We have traditionally offered a suite of "online tutorials" through our library website. Two years ago we totally revised two of these which we new were heavily used (from search logs), one on Citing and Referencing, the other on EndNote. Others still in the old style include How to do research on the Internet, How to develop a search strategy, and various subject guides. Librarians would like to update these and present them in the same format as the other two new tutorials. The burning question is whether there is still a need for these tutorials, whether they will attract use. Anecdotally we hear that students today do not read as much as students in past years. We have conducted a recent study into our various 'help' publications and found that many people first use trial and error rather than look for help. Also, since the tutorials were originally developed we are increasingly offering targetted learning materials through our Course Management System, within academic course units. Should we redevlop further tutorials on our public site and if so, which topics would be most appropriate?

Oops, I did not identify myself re:online tutorials (first time using this kind of software): Vivienne Bernath, vivienne.bernath@lib.monash.edu.au.

It's 11.30 pm Friday, end of first week of semester, and after a birthday dinner for my cousin, my excuses for embarrassing spelling mistakes above 'knew', 'redevelop'.
I am however happy to be experiencing this method of communicating and looking forward to reading other people's messages.

My burning issue is similar but possibly more complicated. It concerns library induction. We get a mention at Trust inductions and also have a display board. We do lots of 1 to 1 inductions for new clinical staff and we have been considering a developing a web-based induction for a variety of reasons eg to save staff time, to raise awareness of our website, to save community users having to come to the library. So the question is "What evidence is there that a web based induction is as effective as 1 to 1 in an NHS setting offering services to hospital based and PCT staff?" Problems include: what is 'effective'? How do you measure it? Is a generic induction feasible for a wide range of users? What are the set up costs? Even if the costs are high are there benefits that would justify them? And so on...

Vivienne's example seems to me an excellent demonstration of why EBLIP is a good idea! There is so much I would like to know - how long would it take to produce new tutorials, what costs are associated, how are they marketed, do academics recommend them to their students, if people adopt a trial and error approach, could the tutorials be written as trouble shooting guides? You need some answers before you can decide how to proceed!

In my experience, i saw in one of the older organisation, there was one burning issue was proper usage of library and its services by staff and Students.

We started attracting users by reaching out to their extent by enhancing the library services thro automation, proper self-use Reference Library (with easy search facility), proper user orientation, extending the library hours, etc. At the later stage, we observed at the purpose and solution took for this was successful and showed tremendous usage.

Pauline, now I wish we were face to face, so many questions and comments: How do we know what is most important to the new clinical staff when they join your organisation? What do they really want/need to know? What should induction cover, whether it is face to face, 1 to 1 or web-based? (By the way, what are PCT staff?) Are some things better presented as self-service because they are straight information, others in person to allow interaction? Could a web-based induction suit busy people better than a scheduled session with a librarian? If a web-based induction included a compulsory self-test would this be better than a session with a librarian where there is no check of understanding?
Thanks for your comments on my question. We do have cost and time information from the first two tutorials. Some online tutorials are recommended by academics, but increasingly online assessment-related learning is now delivered through the Learning Management System, not the public website. However the LMS generally limits access to particular cohorts and is not available to people outside our institution, while tutorials on the public site are linked to by others. Should this be a factor in our decision-making? The LMS is much easier for individual librarians to manage and maintain. More questions than answers at this stage ...

Perhaps one question to ask is : Are all masters students created equal ? i.e. Do they are need the same information, do the same type of research, follow the same lines of inquiry? As a generalist hospital librarian and a solo, I need to pass on search skills information to many different groups. Although a generalist strategy works for almost everyone at the beginning - Pubmed is always a great place for them to begin searching and practice because it is well laid out and documented, I find that as the various clients ( nurses, physios, dietary personnel, pharmacists etc ) progress and need to explore the literature and databases particular to their field of practice, they often need one on one teaching.

Again there is the concept of numbers. If I have one speech therapist a year coming on service, is it worth my time to prepare a full tutorial for that person or would it be more time effective to sit with them, judge their level of current knowledge and then go forward with that. We assume students graduating now do have a computer literacy level that they would not have had 5 years ago but I do frequently find they have only learned enough to get themselves through and truly aren't aware or don't care about the range of materials, databases etc which could make their lives easier.

A second point, in a clinical setting, the idea of two hours for a tutorial is just plain silly. Clients would have to come in on off hours, on their own time (evenings or weekends) to do it as there is neither the clinical time nor budget dollars available to release them for that long. On a one to one basis - we could do it over several lunch hour sessions. That way neither they nor I have to travel back or stay late. Fascinating as libraries, searches and databases may be - I want a life as much as they do.

As the Librarian for an organization that has recently gone through a major integration / merger with other health care organizations in our region, my burning question is: "What is the best method to provide outreach and awareness of available library / information services to health professionals that are now members of our organization?" Included within that question, is also the matter of the right timing for outreach. The period post-merger is a sensitive time as people are being very careful as to "turf" issues, as well as all of the difficulties people tend to experience when going through major changes.
A Library Services needs assessment conducted prior to this integration indicated that there was a need for marketing of library services, as many people did not seem to be aware of what services were available to them. We have now made the Library Services part of the orientation process for all new staff, including physicians. We deal with distance issues by using videoconferencing for our facilities in the region. I have been travelling more through our region providing education sessions to groups on accessing library services, as well as searching the databases. What other outreach activities have been proven to be effective? Should the librarian be an active member of various teams / committees in their organization? How effective is this membership?
Elyse, I can appreciate your comments regarding reaching the clinical staff. Clinicians are very busy and it is hard to get them away from the clinical setting for education sessions. We piloted actually taking the tutorial to them on the floors last winter. I went to the Maternal Newborn unit one afternoon to provide a pubmed session with the nursng staff there. They had a baby with an unusual condition at the time, so we were able to make the tutorial meaningful by finding articles related to the care of the baby and the mother.Overall, the feedback was positive from the nursing staff.

In our library (The Main Library of Poznan University of Medical Sciences, Poland) we have different training programs:
- for the first years students we have 2 hours of the ”library training”.
- for the students of the last year, preparing for the final work: Pubmed, Cochrane, SCI, Cinahl.
We are now revising the programs of the training for the students of the second year who are somewhere in the middle.
The question is: Should we include alternative resources like: Google Scholar, Scirus, Scopus, in our course?
Till now we were concentrated on Pubmed and our polish bibliographic databases.

I am very interested in some of the comments made about training and its delivery. Elyse, your comments about the differing needs of various health professions are very relevant to our service, based in a general hospital which provides the full range of services and employs such different types of staff. One of the client groups we would like to reach is managers, who will have very different needs from, say, nurses.

I try to tailor my training to the particular staff I am training, mainly by using relevant search examples, but this is not really possible with a larger mixed group.

However, the burning issue I am interested in is to do with current awareness. I am very interested in ways of delivering current awareness and alerting services to healthcare staff. Currently, our service is not actively providing its own alerting services but is promoting those provided by bodies such as the National Library for Health, which is very keen on RSS.

So my burning issue is whether this is an effective way of delivering current awareness services compared to email or printed formats. It seems to me that very few healthcare staff have heard of RSS feeds, let along know how to use them, but this does not necessarily mean they are not effective, it may just indicate a need for education or promotion, or the provision of really good content (the 'killer app' for RSS!).

