James Shedlock

An Academic Medical Library Using LibQUAL+: The Experience of the Galter Health Sciences Library, Northwestern University

Abstract The Galter Health Sciences Library has used the LibQUAL+™ survey in two consecutive years. Both sets of survey results provided useful information to understand how users perceive the quality of Galter Library services. The first years relatively positive results offered a useful and hopeful benchmark. The second years results provided more of a “wake up” call to explore in depth what users want and need from the library. Peer comparison also offers an additional insight as to where Galter staff can look to find models and/or best practices when exploring specific remedies that would improve services to Galter users.

The Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries Annual Statistics: an exploratory twenty-five-year trend analysis.

This paper presents an exploratory trend analysis of the statistics published over the past twenty-four editions of the Annual Statistics of Medical School Libraries in the United States and Canada. The analysis focuses on the small subset of nineteen consistently collected data variables (out of 656 variables collected during the history of the survey) to provide a general picture of the growth and changing dimensions of services and resources provided by academic health sciences libraries over those two and one-half decades. The paper also analyzes survey response patterns for U.S. and Canadian medical school libraries, as well as osteopathic medical school libraries surveyed since 1987. The trends show steady, but not dramatic, increases in annual means for total volumes collected, expenditures for staff, collections and other operating costs, personnel numbers and salaries, interlibrary lending and borrowing, reference questions, and service hours. However, when controlled for inflation, most categories of expenditure have just managed to stay level. The exceptions have been expenditures for staff development and travel and for collections, which have both outpaced inflation. The fill rate for interlibrary lending requests has remained steady at about 75%, but the mean ratio of items lent to items borrowed has decreased by nearly 50%.

Case study: the Health SmartLibrary experiences in web personalization and customization at the Galter Health Sciences Library, Northwestern University

QUESTION How can the users access to health information, especially full-text articles, be improved? The solution is building and evaluating the Health SmartLibrary (HSL). SETTING The setting is the Galter Health Sciences Library, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University. METHOD The HSL was built on web-based personalization and customization tools: My E-Resources, Stay Current, Quick Search, and File Cabinet. Personalization and customization data were tracked to show user activity with these value-added, online services. MAIN RESULTS Registration data indicated that users were receptive to personalized resource selection and that the automated application of specialty-based, personalized HSLs was more frequently adopted than manual customization by users. Those who did customize customized My E-Resources and Stay Current more often than Quick Search and File Cabinet. Most of those who customized did so only once. CONCLUSION Users did not always take advantage of the services designed to aid their library research experiences. When personalization is available at registration, users readily accepted it. Customization tools were used less frequently; however, more research is needed to determine why this was the case.

Promoting and teaching the history of medicine in a medical school curriculum.

Since 2004, the Galter Health Sciences Library staff has participated in years I and II of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicines medical doctor (MD) curriculum by offering a history of medicine seminar as part of the “Patient, Physician and Society” (PPS) course. The seminars goals are to introduce students to the librarys rare books and its special collections; to learn the social, cultural, and ethical aspects of medicine; and to improve communication skills. Because the MD curriculum is based on lifelong learning principles, students are encouraged to explore their interests in history by selecting a disease, health condition, or medical specialty and tracing it back in time; presenting their observations of what they learned to the seminar; and engaging in discussion about rare books and their content as a means of learning about the history of their profession.

Building the electronic health sciences library for the twenty-first century: the Galter Library experience.

Constructing home pages for World-Wide Web access has become a major activity in academic health sciences libraries. At the Northwestern University, Galter Health Sciences Library staff are creating the librarys new health information system using Web resources and integrating them with existing library systems-NUmed (OVID MEDLINE) and LUIS/NUcat (NOTIS). Development of Web pages, including selection and organization of electronic information, has become the building process for the electronic library. Selection, organization, design, and construction are important factors in the creation of an efficient and useful information system. Using resources like the World-Wide Web and tools like Netscape, library staff are designing an interface, defining policies and guidelines, and creating the tools that will give users easy access to local and international electronic, scholarly information resources. In this paper, the process used at Northwestern is shown as a model of an electronic health sciences library for the twenty-first century.

Linda J. Walton Medical Library Association President, 2014-2015.

