MLA Election Reminder

Believe it or not I am now just really starting to feel better from whatever I had that had gottten me.  It took me a while but several types of antibiotics and a steroid inhaler later I am feeling more like my old self.  A lot of stuff went on while I was out on my blogging leave of absence, and there is no way I can cover all of it.  So I will just go forward with what is going on now. 

You thought November 2nd was the end of the elections for a while, but if you are a member of MLA then election season is not quite over. 

The MLA 2011/2012 election is now underway, and the deadline for voting is December 7th.  Email messages with a link to the ballot have been sent to all MLA members with email addresses, and paper ballots have been sent to those without email.  The participation rates for the 2009/10 and 2010/11 MLA elections were 42.37% and 39.75%, respectively.  We hope to see the level of participation in MLA elections rise.  These elections are important because they determine who will lead MLA, set its priorities, and allocate its resources during these difficult times.  Please take the time to cast your ballot by December 7th.

So read through the ballot and the candidates and select the people you think will lead and represent MLA.  Be involved and vote!

Congratulations 2010-2011 NLM/AAHSL Leadership Fellows

The NLM/AAHSL Leadership Fellows Program  is “focused on preparing emerging leaders for the position of library director in academic health sciences libraries. Fellows will have the opportunity to develop their knowledge and skills in a variety of learning settings, including exposure to leadership in another environment.”  Fellows are paired with academic health sciences library directors who will mentor them during the fellowship.

Congratuations Tania P. Bardyn, Keith Cogdill, Kelly R. Gonzalez, Deborah Sibley, Susan Nash Simpson.  Read more about the new fellows and their mentors and more information about the scholarship on the AAHSL web site.

MLA E-Books Webinar

This morning my colleague and I finished recording our brief video that will be a part of MLA’s ABC’s of E-Books: Strategies for the Medical Librarywebinar on November 10th.  You can see the agenda for the presnterson MLA’s website.

Marian Simonson and I will have a brief 4-5 min. video presenting how we manage our ebooks at the Cleveland Clinic.  We will talk about how/why we add them to the catalog and how we originally created a plain old web page listing all of our ebooks by title and by subject.  Then as we started to collect more and more ebooks the web list became difficult to manage, time consuming, and too long to scroll through.  So we decided to manage our electronic books using our Electronic Resource Management system.  Our ERM is through our ILS which is Innovative Interfaces.  In the video we discussed how we are using our ERM to manage our ebooks and what our patrons will see and how they might use it as well as what the librarians will see and how they use it.  (Side Note: We didn’t mention this in the video but you don’t have to have III to have an ERM, many other ILS providers have ERMs, including systems specializing in small to medium size medical libraries.)

Our video was only meant to be 4 minutes and I feel like we could have talked longer on the topic. After the webinar on November 10th I will post about some of things that I think I would have liked to have said or expanded upon if we had more time.  It is easier to do it after the webinar so I when I refer to things, you will have already seen the video.

Hospital Switching from Pagers to Smartphones: One CIO’s Experience

Emory University Hospital is in the midst of three year movement to switch approximately 6,000 pagers used by medical staff at the hospital to cell phones. The article, Inside a Smartphone Rollout With Life and Death Consequences, is an interesting look at what a hospital CIO needs to consider when switching from a pager system to smartphones. 

Now that doctors are really beginning to snatch up smartphones and using them in their daily practice to answer questions there are a whole host of other issues that must be addressed and the article specifically mentions three:

  1. Reliability- of the device and of the person using the device. Interesting thing to consider, pagers are often worn outside of clothing, smartphones (probably because they are bigger than a pager) are often in pockets and purses and left on desks.  The pager is easily heard, the smartphone (depending on its location) not so much. 
  2. Can you hear me now? – Coverage, coverage, coverage.  Multi carrier coverage is a big problem as well as building challenges (we have all found that dead cell zone in our hospital and it isn’t always the basement). 
  3. Fragile – Granted a pager probably won’t work if it accidentally falls in the toilet, but drop it down a flight of stairs and it has a fair shot of still working.  Try that with a smartphone and some would shatter on the first step of the stairs.  In addition to owner created hazards, smartphones have more software and have more “parts” that can “break” with the latest software upgrade. 

