her that she should (and that it is ok) to ask a librarian for research help.
In one of her comments Anna said, "I don't think I should have to be, or enlist the services of, a medical librarian in order to do a simple search on a literature search engine. PubMed should be an intuitive search engine such as Google, or others. I don't know of many researchers, either MDs or PhDs, who have had extensive training in computer science or search algorithms."
How sad.
David Rothman writes about Anna's complete unwillingness (almost to absurdity) to ask for help from a librarian (at Harvard no less) or look at help documents (easily found on PubMed's site) and it led him to the conclusion that PubMed isn't broken in this instance, it is the user. While I think Anna has a naive arrogance about her knowledge as a Harvard PhD student, I think more than the user is broken. I think the system is broken.
Anna is just one name of the countless number of researchers that we have failed to reach. Don't forget the horrible event at Johns Hopkins that led to the death of a healthy 24 year old woman. Dr. Alkis Togias, made "a good-faith effort" to research the drug's adverse effects, but failed to enlist the help of a librarian to look further in the literature about the drug, possibly preventing the tragic event. There are countless examples of how librarians can help researchers and doctors save time, money, and lives, yet there are also countless examples of researchers and doctors who have wasted time (at best) or lives (at worst) because they failed to ask for help from a librarian.
Clearly Anna's rant just further illustrates how librarians from well funded institutional libraries can even miss people. I don't know how we fix the system, but we need to look at ways to do that. I keep thinking of all the things that the Anna's of the world are missing out on and to that extent what kind of research or cures the rest of the world missing out on as well.
posted by The Krafty Librarian @ 2:36 PM
7 comments
7 Comments:
At what point can we stop blaming "the system"? This PhD student apparently explicitly rejected approaches from librarians eager to help her. I don't believe librarians can go out and bludgeon people into accepting help. Nor do I believe it's reasonable to expect specialized search engines to behave as "easily" (and produce results as badly, for specialized fields) as Google.
At some point, one has to say: Librarians tried. The user rejected their assistance. The user also rejected the possibility of reading some grade-school-level documentation. The user may, in fact, be broken.
"Anna is just one name of the countless number of researchers that we have failed to reach."
Michelle, if this is an instance of failure on the part of the librar*, please elaborate on what exactly anyone could have done differently to satisfy this patron.
walt,
Of course we can't bludgeon people into accepting our help. Although that might be one way to get their attention and satisfy our frustrations at the same time.
The user could be broken, but can't the system that user exsisted in be broken as well? If it isn't broken then it certainly isn't performing at peak performance.
There is and should be some onus on the individual, but I think we as librarians need to look at other ways of outreach and education.
David,
I don't think it is a failure of one librarian or the multiple librarians who this person should have or would have encountered.
I think it is a failure of how we as librarians as a whole do or don't do educational outreach.
Not every undergraduate or graduate instution requires their students to take a library 101 type of course.
As an undergraduate I had librarians who came to one of my English classes and one of my History classes (for 1/2 hour)when we did a research paper, but nobody came to my science classes or my Physical Therapy classes. We were not taught how to do research for any of the sciences and I majoring in a science.
As an undergraduate I thought of the library as a place to study or to do literature and history papers. There was no concept of researching a simple procedure, theory, or skill and applying it to science. There was no idea of using the journal literature.
I don't know what we could have done differently to reach her (if possible) but we can a lot of things differently to try and reach others.
Outreach is great, Michelle, but completely irrelevant in this case.
Kushnir was repeatedly offered expert help and chose instead to remain frustrated.
No amount of outreach would change this.
Remember guys I didn't say that the user in this case wasn't broken. I think her dogmatic refusal to learn the basics of tools of her trade or to seek help is pretty indicative of that.
However, I think more than just the user is broken. I think the system is broken. I think there are less extreme Annas out there that we aren't reaching in which we could make a difference.
Just because in this instance we most likely couldn't have done anything differently, it doesn't mean we can't do things differently for others.
It is a matter of seeing the forest for the trees; some of our user groups are very receptive to library outreach, some categorically refuse. Information-seeking behavior studies help us understand our users and we have resources for evaluating outreach efficacy, and these definitely shouldn't be overlooked.
However, without librarians having substantial PR/education/same specialization backgrounds, it's challenging to build relationships with resistant user populations from the start when our message is most likely to be heard. That won't keep me from trying though :)
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