If I were to boil this down to an answerable question, I guess it would be:

Is RSS (intervention) an effective way of providing alerting services to healthcare staff in a hospital (setting) compared to email or print delivery (comparison)?

The perspective could be one of the healthcare staff receiving the alerts, but also from the point of view of the library service providing the service (for example, is it easier or less costly?). The evaluation might be whether healthcare staff read the alerts and act on new evidence or information they find as a result of this.

Communication: having trialled numerous means of communicating with our users (meetings/SDI alerts/e-mail/discussion groups - blogs are blocked by the hospital firewall) it appears that the only effective means of spreading our message is by word of mouth - one person hears of a resource or service, and before we know it, their immediate circle are on board too. This is often how we ourselves receive relevant information and feedback too.
I know this is a variation on the themes already raised but my question is:
Before looking for more high-tech options, has anyone any evidence to show that using a "champion" from each user-group or department is an efficient way of developing a two-way communication system, and that the message does not get distorted? Is there a limit to what can be communicated in this way?

Jason I have a similar burning issue to you in relation to current awareness. I think it also links with finding out what is important to clinical staff mentioned by Vivienne. We're setting up a current awareness service and it has been challenging to find out what topics staff are interested in. We received many vague topics that have been difficult to interpret. What I'd really like to find out is what are the effective methods of providing current awareness services and what are the effective ways of disseminating these. I'd like to find out what methods are effective in gathering information and in alerting staff to up to date literature/news compared to not providing any service at all. It would be useful to find out about all the possible methods for gathering information and which are most effective, the most effective methods for delivering the information and whether the service would have any impact on the work undertaken by staff.

Elyse, I am also based at an acute general hospital and we also tend to offer one-to-one training which we try to tailor as much as possible to individual needs. We are also dealing with busy people and find that often library users are only able to spare about one hour for training - we always tell them that they can book extra training or 'phone up with queries if they need to. We have tried bigger training groups - sometimes they are successful, but sometimes, although the trainees may all be midwives, for example, their computer and searching skills can vary so widely that it csn be difficult to provide training that is suitable for the whole group.
With the focus still on training my burning question is about critical skills training which we would like to start offering shortly. We intend to offer basic courses and I would like to know the ideal number of trainees for a training group and the time to be allocated eg 1 hour, 2 hours etc? Hopefully, there will be two trainers - we would like to be able to cover the basics of critical appraisal but don't want to be too ambitious by recruiting too big a group for our first session.

I am really interested in Kim and Anne's question/comments. At the academic health library I work at, which has many affiliated hospitals, we also have a problem of marketing our services. Sadly, we do not have the excuse of having recently merged. There are in fact faculty working here who have no idea of many of the services we provide. This is compounded by the problem of the overlap in service responsibilities with the affiliated hospital libraries.
Interestingly, what we have found is that what Anne suggests is true - that is, word of mouth is often the best method of communication.

For my burning question, I'm asking something that relates to a committee I sit on. Rather than make a decision based on the opinion of committee members, I would like to use the best evidence to determine: "What is the best way to organize subject/research/course guides on the library's website?" The outcomes would be student accessibility first and foremost, but also the ease in maintaining the content and links for library staff.

"I'd really like to find out is what are the effective methods of providing current awareness services and what are the effective ways of disseminating these."

Thie above statement i just lifted from another post and it will likely serve as my burningquestion as well.

I try the various table of content things both paper and electronic and try desperately to rememeber who asked me what in the coffee line three days ago when i see something new in the press or on a blog.

I should be keeping a database of everyone who asks me a question or to keep an eye out for information on ??????
but there simply isnt the time to record and manage such a beast. how do others do it and more to the point how do you get rid of soemthing you no longer feel is effective but is dearly beloved by some very strong senior staff?.

Kim, I wonder whether you can follow up or have followed up to find out whether the Maternal Newborn nurses have used your services or searched for articles since your 'house visit' tutorial, and whether the use if any is more than by groups who have not had such tutorials. I also wonder if there are any published studies on whether clinicians who have attended tutorials are more likely to search for evidence (or use library services) than those who have not. Whenever I do a survey of one I'm told 'I don't have time to search, I learn by attending seminars, conferences, asking a trusted colleague'. In my case, a university library, we assume that because students must use scholarly literature for university work (the need) they will be better at searching the literature if they attend our classes - I'm going to do a search for evidence!

My burning questions is "how to evaluate a service desk" .... This stems from the fact that we recently combined the previously separate circulation, media, periodicals, and reference desks into one desk with two sides - one for access to materials and the other for research help. We had some sense of the problems with the old approach (but didn't gather any data systematically - though we have statistics on book check-outs, media check-outs, reference questions, etc.) but now how do we know if this new approach is working, could be improved, etc.? Some staff really like the new approach - others are less enthusiastic. We changed other things in the library at the same time so some of the problems that have come up may not have anything to do with the new desk at all. A complex but important topic for us!

There is an important initiative in my Organization. We are in the middle of the process changing from old Documentation Center model to Information & Knowledge Management Center (IKM-Center). Four months ago, we had a technical visit of our IKM Team from Regional Office and they shared with all the professional staff some presentations about what they expect with this new IKM strategy.
The burning question is: How can I change from the old to the new model trying to involve all professional staff when they never paid enough attention us?
Reasons why I have chosen this question:
• Traditionally, our services were specially focused on external users because we didn’t have much demand for information from internal ones.
• We used to prepare a monthly dissemination of all new records in the database, classified by broader subjects but the demand was very short.
• This new IKM Model means to involve all our professional staff as information officers as well. They can drive us to their national counterparts and attend their information needs. This is our challenge!

Ther range of electronic resourcesis consderably growing in my country (Senegal).
The type, quality and usefulness of these resources varies enormously for users.
At university, for initiatives like HINARI, the gatekeepers do not want to give passwords to all post-gaduate medical students and users from the clinical setting for various reasons
My burning question is should new users be made aware of the differences, benefuts and drawbacks of various kinds of resource?

Hi, I’m tempted to follow Lisa’s lead and consider how to evaluate a service, because we’re going to be in the middle of a building site when a new education building is built literally on our doorstep, and I guess users won’t use the Library in the traditional ways. However as with Vivienne training is a particular concern – our on-site courses currently take 3 hours, which is a long time away from clinical commitments, and take-up has dropped this year, may be because of short-staffing, or because we’re offering the wrong subjects. Barbara, we cover traditional databases, but do also offer sessions on looking for clinical material on Google and other Internet resources. Like Elyse and Julie I’ve been wondering what the best length of course is, and whether we should introduce a new critical skills awareness course. One-to-one is rewarding, but time-consuming, so I try not to go that route if I can group people. We used to go out to our community hospitals, but that has lapsed a little, so like Kim I’m thinking of addressing that later this year. However I think my most burning question is how to cope with the anticipated much larger intake of junior doctors starting in August than we’ve been used to, so like Pauline I’m wondering about introducing online induction. How to design it, fund it, roll it out and promote it? Would it involve any form of assessment to check their levels of involvement and understanding, etc.? If it were to be interactive in any way, how would my very small team manage it, but if there’s no assessment of take-up and understanding, how could we be sure that it’s working. What evidence is there that busy staff make time to follow and remember online inductions in their own time, rather than going to the library for personal induction when required?

