This week I was at the SCC/MLA annual meeting in Fort Worth teaching a class. I got in a little early and I was glad I did.
Karen Keller, Dena Hanson, Lynne Harmon, and Barbara Steffensen at Cook Children’s Medical Center presented a paper on the creation of a tool for non-academic health sciences librarians to measure the value of research performed by librarians. The tool attempts to measure the value and establish an ROI of librarian expertise. The abstract of the paper can be found in their online program(pg 25 of 36 in PDF viewer)
I found this to be really interesting. Medical librarians have been looking for ways quantify what we do and put a value on it to our administration. I did not get a chance to listen to the actual paper presentation. I found out about it because I attended the Hospital Librarianship Forum where we discussed ideas and issues facing hospital librarians. In the forum Karen mention her tool. Unfortunately the tool is not available. The are still testing it.
Even though it it isn’t ready for prime time I wanted to blog about it to make sure it is on the radar for librarians who might also be interested. So keep your eyes and ears open.