The OERC Is On The Road in April

Posted by nnlmneo on April 6th, 2016 Posted in: Blog

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The OERC staff will be putting on some miles this month. Karen and Cindy are slated to present and teach at various library conferences and meetings. If you happen to be at any of these events, please look for us and say “hello.”  Here is the April itinerary: 

Cindy will participate in a panel presentation titled “Services to Those Who Serve: Library Programs for Veterans and Active Duty Military Families” at the Public Library Association’s 2016 conference in Denver. The panel presentation will be held from 10:45 – 11:45 am, April 7. She and Jennifer Taft, who is now with Harnett County Public Library,  will present a community assessment project they conducted for the Cumberland County Public Library, described here in the November/December 2014 edition of Public Libraries.

Karen will conduct the OERC workshop “Planning Outcomes-Based Outreach Programs” on April 8 for the Joint Meeting of the Georgia Health Sciences Library Association and the Atlanta Health Science Library Consortium in Decatur, GA. This workshop teaches participants how to develop logic models for both program and evaluation planning.

 Cindy and Karen will facilitate two different sessions for the Texas Library Association’s annual conference, both on April 20 in Houston. One session will be a large-group participatory evaluation exercise to gather ideas from the TLA membership about how  libraries can become more welcoming to diverse populations. The second is an 80-minute workshop on participatory evaluation methods, featuring experiential learning exercises about Appreciative Inquiry, 1-2-4-All, Photovoice, and Most Significant Change methods.

Cindy will join the NN/LM Middle Atlantic Region and the Pennsylvania Library Association to talk about evaluation findings from a collaborative health literacy effort conducted with 18 public libraries across the state. The public libraries partnered with health professionals to run health literacy workshops targeted at improving consumers’ ability to research their own health concerns and talk more effectively with their doctors. The public librarians involved in this initiative worked together to design an evaluation questionnaire that they gave to participants at the end of their workshops. The combined effort of the cohort librarians allowed the group to pool a substantial amount of evaluation data. Cindy will facilitate a number of participatory evaluation exercises to help the librarians interpret the data, make plans for future programming, and develop a communication plan that will allow them to publicize the value of the health literacy initiative to various stakeholders. The meeting will be held April 29 in Mechanicsburg, PA.

In addition, Cindy will be attending a planning meeting at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda in mid-April with Directors, Associate Directors, and Assistant Directors from the NN/LM. Our library, the University of Washington Health Sciences Library, will receive cooperative agreements for both the NN/LM Pacific Northwest Regional Medical Library and the NN/LM Evaluation Office, which will replace the OERC on May 1. (You can see the announcement here.)  We will let you know more about the NEO later, except to say that we will be moving into the same positions in the NEO that we hold with the OERC. You have not heard the end of us!

Although we will be on the road quite a bit, rest assured we will not let our loyal readers down. So please tune in on Fridays for our weekly posts.