Talk about "Annes" thinking the same - my burning question also is communication. Our hospital has many offsite campuses and communicating with them is difficult to do face-to-face. We try and make a point of getting out and about as much as possible but we just don't seem to have enough time. Have tried special morning teas, featured events (i.e. Library Week)but we still meet clients who tell us "we didn't know there was a Library". We have a Library Advisory Committee that has quarterly meetings and this is has representatives from all disciplines in the hospital. Where to next? Must admit I am thinking of a high-tech solution but still would rathher something more personal. Can we look at high-tech versus one-on-one communication?

Suzanne Lewis (Group 13), Northern Sydney Central Coast Health, NSW, Australia. Wow, I am blown away by all the burning questions posted so far. Training seems to be a huge issue - online or face to face, group or one-to-one, are the benefits worth the cost, etc. Questions about the best/most effective outreach, current awareness and library marketing strategies also seem to be prominent.Kim Hancock's questions re the best time/method to provide outreach to staff of recently merged healthcare organisations also struck a nerve with me as my health service has recently merged with a neighbouring health service. However I would like to post a burning question related to Lisa's question on how to evaluate a service desk. I would like to evalute a current practice in our library - accessioning hard copy journals. The number of hard copy journals we subscribe to has halved in recent years and they are hardly ever touched in our library - online is king as far as our users are concerned. However we still have a library technician checking in each issue and claiming. This takes a lot of time for, I suspect, very little return to our users. This question was prompted by an article I read recently in the journal Serials Librarian entitle "How I learned to stop worrying and give up journal check-in".The author outlines the reason for giving up journal check-in and binding in a University library with 2,700 print subscriptions and the results of this change. Bottom line - no reduction of service to patrons, huge amounts of staff time saved plus the cost of binding. So .... I guess my question is, "In a hospital library, would ceasing to check in hard copy serial issues have any detrimental effect on the service provided to patrons?" or, "In a hospital library, could staff time spent checking in hard copy journal issues be better spent on enhancing services associated with online journal access, eg. document delivery services?"

Jean Truebridge, Group 19

My burning question is whether to change from a paper collection of journals to as many as possible online. Approximately 43 of our journals are online and about 15 paper only. I roughly added the titles just now and am surprised at the proportion of our titles available online.

This is a conservative Association and many of the members are very happy with the paper format that they are used to. However increasingly, I feel, members are attracted to the online format, especially coming to their desktop.

Many members (2500 approx in Victoria) are in country areas. Members can access the library 24/7. Most rural areas in Victoria (but not all) have a reasonable broadband facility and most members would work in a country town or perhaps a Health Centre / Rural Hospital.

There is not much point in having a journal online if members have to travel to the library in suburban Melbourne and then have to print out the required articles in the library. They might as well photocopy the required articles from the printed volume!

I am also interested in Suzanne Lewis' ideas on not checking in nor binding journal issues. It certainly would save a lot of time and also money in binding, but possibly a lot of time would be spent in looking for journal issues that had never been received.

However, a couple of our titles are now only available online so either we get them online or not at all. Both are popular titles with dentists.

My training of dentists here is one-to-one, when they come to the library.

Idoia Gaminde (group 20). I do manage just a Virtual Library, meaning that everything is virtual. We do coordinate online access for the whole regional health area, with 5 traditional libraries based at hospitals. Our role is to buy evidence-based electronic resources (i.e. Clinical Evidence, Uptodate, Cochrane Library, etc.), as well as online access to journals subscribed by the libraries. As resources are scarce, and journal prices high, our main problem is how to make decisions on what online journals to buy? The ones that we already have in paper to ease access for users, or go for new ones –just online no paper -? Who should take part in making the decisions? My burning question could be this one: What are the key elements that should be taken into account to prioritise among journals and among evidence-based resources?

Paul Herbert (Group 8). Just before christmas we had a promotional week in the library to try and attract more users and introduce them to the types of services we offer. We put together a little quiz on the library to try and find out what users knew about the service in general.
The most common response to the question 'What one thing would you change about the library?' was to have it situated in the main hospital building. We are situated in the education centre only a couple of minutes from the main hospital. My burning question is - Is there any evidence to suggest that libraries situated in the main hospital building attract more users than those based elsewhere in the hospital campus?

Hi Everyone! Wow - it's does certainly seem like training and current awareness are the burning issues. Like Jason, I would like to know about the benefits of RSS feeds - is there any evidence that their use is more effective than email bulletins, alerts and the like? However, interested as I am in RSS, my burning question relates to Julie's thoughts concerning CA training. Currently, we offer basic courses, which usually run for about 2 hours, where we tailor content to the needs of the group. This works well with a group who work in the same area/specialty, but can be problematic when you have a more mixed group. Our optimum group size is about 8. Any less than 4 and you may find there's too little discussion and in our experience we've found that any more than 10 and you end up with a lot of facilitation which can seem like you are forcing people to speak or shut up! Perhaps that’s where I need to improve my facilitation skills!! My burning question is - Does the evidence indicate that critical appraisal training is more effective when offered in the trainees own department/workplace, as opposed to training within the library setting? I’d like some perspective from the participants. We’ve facilitated sessions in both settings and both seem to work well, but I would like to know whether the evidence base is there to indicate whether one is more effective than the other. Outreach training is a good option, but we find sometimes that this isn’t possible and we end up with a mixed group – better housed in the library, so everyone is on neutral ground. Is the neutral ground beneficial? And does the make-up of the group affect what people are willing to say? Do groups where you work alongside each other find themselves less willing to risk their opinion or vice versa – is it a safer, more supportive environment? I seem to just be adding more questions rather than answering them! Has anyone got any opinions or suggestions?

We have had a few enquiries regarding 24hr access to our library (currently it is open 9-5pm Mon-Fri). The library was open 24hrs in the past before the library was refurbished, and there were problems with hospital staff using it as a lunch room. We do not want to dismiss the idea without investigating it completely but we want to avoid the past problems. So my burning question is " Should the library provide 24hr access to hospital staff?". We would like to know how much demand there actually is for it, the postive and negative aspects of 24hr opening, processes and costs involved, impact on library staff and how past problems can be avoided etc

I think my burning question is going to be in the same area as Ann Mulder and Paul Herbert. How can I raise the profile of my library service? I have chosen this question, because I have being working in the same post for many years now and have always had a constant battle to raise awareness of the library service. The situation is not helped by the fact that we are a large mental health trust and therefore many potential readers are scattered throughout the County. They also seem to be determined to build up their own collections of books and journals within their own departments without any reference to the library or what we can offer. The amount of duplication and subsequent waste of money must be scandalous! Like Paul, we have tried surveys, we have even tried tempting people into the library with free sandwiches, but always the response is very low.

Mariet Schepers. Our Library introduced a 1-hour Rapid Critical Appraisal session in January 2007, which replaced a 2-hour session. For this 2-hour session attendees (NHS staff and University students, mixed) needed to read a 6-page article and prepare to answer 10 CASP questions. Most attendees did not read the article, or the questions, due to time pressures and attended the session unprepared. Therefore we needed to spare 20/30 minutes reading time. This resulted in the following situation: attendees who had prepared the session were wasting their time; the trainer had to answer the questions and there was hardly any discussion. During the Rapid Critical Appraisal session, first experienced by one of the trainers during a BMA event, attendees get to read part of a 2-page abridged article and answer between 4 and 6 questions, depending on how many people attend the session. Attendees get a sheet with information on what part of the article they have to read and which questions they need to answer. My burning question is: what is the evidence that this 1-hour Rapid Critical Appraisal session is more effective than the 2-hour session regarding learning outcomes for each attendee? I have chosen this question as we are now over two months into the trial period and have not had any negative reactions. However, the trainers feel that they have not covered enough. Perhaps we send attendees away with a feeling that they have not learned much and don’t know enough to appraise an article. Due to the time limit we can only cover the basics, but is that enough to inspire attendees to seek more training specially regarding explaining statistical information in research articles.