Linda J. Walton, the Medical Library Association’s (MLA’s) 2014– 2015 president, is a great person to know. I have been privileged to know her via MLA, through her work in two Regional Medical Library (RML) programs, and on the job (she served as associate director at the Galter Health Sciences Library when I served as the library director). She has energy, warmth, humor, and a smart sense about people and is practical, almost to a fault. She is a committed professional with genuine concerns about issues facing librarianship in general and the medical library profession in particular. A telling characteristic is that she speaks her mind, usually in a way that a listener can appreciate (once they get over the shock of her startling questions or comments). This polite bluntness often advances the point of the conversation because more than anything else, Linda is all about getting things done. More on these characteristics later, but first it is worthwhile to understand where MLA’s next president came from and what produced these special characteristics. Linda is a true child of the Midwest. A native of Crawfordsville, Indiana, Linda’s roots are pure American on both sides of the family. While she is not into genealogical research, she knows her families’ lineages go back generations to colonial times. Like recent MLA presidents (Dixie A. Jones, AHIP, Ruth Holst, AHIP, FMLA, and Mark E. Funk, AHIP, FMLA), Linda hails from small-town America. Crawfordsville is in west central Indiana, and even though it is a small town (the city government brags that it regularly appears in the list of ‘‘the top 100 best small towns in America’’ [1]), it has several claims to fame: it is the home of Wabash College, a highly ranked, all male (still!) liberal arts college; it is the home of Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ; and more importantly to basketball fans, Crawfordsville lays claim to hosting Indiana’s first official basketball game in 1894 and the state’s first intercollegiate basketball game (Wabash versus Purdue), also in 1894 [2]. (For those who don’t know, basketball is Indiana’s state ‘‘religion.’’) In other words, Crawfordsville is not a bad place to live. Still, Linda wasn’t buying it: she wanted to get out of town so she could see the world. Education was her exit route. Linda’s first exit out of Crawfordsville was attending college at Indiana University (IU). Close to home and affordable (with a Pell