These three things are definitely issues that must be addressed if a system is to move off the pager and on to the smartphone.  However, one thing to note is these issues are just dealing with the practical issues of paging doctors through their smartphone.  The whole reason doctors and other healthcare professionals want and use smartphones is that they can use them for so much more than paging.  A hospital begins to run into far bigger obstacles when they must address EMR and smartphone accessibility, patient/doctor notes on smartphones, and what happens if somebody loses the phone. 

Still it is an interesting quick read article, it would be interesting if we could hear more about Emory University Hospital’s transition and the unexpected positives negatives they encountered in their move.

Section Planning from a Newbie’s Perspective Part 4

It has been quite a while since I wrote about section planning from a newbie’s perspective, (last entry was Section Planning From a Newbie’s Perspective: Part 3).  A lot of the section planner’s work is at the beginning of their term.  Once the 2011 programs are submitted to MLA in July, we have a bit of a breather until September/October.  In September we send out a call for posters and papers to our section members and in October we ask for volunteers  from our section to review the abstracts submitted for MLA’s 2011 Annual Meeting.  We also sit and cross our fingers that people are submitting abstracts to our programs and that we get enough volunteers to review the abstracts. 

In case you are interested you still have time submit your abstract for the 2011 meeting, just review the instructions in the poster or paper FAQs on MLA’s site, then begin the online submission process. Submission deadline is November 1, 2010.

Once we have the list of people willing to review the abstracts we send that information to MLA.  MLA will contact them with information and instructions for reviewing the abstracts and the date they need to finish their reviews.  Everything is done online through OASIS and I have been a reviewer a few times and it is a pretty interesting and painless process.   

Starting October 1st, section program planners are allowed to seek and contact vendors to help defray the costs of the program.  It is the responsibility of each section of MLA to pay for their sponsored program.  So to answer a question some people might have about joining sections and the costs associated with it; some of your section membership fees might be going to the cost of your section’s MLA programming.  You aren’t just paying section dues just for the sake of it.  What kind of costs are there for a program?  Well Internet and the big screen people display their Power Point slides on aren’t free, they cost money.  Some sections have outside speakers that they reimburse for travel.  Some sections are able to cover the costs of the program, while others are not and they do some fundraising.  This is the time they are allowed to start that process.

So I think I have brought you up to speed with what is involved in being a section planner for an MLA annual meeting.  For more information on what is like to be a section program planner for an MLA meeting go to:

I will continue to provide posts about the section planning process every so often until MLA 2011 actually happens.  Hopefully, these posts will help demystify the process so others who have never had the opportunity to be a section planner can learn about it and be interested in it enough to volunteer to participate in their section.  You don’t have to be a section planner to participate, as you can see your section needs your help with a lot of other things such as reviewing abstracts and being a program moderator (more on program moderators in a future post).

E-Books Virtual Summit

Library Journal recently sponsored the online virtual conference, “ebooks: Libraries @ the Tipping Point.”  Bad news is the summit is over, it was held September 29, 2010.  Good news is they recorded the sessions and they are available. The archive of the summit is available for $19.95, all you have to do is fill and pay for registration before December 31, 2010. 

For those of you who already registered all you have to do is enter your email and password to access the archives. 

Access to the archives of the summit for $20 is a good deal, but I understand you may be unwilling to fork over your Friday night pizza money without knowing about the content of the summit. 

According to the website librarians discussed:

  • Librarians and library administrators learned about current best practices for library ebook collections and explored new and evolving models for ebook content discovery and delivery.
  • Publishers and content creators learned how to effectively identify and develop the right content offerings for each segment of the relatively untapped library ebook market.
  • Ebook platform vendors and device manufacturers learned just what libraries need and want in this rapidly changing environment.

If you are still undecided, The Librarian in Black, Sarah Houghton-Jan, wrote six blog posts on the summit discussing the keynote speakers and issues like ebooks impact on libraries, publishers and readers. 

If after reading through the description of the summit and Sarah’s blog posts, you find the information interesting, you might want to spring for the archive.  It might also serve as a nice spring board for the next MLA webcast ABCs of E-books: Strategies for the Medical Library and get your mind ready so that you have some good questions or discussion points to bring up during the webcast.