My burning question relates to Natalie Yates'. We already offer 24hr access and find that it is well used at night and weekends. We do occassionally, as Natalie found in her library, have issues with staff bringing take away meals into the library but this happens very rarely.
There are definite advantages for staff in being able to use the library at night particularly for those who work nights or are on-call. We have self-issue, 24hr computer access, printing and photocopying availabile 24/7. I can't really think of a major disadvantage that we have come across. We have yet to evaluate this service and so we only have anecdotal evidence of its "worth" to staff and students and also the large numbers of staff and students who sign up for this scheme with each new intake.
My question relates to staffed library hours : "Do we require extended staffed hours in the evening, in addition to 24hr access?" I would be interested to know how much demand there is for library staff to be available in the evenings and the impact on the library staff/service of offering an enquiry service in the evenings.

Barbara Rosinska, your question is very interesting as we are in the same situation with our Health Library, which services the Health Faculty community (students and staff) and NHS employees in our area. We feel that we cannot leave Google Scholar, Scirus, Scopus out of our sessions any longer, as most customers search these search engines for (health) information rather than use the databases bought by the university/NHS. So it is not right to ignore these resources and act as if they do not exist. We have decided to start with familiarising ourselves with Google Scholar, etc. Thus, we will know the difference between the resources and perhaps we can make a case for the traditional databases on evidence. Once we know more about Google Scholar, etc we would like to start 1-hour sessions on Google Scholar, Scirus and Scopus. If we, the trainers, are well-informed about the pros and cons, we can then point this out clearly and engage attendees to get trained and start using the resources which the university and the NHS pay for. From Mariet Schepers

With regard to 24 hour library access (Natalie & Hannah), we also have 24/7 access although the library is only staffed between 8:30am - 5pm Mon-Fri. Theoretically, all staff have access but we find it is mostly Junior Medical Officers who use the library after hours. They have their staff ID card enabled for swipe access whereas other staff have to ask Security for the key. This may change soon as we feel it is somewhat discriminatory. Like Hannah's library, staff have self-issue,access to computers, printing and photocopying and soon will be able to watch DVD's in an area we are developing into an audiovisual "corner" - all the comforts of home!
Security gather stats of swipe card entry and also key entry so we are able to assess usage. Staff feedback is always positive and most do the right thing. We do have gripes though. We often have to clean up after the "party" people who leave food and drink containers, sweet wrappers etc. around the place. Also, the internet gets a lot of non-work-related use. We have had to cut down on the amount of paper left in the printer trays and the photocopier tray because we were going through ink cartridges and paper at an alarming rate. Oh yes - we also have items stolen! My "gripe" list might sound like good reason to shut up shop at 5pm and not to let anyone in until 8:30am next morning but we know from word of mouth and questions we've asked on hospital-wide surveys that night staff especially, who often feel left out of the loop, appreciate 24 hr access.

Helen watts Group 8
my burning question is: What, if any, evidence is there to show that quality marketing and promoting of library services to staff aids their use and understanding of the the library services in their working lives?
I work in a mental health trust that covers a very wide area. we have approxiamtely 4000 staff and 3 library staff to deliver services!A great deal of our staff work out in the community. We have recently concentrated on making available the hard copy journals of our library service points available in electronic format so that our community based staff have access to the resources on site staff have. We do not have any access to create professional looking promotional material but have to rely on the cut and stick Blue Peter approach. We use lots of electronic advertising by way of sending emails. This does tend to get us good feedback but we cannot be sure we are reaching all our staff. This could be an impossiblity? Is it worth investing/ spending precious budgets on professional marketing material to enhance and attract users?

I really like the idea of asking the question 'What one thing would you change about the library?'(see paul Herbert's comment above). In response to his burning question, my boss undertook research in 2004 entitled "why don't dispersed mental health staff use library services?" overwhelmingly the answer to this question was because they didn't have the time or inclination to travel to a library, so the siting of libraries is a very important issue. My library was recently moved after restructuring from being away from staff at the end of a long corrider that only went to the library so if you were not going there you would not just walk past it on the off chance and be attracted inside. Now I am situated next to busy wards in a area designed for research and conferences, so consequently get a lot more passing traffic which equals more use.

My burning question is how to promote to users, academic and NHS, the e-book resources that have been purchased for their use? We are in the third year of purchasing about 150 e-books for medicine and dentistry and have data showing evidence of use of this type of resource. The university as a whole now has nearly 700 titles and this will grow. The Library has yet to conclude how best to record and market ebooks. Should we continue to add catalogue records, rely on portal software and/or maintain separate web pages listing for subject areas. Double cataloguing is time-consuming (for print copy and e-book), but other methods also have their problems.

My burning question is how best to provide support for short course students, or students undertaking a course across several institutions. We have an increasing number of this type of student and many of them come from outside the UK.
At the moment I provide a half hour orientation session for them. I offer further one-to-one training in literature searching, but this offer is rarely taken up by this category of student. I have also produced some guides aimed at this user group.
These students often need to get up and running quite quickly and are usually very busy. Feedback from academics suggests that some of them are struggling to find relevant, or a good range of literature sources for their academic work.
I would like to find effective ways of reaching these students. I had thought about developing some workbooks, or online tutorials but, like Vivien Bernath, am not sure about the extent to which this type of material would be used by these students.

I agree that the siting of the library directly affects the usage of the facility. I read somewhere( wish I could remember the reference)that the average time that a potential user is willing to take to walk to an onsite library is 8 minutes! We used to be located in an old demountable building in the hospital grounds and struggled to get respectable usage stats. When our buidling had to go to make way for a new Specialist centre, we were moved to an area in the main hospital buiding quite near to the JMO lounge and the wards. Our stats improved dramatically and even though we are still down a few corridors, we are within about ten minutes walk from most areas and clients do not have to brave the weather to reach us. As our library is in a rapidly expanding private hospital and is non-profit making, we will always lose out, location-wise, to clinical needs. There is talk of a private medical school being built on site so we are hoping for centre-stage there!

Training and access seem to be high on most peoples list of priorities, but we already offer 24hr access, which is popular here, and a range of training options. However, as Kim comments, the Clinicians are busy and they, along with ward staff, can find it difficult to attend training sessions. Vivienne, it will be interesting to hear if you find the evidence you are going to search for. We feel that there could be value in offering to take our service out to the wards and clinics. So my burning question of the moment is "Is there evidence to support a Clinical Librarian role within an acute general hospital?"

I'm trying to keep up with all the new queries, comments and suggestions and really should wait to comment until I've absorbed it some more.
One thing stands out in many queries though - as a bunch, we do a lot of "pushing" of our services, but where is the "pull"? Helen and Marie mention marketing and promotion, but if we were to stand back and do nothing, what is it that would drive them to seek us out? How do you get users to articulate their needs and how they would like us to meet them?
Do users see us as part of the academic team, the health service team, general admin or as some sort of hybrid?