Cecile E. Kramer, AHIP, FMLA, 1926–2007

Cecile E. Kramer, AHIP, FMLA, served as the director of the Archibald Church Medical Library of Northwestern University from 1975 until 1991. Prior to coming to Northwestern, she worked at Columbia Universitys medical library at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. In retirement, she continued to volunteer her time at the library of Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton. A native of New York City, Cele started work as a secretary to Estelle Brodman in Columbias medical library when she graduated from high school in 1944. Cele completed a bachelors degree from Hunter College, City University of New York, in 1956, while working full time. In 1960, she received a masters degree from Columbias School of Library Service. Cele served as an assistant librarian at Columbia from 1963, until she left Columbia for Northwestern in 1974. When Cele would recollect her years at Columbia, she spoke excitedly about the librarians relationship with faculty and students and the librarians role in organizing information. She recalled the work of creating bibliographies for Columbias Parkinson Clinic in the days when typewriters and photocopiers were the available technologies. She highlighted what it was like to do this type of precomputer literature searching in the obituary she wrote for her boss, Tom Fleming, director of Columbias health sciences library [1]. This manual labor involved intimate contact with the medical literature, which eventually became her hallmark in building the collections at Northwestern. Reference work also gave her the satisfaction of mentoring younger librarians, such as the late Irwin Pizer, who worked with her in compiling and then typing references for bibliographies on three-by-five cards [2]! During her years at Columbia, Cele contributed much to the Medical Library Association (MLA). She served as secretary for the New York-New Jersey Chapter in 1958 to 1960 and then served twice as chair of the chapter, in 1965–1966 and 1973–1974. She also worked on the Ad Hoc Committee to Review the Goals and Structure of the Medical Library Association from 1969 to 1972. Cele contributed a great deal of energy and input into MLAs continuing education (CE) program. She served as course instructor for CE 5, “Human Factors in Medical Library Administration,” in the mid-1960s and again in the mid-1970s. She also taught CE 4, “Basic Biomedical Reference Tools and Their Uses.” She served on MLAs Committee on Continuing Education in the mid-1960s and was the MLA representative (1961–1964) to a Joint Committee on Library Education. She also served on the National Program Committees CE subcommittee for the 1978 annual meeting in Chicago. When Cele moved to Chicago, she continued her teaching activities as an adjunct member of the library science faculty at Rosary College (now Dominican University). Cele taught the medical bibliography course with the aid of her senior Northwestern staff during the late 1970s and into the 1980s. After moving to Chicago to accept the directorship of Northwesterns medical library, Cele became MLAs first volunteer editor for the MLA News in 1976. She and her secretary worked tirelessly to make the MLA News as perfect as possible, a considerable chore in the days of typewriters. In her role as editor, she also served as an ex officio member of MLAs Editorial Committee for the MLA News. While at Northwestern, Cele devoted her energies to building up the collection of books and journals. Cele was of the “old school”: she believed the heart of the library was its collection, and she enjoyed the challenge of selection and collection development, building on her long familiarity with the medical literature. As times changed, Cele was willing to change with them, but up to a point. When new technologies were introduced to produce better reference service (i.e., MEDLINE), she quickly adopted them, though she herself would not necessarily be using them. Instead, she sought out the new generation of librarians who were savvy with these latest technologies and had them introduce the new services to Northwestern users, while she concentrated on obtaining the funds to make these developments standard services. Her mantra in the late 1970s and thereafter was always to make sure the librarians, especially those at the reference desk, were of service to users. Besides introducing mediated MEDLINE services to users, she quickly adopted innovations in integrated library systems, primarily the NOTIS system, which was in development at the university library on Northwesterns Evanston campus. Again, Cele made sure the medical library was the first to adopt them. The same was true when she jumped on the bandwagon of educational multimedia in the late 1970s. With the late James Eckenhoff, dean of the medical school, Cele and her staff were instrumental in building Northwesterns learning resources center. She and the dean worked at finding the funds and space, while new staff used these innovative resources to improve the librarys contributions to the medical schools curriculum. These innovations included early efforts at computer-based simulation, including the use of PLATO from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and clinical case simulations from Ohio State University. The library at this time also invested in the new Apple computers for medical education programs. Additional innovations that Cele started at Northwestern included a media services department for scientific photography and video production for educational training and a computer-based system for image processing. Celes last major contribution at Northwestern was helping Harry Beaty secure the Galter gift to the medical school library. These funds provided for the much needed renovation and expansion of the librarys physical facilities [3]. She knew at the time that she was at the end of her active career, and because she was not going to “live in the new library,” she decided to retire and pass the planning effort onto her successor. She retired to Florida to be close to her family. Other than work, family was central to her life. When she moved to Chicago in the mid-1970s, she also relocated her mother and aunt so that she could support them, and, as their health declined, Cele pulled back on her professional commitments to be with them. Likewise, she wanted to be close to her brother and his family as she aged. Cele, though, was not one to sit around her townhouse complex pool or play mahjong; even leisurely reading was not her thing to do. Instead, Cele took a volunteer job on the serials reference desk at the FAU library. She enjoyed “going to work” two days a week because she would stay active in something she enjoyed so much: helping students find answers in their searches for information. Cele had an affinity for the FAU students because they shared her own experience of holding down full-time jobs and going to school in their off hours. Cele stayed in touch with Northwesterns medical school development office and would assist their visits to alumni in the Boca Raton– north Miami area. Cele also volunteered to serve as the newsletter editor for the local chapter of Hadassah, the Jewish womens organization. Between family activities and her “work,” Cele maintained an active life until declining health held her back. She mentored three different library directors (the two authors of this obituary and Ellen Nagle, AHIP, former director of the biomedical library at the University of Minnesota) and a number of local area hospital librarians as well. She could show impatience at times when things did not go her way or systems became overly bureaucratic. Her temper would flare, but she was never vindictive, and she was quick to laugh. She cherished her staff and made working for her never boring, but full of surprises and often fun. She frequently flew by the seat of her pants and was not overly impressed with strategic planning. She could be very creative with finances, especially if stretching a dollar could secure more volumes for the library. Above all, she relied on personal relationships as a mechanism for managing the library. As an example, many department chairs would meet with her in her office to discuss the collections as well as the state of the medical school. This was her style, and many in the medical school came to recognize and appreciate it. Often, she was the sole female at the senior administrative meetings in the medical school or the faculty senate council. She had a passion for libraries and for her family and made them both the focal points of her life.

The Galter Health Sciences Library at Northwestern University: a library for the 21st century

Initiated to increase space, renovation planning for Northwestern Universitys Galter Health Sciences Library evolved into a process for developing a more technology-centered library. Design focused on correcting structural problems and providing greater access to technology. Space was redesigned for functionality and flexibility. Design features included a new entrance, relocated and expanded learning resource center; certain limitations remained. The planning process involved all major groups on campus; construction will be phased.

Air Pollution Information Resources

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the concepts in information management that apply to any scientific field. Although most research topics are expressed in narrow terms, the volume of available resources is vast. The literature search begins by analyzing the information problem and then identifies the type of literature likely to satisfy that need. Various stages of the research process represent different phases of information transfer or dissemination, and the evolutionary process of scientific research is reflected in different publication formats. Original reports of data can span a variety of formats: scholarly journals, conference reports, dissertations, patents, and even copies of government regulations. Because of the potential scattering of relevant literature across many disciplines, a corresponding array of highly specialized and multidisciplinary indexes and abstracts serves to organize and help access the journal literature according to subject, author, and other elements. The purpose of published compilations is to identify a disciplines literature in an organized and efficient manner. Information problems encompassing more than one topic involve a series of steps well beyond quick referral to a specialty text. Computers are now routinely used to produce most significant indexes and abstracts.