Nominate a Medical Librarian as a Mover and Shaker

Library Journal is seeking nominations for emerging leaders in the libraries.  Their 10th Annual Movers and Shakers will profile 50 or more up-and-coming people in the world of libraries.  These people are innovative, creative, and making a difference in libraries.  Anybody working in the library field (librarians, vendors, paraprofessionals, etc.) moving libraries forward are eligible. 

DEADLINE: November 1, 2010

Ok medical librarians, they are looking for fifty or more people to be LJ’s Movers and Shakers so we have got to make sure we have a good showing. I know there are a bunch of us doing some really cool things out there and we need to make sure that we aren’t the only ones who know it.  They deserve recognition from the rest of the library world too.   Put on your thinking caps and nominate somebody.

Go to http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA606274.html to nominate somebody working in medical, hospital, or health science libraries who is moving us forward and doing innovative things. 

The process is online and easy!

Safari Books Online Now Available to Mobile Devices, Just Not for Library Subscribers

Earlier this week I saw this recent announcement stating Safari Books are now available on mobile devices and mobile devices users can now share content using the “Share This” feature, take notes, tag, and save content in custom folders too. 

I was excited about this.  I know there are some people who don’t like or understand the idea of reading an article let alone a book on a 2.5×3 inch screen, but there are more and more people doing it these days.  It is a growing usage trend.  So I figured if Safari is offering it then it would be nice to offer it to people in my library who don’t mind reading on a small screen. 

What a disaster.  First I went to Safari through our library page (on my iPhone) and got the same old Safari screen that is not optimized for a mobile device.  So I decided to try the URL that is mentioned on Safari’s website http://m.safaribooksonline.com.  That didn’t work, it wanted me to login and is primarily for non-library users.  However that made me sit back and think and I realized we get our Safari books through Proquest.  So I tried adding the mobile part to the Proquest URL.  No dice.  Since I am on an iPhone and my hospital blocks access to the Intranet to iPhones, iPads, and other “non approved” wireless devices, I thought my institutional access was the culprit.  Nope.

It was only after I started looking around on the Internet to see if others had similar problems did I discover two things. First, the announcement about mobile devices is kind of old (despite BusinessWire’s September 27, 2010 date) because O’Reilly announced the beta version of Safari’s mobile site back in February 2009. Second, and more importantly, Proquest does not have a mobile version of Safari Online for institutions.  According to The Distant Librarian who contacted ProQuest Technical Support, he was told, “The Mobile version of Safari Online is not available with an institutional account. I can send this on to the Product Manager as an enhancement but would not be able to give a time frame for when or even if it would be implemented.”   He sent a request to Proquest for mobile access to the Safari books for institutions and as of June 27, 2010, Proquest has not responded.   

I have done several Google searches to try and figure out if Proquest has decided to offer mobile access to Safari books to institutional subscribers and I haven’t found anything to indicate that they are even looking into it.  I would love to hear from somebody at Proquest or from any other librarians who can either tell me that yes, Proquest is working on mobile friendly access or no, Proquest is not interested in providing mobile friendly access…and why.  Just looking at the comments on Paul’s site (The Distant Librarian) and based on the growing number of mobile users this is a feature that is wanted by users.

WiFi Access at MLA’s 2011 Annual Meeting

I just received an email from Section Council regarding Internet access at the meeting and I asked if I could share it and I can, so here is the email. 

MLA Headquarters reports that Internet access in guest rooms in MLA block at the Hilton will be wireless and without charge.

Most meetings will be at the convention center, a short walk from the hotel.   At the convention center MLA will offer the Internet Cafe with wireless WIFI, as in the past. 

To expand access, NPC and staff are looking into ways MLA can provide attendees WIFI access at plenary sessions. The technology is there to do it. Our challenge is being able to cover the cost.  Currently, we are getting bids and looking a potential fund raising sources.

Internet connectivity is becoming a must in our lives and I am happy to forward the news that MLA is working on Internet access for attendees and is making progress towards connectivity for the meeting.