Evidence-based practice is becoming an increasing focus at our hospital and we are looking at the pros and cons of Clinical Librarianship. Our Medical Director has given the go ahead for us to investigate further and we are receiving mostly favourable responses from the survey we are conducting at the moment. We anticipate that it will mean an extra workload on two already pushed librarians and we know from experience that a good percentage of the lit searches we do now are providing an evidence base for patient care. My burning question is, "Is it worth establishing a new service with all its attendant marketing, evaluation, etc, etc, when we are already performing the same function, to a certain extent, under another guise?" Your comments on the success or otherwise of a similar service would be most appreciated.

In the health sciences library where I work, the reference librarians are all liaisons to the various colleges, schools or academic departments of our primary clientele. This is a service that is meant to provide "one stop shopping" so to speak for every faculty member, staff or student. The trick is to get those people to use us! So my burning question is what are the best ways for liaisons to become known to their assigned departments, etc. and to build the trust that will then have our clientele continue to seek our assistance.

A few people are looking at the issue of print versus online journals but there are drawbacks to going electronic only. The reduction in price is usually very small - seems to be typically about 10% - and what happens if the subscription ends? There seems to be no guarentee that you would keep access to the back issues paid for.

In response to one posting asking for evidence that the siting of the library made a difference to its use, I once worked in an acute hospital library which was situated in a buidling just outside the hospital gates. We were lucky to see 2 – 3 people a day! When we moved to a new hospital and the library was sited in the education centre opposite the staff restaurant, our statistics soared. There is no doubt that the convenience of its new position and the fact that we got a lot more ‘passsing trade’ was a huge influence.

The burning question for my library echoes what many others have been discussing. How to evaluate services in such a way as to find the views of people who don’t use the library. The last survey I did about 18 months ago elicited a low response rate and, of those who did complete the questionnaire, not one non-user responded, in spite of there being questions aimed specifically at this group.

I suppose this question also relates to marketing and promotion. I work in a palliative care setting where many of the staff have worked for a number of years and simply feel they have no need of further education. It’s a problem experienced not just by me in the library but also by the education department where uptake for some courses is low, even when there is reason to believe that knowledge is not always as up-to-date as it could be.

Sorry I've come to this a few days late - I've enjoyed reading all the comments. My burning question concerns the value of frontline services ie. a person sat at an enquiry desk and at the end of a phone, in particular the contribution of library assistants to the success of library/information services. How much does the ease with which a user can talk/engage with a member of the library staff affect their use of the service? If a library is open but unmanned when they come to use it do they start to look elsewhere? Are personal frontline services to users essential or a luxury? Our own statistics show that when the front desks are manned and opening hours extended, demand for services rises (increased loans, document delivery requests). But is there an evidence base to back this up? Does time spent engaging with the user (library inductions, demonstration of services or a general chat) lead to an increased demand for services? And does it have a knock on effect ie. freeing professional library staff time to develop/plan/market other services and further increase demand/use? I work in a library team that offers a countywide cross-Trust service but is hosted by an acute trust. We are feeling the pinch of the financial crisis in the NHS with some service points being staffed for less hours. Do users use a library less when there is not a member of staff to engage with or does this have no bearing on the way users make use of our services?

My burning question is “Where do NHS managers get their information?” As part of my role is to provide a current awareness service for Strategic Health Authority staff, I constantly tread a path around what they need to know, what they know already from other sources and what is surplus to requirements. This has become even more challenging as the organisation and many of those it works with are in a period of great change with staff roles being redefined and a grave danger of valuable knowledge being lost as staff leave.

(Kate Wheadon)
My burning question is:
“When is the best time to deliver library skills/EBP training to nursing students during their time at university?” I deliver a compulsory intro the library during their first year which has to fit in everything from where the library is to how many books you can borrow to e-resources. It’s a lot to get through and not very attention-grabbing for them! I find that later on, students won’t come to me thinking I’m only here to tell them how many books to borrow and by the time of their 2nd year they have got used to using Google and may be reluctant to learning ‘new’ resources. With some pro-library lecturers we have managed to work in to the timetable some hands-on library training in year 1 and relate this to their current assignment. I would love to roll this out to all modules and then re-visit them in subsequent years to improve upon their searching skills and show them any new resources. This continuity would also help to build a better rapport between myself and the students. Some lecturers are adamant though that they need no in-depth resources training until the end of their second year! It would be great if the evidence on this topic should point to ‘more’ and ‘relevant’ library skills training which I could then use to argue my case!
I agree with Julie Stoppani though that the IT-skills can vary hugely and so affect how much teaching you can deliver in one session. With regards to your concern about the number of students in a session, we simply go by how ever many we can get in a room! Normally, this is 30 max and would have two members of staff on hand which hopefully means that those with poorer IT skills have ‘roaming’ support whilst I’m demonstrating.

My auestion: What is the most effective way of providing PubMed training for health care practitioners (as half a day session of the 5-day workshop that covers information retrieval/computer skills in health care). We organise those initial training workshops as part of our activities of establishing Learning Resource Centres in health care institutions in different countries. (After that training most of communication with the participants is only through e-mail).

Hi, I feel like I'm coming to this discussion rather late in the day, and it's made me question my own question, but I'm going to stick with my original one:

which has more impact on patient care - training a health professional to do their own searches, or providing a mediated literature searching service?

Coming in late has given me a chance to see the wide range of questions - both broad and specific, from questioning 'traditional' services - e.g. journals check in - to introducing new ones, e.g. RSS feeds.

As has been pointed out, there's some common ground - particularly around current awareness services and training - both of which are issues of concern for me.

I'm particularly interested in questions around RSS and introducing Google Scholar etc. into training - as I've avoided both of these so far, but feel I ought to stop burying my head in the sand...

I thought the most intriguing question was the one around library location - especially as I work for an academic library, on various campuses, none of which are based within the hospitals they serve.

I'm also interested in the 'single vs split' service desk debate, as we have gone down the 'split' help vs service desk route.

basically, they were all interesting questions - and from a relatively small group - it made me think how important co-ordinating all this is across the profession - which is probably why I'm on this course....

The scenario ..
The new initiative we are currently working in is to move towards a shared service with a local university nursing library. Traditionally, the Trust has housed two libraries on one site, historically one for nurses and one for doctors. This coming together of the two services - in a 'shared location for health information(!) will hopefully provide a streamlined, one-stop shop for all our potential users, in the last physical step towards a truly 'multiprofessional' services.

The burning question ...
This in principal this seems like the right direction we need to be taking, but what we want to know is how the different groups of users will 'culturally' feel about sharing one 'library/information' environment. Will there be clashes in terms on the information seking behaviours of different professional groups and how will we manage this effectively as librarians wishing to provide a equitable service to all?!? good intiative but what we want to know is will it work?

Rachel Southon (Group 17)
I am very interested in the comments about using online/ virtual tutorials/ services rather than in person inductions/ training/ services. My burning question: whether virtual reference services can replace other means of contact/ training for users that choose or cannot access the services in person? Does virtual reference just replace the email or phone, providing real time and online chat with a professional information specialist to answer their burning information question there and then? Can it replace the tradition outreach service or does it offer a different service that complements outreach? i.e. outreach = training, virtual reference = enquiry desk? With finances tight and no funding to support an outreach person within the team I am looking for alternative methods of outreach that can be absorbed within the whole of the library team. This means that we do not lose an ‘outreach’ service when an outreach librarian leaves. It also makes me ask: outreach and clinical librarianship is classed as a gold standard way of reaching out – but based upon what evidence? Is this assumed or are there other ways of doing things that no one has identified yet? I was very interested in the Anonymous comment on Mar 5th 11.49pm regarding establishing a new Clinical Librarianship service when they were already providing this service within the team, albeit limited. My perspective would be to look at whether you should appoint a new member of team so that several members of the team can reach out to clinical areas more effectively – maybe having particular departments that each is responsible for – rather than one person dedicated to the whole lot. This provides variety in the job as well as not totally losing a service if a member of the team leaves. I think my burning question also links into Jan’s question regarding less staffed hours and its affect on usage – is personal contact essential – can technology replace it?

