Inaugural Meeting for Hospital Librarians Group

Posted by Margot M on August 9th, 2021 Posted in: Communities of Interest
Tags: DOCLINE, hospital librarians, hospital library advisory group

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On August 5, 2021, Region 7 held the inaugural meeting of the Hospital Libraries Advisory Group (HLAG). Fifty librarians joined us to learn about this newly configured advisory group. Region 7 will host annual meetings and distribute an annual survey to gauge the interests and needs of hospital librarians. We will bring input directly to NNLM to inform the development of national webinars and Moodle courses. Anyone with an interest in Region 7 hospital libraries is welcome to join HLAG!

In addition to HLAG meetings and surveys, Region 7 will conduct virtual site visits to learn about the hospital library workplace. We will attempt to make a few in-person site visits as well. We plan to host 1-2 in-person meetings for peer-to-peer sharing. Let’s hope that the virus numbers allow us to meet in-person over the next five years.

We polled attendees about preferred communication methods. Receiving newsletters and listserv postings through email is popular, and LinkedIn emerged as a secondary source of work-related notifications. Among the attendees, Twitter ranked far below email and LinkedIn. Several people noted that their hospitals prohibited access to Twitter and LinkedIn.

NNLM is developing training for hospital librarians who are learning to support data access, data management, data analysis and data sharing. Our courses will help learners attain the Data Services Specialization certificate from the Medical Library Association. New to NNLM! The National Center for Data Science is launching for 2021-2026. Region 7 will be working with the New York University Health Sciences Library to deliver training and educational programming in data sciences. We will share more information in the near future.

The National DOCLINE Coordination Office was discontinued in April 2021, and DOCLINE support returned to the Regions for 2021-2026. The Regions are still figuring out what this means, beyond opening new DOCLINE accounts and adding new users to existing DOCLINE accounts. Region 7 is curious about hospital librarians’ experiences with DOCLINE. We went into breakout sessions to discuss DOCLINE, and then came together to share concerns.

After the meeting, one attendee sent this list of concerns:

1. Reports – need to be able to export them properly to Excel!!! The copy and paste workaround suggested on the webpage does not work well at all.
2. Embargos – DOCLINE holdings clearly have a place to indicate this, but the routing algorithm doesn’t use it which results in a lot of unfilled and delayed filled requests
3. Batch Requests – for institutions who receive a lot of requests, only being able to enter 5 at a time is aggravating and hinders work productivity.
4. Supplemental Material – there isn’t any way to indicate if holdings include supplemental material or not. It would be helpful to be able to route just to libraries that have that access if those are requested.
5. And finally – not being able to request print material from NLM is very frustrating.

The group supported the idea of auditing DOCLINE users in Region 7. Several people reported instances of non-responsive users, especially after the elimination of community hospital libraries. There are 276 DOCLINE libraries in Region 7. An audit is a worthy endeavor, especially for those of us who like clean data. We will report back on how Region 7 will proceed with this task.

If you are interested in receiving the recording of this meeting, please email Margot Malachowski at the link below.

Webinar Planning: Cyber Security for Hospital Librarians

In December, we plan to offer a webinar on “Cyber Security for Hospital Librarians”. Last year, the hospital at the University of Vermont experienced a ransomware attack. We are reaching out to those librarians to see if anyone can speak to how that impacted the library. If you have experienced ransomware attacks or are in contact with a hospital IT person who could speak about this issue for our December webinar, please contact us using the email link below.