Rachel Southon (Group 17)
I feel that I am entering this discussion very late in the day (and with a very fuzzy head due to recovering from the flu!) I have been very interested in reading all of the comments so far, many questions that I too would like the answers to – some I hadn’t thought of until reading them! I am very interested in the discussion regarding RSS feeds, wikis and blogs as forms of current awareness as we are currently investigating these for future development of our website that has just been completely redeveloped. Do techy, whizzy things add anything more to our service? With regards to marketing and promoting – I thought it was an interesting concept of Anne’s to ask if ‘we stood back and did nothing, what would motivate the users to seek us out?’ Understanding user needs (and potential user needs) and satisfying them is essential for the service to demonstrate effectiveness. We have recently introduced more in-depth evaluation of training sessions and medicated literature searches to ensure that we are addressing user needs and understand the basis for the need i.e. patient care, research, etc. Communication, service champions and word of mouth recommendation have been identified as essential marketing tools for what we do.

Rachel Southon (Group 17) Last comment for now - it is regarding the comment by Jan on Mar 6, 4:25pm. I think that we need to be careful about the way we measure and interpret less staffed hours on the service points leading to less usage of library services. Our Library has suffered a major impact of funding cuts this year that has made us analyse the cost effectiveness of alot of our services. But it needs to be remembered that other departments may also be suffering the same funding issues which means that staff shortage, motivation, reduced study leave etc can impact negatively upon library usage too, not just whether a member of library staff will be on the enquiry desk. Although I do think (not based on evidence) the presence of staff to offer assistance is an important service that we have to offer! When carrying out any research or analysis of the evidence, all contributory factors need to be identified.

Ann Tanker (Group 1)There have already been several postings about current awareness, and I would like to add to this. In my library we produce a daily current awareness bulletin, which covers both national and local items, as well as details of articles in journals received in the library. The bulletin contains from 3 to 8 stories each day and appears on the PCT website and is emailed out to about 700 people. Although we receive generally positive informal feedback about the bulletin, many clinicians, particularly, do not have time to read through it every day, and I think, for that reason do not benefit as much as they could do. We have been looking at ways of producing more targeted information, so my burning question is ‘is the daily health bulletin effective for clinicians or would it be worth producing more targeted bulletins on a regular basis (weekly, or monthly) aimed at specific groups, (nurses, physiotherapists, managers, for example), thus cutting down the amount of time clinicians spend reading irrelevant information?’ An issue to consider would be does the benefit to the clinicians justify the extra time library staff would spend in producing several bulletins?

I too am late in posting this! My burning question is how do we reach the constantly arriving new staff at our health service. Do we let them 'find their way' to the library when they need our services OR do we keep pursuing inclusion in orientation for all staff and other ways of reaching staff. We know we reach many new staff, but the other part of the question is: is what we do effective enough??

Having come to this discussion on Day 9, I must say I've benefited from reading and reflecting on the other burning questions submitted. Many are relevant to issues we're currently addressing at my university library, particularly the ebook question Marie had. We've recently struck a committee to address how we are handling our growing ebook collection.
Sarah's question regarding training a health professional to do their own searches vs. providing a mediated literature searching service really struck a chord with me, because I do often feel my time and the health professional's time might be better utilized if I performed the literature search myself rather than training him/her how to do it. However, perhaps the context of the question or the purpose of the literature search (i.e. immediate patient care or systematic review) might change the answer.
My burning question follows from Lorie's question about organizing subject or research guides. We have a large number of subject guides which the reference librarians maintain. I'm wondering if social software such as wikis could be incorporated successfully to 1) decrease the time required of the librarian to update the guides, and 2) to increase the usage and relevancy for the target audience.

I'm sorry I'm so late in joining the discussion, our web filters blocked the page and I've only just got it opened up! It's taken me ages to read through all the postings, but they're all really thought provoking. I am involved a lot in training and am very interested in the online vs face to face training scenarios, and also the RSS feed issue. I try to raise this in NLH training sessions and almost everyone kind of goes a bit green about the gills and asks me about something else to avoid the issue! There are also problems that many feeds come from Blogs which are blocked by our filters.
My burning question is regarding accessibility and marketing. I'm worried that our library's history of being a medical library deters other staff members from using our services. The majority of people I train are Doctors, and the other staff seem to come as a last resort. My question is "how can we be sure that we're meeting the needs of all staff in the trust?". I think this is primarily a question of effective marketing, but also developing the services so staff will want to use them. Also, are resources accessible to people with difficulties such as print disability? Any comments will be gratefully received.

I work on a multi-trust site where each trust operates on differing academic calendars and there is only one multidisciplinary library on site providing a library service. My burning question is how we could go about co-ordinating arrival and departure dates of staff and students of each trust and the various departments within each trust? Thereby ensuring that as a library we can be a presence on each induction day and promote the library service to new arrivals, and also keep an eye on departing staff and students - reminding them to return borrowed items and overnight access cards. I feel that by being a presence on induction day for the different healthcare professions on site we can also overcome the perception of many that the library is "only for doctors".

Re: Heather Chesters' Burning Question: I feel you are on the right track with developing workbooks and on-line tutorials. Having been a busy student myself, I found that although attending one-to-one training it soon got buried in the general whirl of things. A few months down the line I'd forgotten most of what was said and had misplaced the scraps of paper I had written it on, which was very frustrating especially at 2am when I was trying to get to grips with a literatre search and not having much success. Having online access to the training session I had received a few months previously would have been wonderful at the time, or even a workbook which would have stood out from the paper mountain I had acquired. I find in the library these days most users expect everything to be on-line, especially those who are fresh out of the academic/university system where the academic institutions tend to provide course related material online.

Re:Vivienne Bernath's burning question as to "whether there is still a need for these (on-line) tutorials, whether they will attract use"? From personal experience and from feedback from users of our library, on-line tutorials are a good thing. You can refer to it many times over - re-run, fast forward, pause ect according to personal requirements, and can act as an additional resource to face-to-face lectures and tutorials. I've also discovered (from talk among library users and high-school children) that although as Vivienne hears that "students today do not read as much as students in past years" this applied to traditional printed matter (books/journals/newpapers etc). The habit of reading seems to be very much alive on palm tops, PDAs, blackberries and other such gizmos!!!

Alison Thompson. After reading Rachel's comments regarding a team of staff to provide the outreach I have decided to slightly alter my question because it is highly unlikey that the trust would be able to provide the funding for enough staff the provide a 'team' of librarians. So now I am thinking "Does the evidence support provision of a single Clinical Librarian in a large general hospital". I would just like to say that I have found this forum very interesting and valuable to hear comments from around the world. It is obvious that the same issues are met by all, not just because of funding problems within the NHS

Vicki Veness. My burning question concerns successful marketing and promotion of the use of e-journals. Reading other comments it's clear that others on the course also have questions around the marketing, provision and uptake of e-journals/books. We carried out a user survey in October of last year and it is clear that some of our users do not make full (if any) use of the full text electronic resources that we provide. Those that do use e-journals are in the main very satisfied and appreciate the benefits of immediate access from their desktops. Tied in to this is the journal usage survey that the library also carried out last year, the aim of the survey was to demonstrate which journal titles are being used and to make an informed decision regarding subscriptions. The journal usage survey showed that although a journal might be available electronically, for various reasons, a large number of our users still prefer a print copy. Given the limitations of available budget - cost of providing print and electronic vs electronic only and space considerations etc we are keen to increase the uptake in clinicians use of e-journals. How do we successful change the habits of a life time and encourage people to actively use e-journals? Do we just bombard people with publicity or are there more effective methods to get the message across?

Vicki Veness. Re: Caroline Miller's question, Mar 2, 5:12pm and others concerning provision of current awareness services. This is something we have also been keen to develop and have had similar discussions with our users regarding what topics to cover. Jason Curtis' comments Mar 2, 2:47pm)regarding dissemination of current awareness are also very interesting. It is difficult to know where to start in some senses as what is important to one person is going to be irrelevant to another. In the end to start the ball rolling we have worked with the Trust Training and Development Manager to provide topic lists to accompany Trust training courses. These lists provide details of recent journal articles, books, CD-Roms and websites on a particular topic. Topics covered so far have been fairly general and concern issues such as Communication in Paediatrics / Time management / Resources for R&D and Clinical Audit rather than purely clinical but it is a start and also acts as a marketing tool to those who might not otherwise tradionally use the library.
I'd just like to add how very useful and informative reading all your contributions on various topics has been.

My burning question is how do we make our induction sessions wanted, relevant and successful. When i started in the post i found that many of the post-reg returning students were either very nervous of using the computer, didn't think they needed to attend our library sessions because they had been on courses before or didn't feel they had learnt anything which was relevant to their course of study. The solution was to spend some time talking with tutors finding out what they expected their students to know. Be sensitive to students who had poor IT skills and develop the content of the sessions so students could see the relevance of attending.

This is proving to be effective but how do you measure the improvement and use it as a model to train others.

Sue Jennings - In reply to Jan's Burning Question about "the value of fronline services" I can't stress strongly enough how valuable human contact is any service but especially so in the information services. The users who use our service are not information specialists and it is imperative to the success of any information service to have staff onhand to help, make aware and train users how to find the information they need. Would you want to use a service which offers you no guidance, no help, how often do you hear the comment i don't want to talk to a computer, or on the telephone, most people want human contact. I have been in my present post for just over a year and the outreach work and proactive approach has shown a definite increase in use of the service.

Sue Jennings - Comments on Kate Wheadon "When to deliver library skills". I have just had experience of delivering a second induction session to a a group on their second year and it has made me realise how important it is to do a refresher session at the start of the second year. But it wasn't just me who made that the decision is was made because of the feedback i got from the students and the lecturer in charge. It was quite apparent that they were lacking in basic information retrieval skills and because of the session many have come back into the library and are asking for further guidance. From the evidence of this it has also confirmed in my mind to put forward a proposal again supported from students comments to Induct 1st year students in the first few weeks but then 3 to 4 months into the course run a more indepth session again.

Finally got enough time to add my burning question. It was very interesting reading everyone else's. I am not based in a library, nor to I training anyone to acquire searching skills (well not yet) so I feel unable to comment on most people's predicaments such as outreach, training etc. although it seems to play a major part in the clinical setting. My job involves none of this, I assist in formulating clinical questions and searching for evidence for national clinical guidelines. So what can my question be, having put in all this work, and seeing all the work that goes into producing them it would have to be: Clinical guidelines: are they worth the money and does anybody use them? (bearing in mind some of them maybe out of date by the time they are published! so need constant updating)I would be really interested in getting feedback on this as the majority of people who could possibly promoting these may possibly be all of you out there in the world. Lina Bakhshi

Reaction to Anonymous Mar 6 6.35 pm
The scenario…
Hi, I want to react to the move towards a shared service by merging a local university nursing library and a library for doctors. We went through this process in 2004 and it resulted in a new Health Library, servicing students and staff of the University’s Faculty of Health and NHS staff employed by 4 Trusts operating in our area. The Health Library is housed in a new build Clinical Education Centre on the hospital’s site. With regard to the reaction of the users, having to share the service with other groups ‘cultures’ we have not found negative reactions, in fact, more than often users appreciate the fact that they have more stock to choose from and more knowledge in the team. As long as you keep providing the services which each group of users is used to, you won’t have any complaints. Nine months before the merge, we had an ‘away’ day, where both teams had the opportunity to get to know each other. On that day we created focus groups. A focus group would discuss and suggest procedures for the new service. There were focus groups for Journal Administration, Cataloguing, Circulation, Communication, Training, ILL, etc. Each member of staff could put their name down for one or more focus groups. Working in a focus group meant that you got to know your new colleagues and had an input in the new service.
With regard to your question: will it work?? I can say that, in our case, it has. In the two user surveys which we have had since the merge, the library service has scored very high and last year our service acquired stage 3 Accreditation. By merging these two services we managed to add value to and improve our services. Good luck with your merge!!

The primary focus of our library service is to support evidence based practice. As we serve a large, remote population, we get very few visitors so our services are delivered remotely. One of the main tools for EBP is the delivery of current awareness services. I am keen on getting all the information that's being produced every day to the relevant people in such a way that they actually take it on board without what interests them getting lost amongst less relevant stuff. Although we have long produced a weekly bulletin, divided into sections in an attempt to package relevant information for different staff groups, we have recently launched a 'create your own' current awareness profile service. The idea is to work with individuals to cherry-pick, from the plethora of alerting services already available nationally, only those that are most relevant to them.
Creating each profile is time-consuming and we often have to subsequently tweak them if the user reports being inundated with too many alerts or receives too much irrelevant info. We also still produce a weekly bulletin for the hundreds of recipients on the distribution list, which takes a good half day to compile. Doubtless in the fullness of time we'll run a survey to determine how many people still value the weekly bulletin and whether people appreciate the tailored alerts. In the meantime, though, my burning question would be "Is there any evidence to suggest that producing tailored current awareness alert profiles for a multitude of individuals more effective in facilitating evidence based practice than a single, regular 'blanket' bulletin?"
I acknowledge that this is a similar question posted by anonymous on March 7th. Except s/he appears to be manually producing multiple bulletins each week targeted at various staff groups, whereas we are setting up the automatic alerts, which [hopefully] require little further intervention from us once established and tweaked.

In response to Vicki Veness, a marketing tactic that is being used by some educators is to use 'champion's stories' - in this case it would be to have some people who are now using your e-journals tell how and why they do this, perhaps identifying an occasion that access to e-text was critical in providing needed information or saving time. In other words, it's not just the library promoting its own resources, but users of the resources endorsing their worth to others in their cohort. The stories could be included in eg newsletters, web pages etc.

Finally made it to the forum! I haven't had a chance to read through everyone's comments but I remember a couple of the earlier ones talked about library inductions and the location of the library. From the comments I scanned through it seems that there are many burning questions regarding marketing and promotion, IT skills training and generally trying to get people into the library! I work in a medical library and there are lots of issues I'd like to address, such as getting people to look on the OPAC for journals we have in stock or have access to - sometimes it is easier just to ask someone, but we have a catalogue and that's what it's there for!; in relation to that, there is teaching users how to use the OPACs and where to actually find the Library's webpages on the Trust intranet. Maybe the library isn't doing enough to promote itself or make its presence known so the users don't know what we/they have access to and are unsure of how to use the service and resources in general. While trying to think of my "burning question" I firstly had to decide on which angle to approach this from, since I think a lot of issues can relate to other areas. From my point of view, questions from users are largely about journal holdings and "do you have this particular book", both of which can be found on the OPAC or via the library's webpages. So I guess my burning question would be: How can we make users aware of the information available to them (via the intranet and OPAC) and should we have more effective training/explanation of services when users first join? From here I could go onto trying to get people into the library in the first place, then onto marketing, etc, but that would be too much!

In response to "anonymous" dated 8th March, this was another burning question I was toying with. How many people in our organisation know where we are and what we do? When I had my Trust induction, there was no mention of the library at all, and as far as I'm aware, there still isn't. Surely the library is the central point of knowledge and learning, and we didn't even get a mention! In the organisation I work for, new users tend to drift in and look a bit disorientated, unless they're on a placement and have structured inductions, and I think they should have some idea of what to expect when they get here. Library staff can only do so much, but I think it's also up to individual departments to make (new) staff aware of what they can receive via the library - and let them know where it is!

Lisa Group 11 - It's really intersting following the threads through on here. It's good to pool our perspectives and experiences. Re: Anonymous Mar 5 1.44pm The siting of the library does have an impact on the footfall certainly, I've been reading with interest. We're lukcy enough to have recently moved into a newly built library - good news for all. It's part of the hospital education centre, which has been built adjoining the university satellite medical school. Makes a lot of sense and lots of lovely facilities, but unfortunately, it's a good 10-15 minute walk from many of the clinical areas - comments from some of our users have been along the lines of - "it's either lunch or visit the library". Althought this may mean we've had slightly less folk in the door as regularly as they were before, it does mean we've attracted new clientele from med students about to be on placement with us and our renewals have increased! Perhaps the way for us to sell this is to make the library more of a trip or visit rather than an errand to do on your way to somewhere else? Once the building work going on on-site finishes, some clinical areas will be a lot closer, but not all. I wonder - will this impact on the specialties who use us? i.e. If your workplace is located nearer physically - are you more likely to come in?

Lisa Group 11 - Re: Anonymous Mar 5 1.49pm. We've been running Clinical Librarian services at our acute trust for two or three years now. It works really well as far as we can tell and it is worthwhile going out into areas, even if the services are little different to those already offered. we've made our service adaptable to each departments specific requirements, and have focused on the value added aspects we can offer. It's raised our profile and seems to have actually increased usage of evidence based practice as well as the library itself. One of the most telling comments I've had came from a doctor who said they always kept thinking I must check this out in the library later, or I must get the library to do me a search about this and would then forget about it and not have time to come to the library or would forget to phone us. Having someone in dept. - either at ward round, in clinic, at audit or education meeting or MDT meeting - gives that regular jolt and means that they can ask for help, advice, information, training etc. as they think about a subject or discuss a patient. It's also raised expectations of what we can do and shown clinicians that we can provide high-quality information/evidence, at the right time and place.

Lisa again. Re: Sarah Lawson, Mar 6 6.25 Very good question - I never know which is the most effective. I like to think it's a little of both. End-users won't always have someone on tap to help or do, so they do need to have at least some skills to enable them to search relatively effectively, but it's also worth them haing the option of having an librarian/information specialist carry out a mediated search. I find quite often that those who ask for searches, have already had some training and have already tried searching for some info but have had problems and are hoping a mediated search may not only provide them with good info, but also some answers as to where they were going wrong or how to get around something they hadn't come across before. Some of the best searches I've done have been during training, when it's been both at the same time - them learning how to do, but with the advantage of an experienced searcher on tap - and also for me - having the advantage of the expert clinical knowledge on tap to aid in focus or decision making. Sadly this doesn't answer your question, but it's an interesting topic I think.

Lisa again, last one this time I promise. Re: Anonymous Mar 7 3.48 Current Awareness - We provide a variety of current awareness bulletins (we're a teaching hospital) - some weekly and some monthly. There's a weekly one for managers (keeping them abreast of info without having to check lots of different places, a weekly one covering the main 4 general medical journals - which was specifically requested by the academic staff. This goes to the academic team, but also to all the consultants and the chief exec. We're also in discussion with the nursing committee, as they thought they'd like something like this, ubt topic focused rather than journal focused. There's a monthly cancer bulletin which goes to anyone working in cancer services and it covers library news, general cancer news and also has a specific focus each month such as Breast Cancer or Lung Cancer. We've also begun developing a AHP bulletin for those working in children's services. Initally, setting them up and organising how to email them out took some time, but once they've been done once, they don't take much time at all - a couple of hours for each. We're lucky that we have a team of staff we can spread them out through - one person would be on the go constantly, but they do seem really popular. We wondered about the best method of delivery, but email seems favourite as they can be ignored if necessary and gone back to later. We also add copies to our Intranet site, so all staff can see them if they wish to. It seems to work well, but I suspect it's time we did some more evaluation! I recommend them - they're not too time-consuming and can act as a reference source much later - for us as much as the end-users sometimes!

Hi Margaret, sorry it was me Lisa (Anderson) regarding the move towards a shared service. Thank you for your account. All the steps you took leading up to the merge we are currently taking, meetings to discuss progress, sub groups to look at the merging of procedures, etc. We are very fortunate as we are in a new build in an education centre, etc and I realise already the benefits in terms of improved stock, etc. However, what I am really interested in is the way in which the different groups seek information and the way in which they will behave once in the library. I think I may have not explained myself properly in my original burning question. How can we provide zones for those who want to problem solve in groups and zones for those who study in a solo self-directed way? Even though in a new build, we don’t have the luxury of group study rooms or break out areas. How did you overcome this? In simple terms I am talking noise levels, physical activity, etc as the two groups work alongside each other… I have observed behaviour in the two libaries and they are very different … I know we will find a way to appease all (I am fairly certain on this) but I wanted to see if there was an evidence base which had ever addressed this.. Thank you for taking the time out to help me to address my burning question.

after a rather frustrating search - and yes i realize i am very late with this m, i have found nothing that i can access regarding research of the merit of moving to an exclusively elecdtronci tableof content services.

Perhapos i simply do not have enough access to the appropriate services or perhaps i am a sloppy searcher or perhaps the question is too trivial to be debated professioanlly.
So i have decided to chage my question to the following/ How do i best provide materiasl to support the pediatrics physicians in the hospital - my pediatricians are mostly good library users but two are not - so what is available inthe lterature to help me decide ( perhaps in conjunction to just asking them) which in my mind would likely be the easiest and most direct course of action, what to do.

A literature search produced the article : Journal reading patterns and preferences of pediatricians.Tenopir C, King DW, Clarke MT, Na K, Zhou X. J Med Libr Assoc. 2007 Jan;95(1):56-63. which i can ge tmy hands on becasue its free full text so i will be using htat for my evaluation.

the best siteing of a library is between the elevators and the coffee shop - hands down they will past you two or three times a day - every one know where you are and some will venture in.

i always knew i was a "stream of thought" typist but re-reading my comment the other day has given me pause to see how bad a typist i really am - grin. sorry about that - i promise to check postings more carefully in future - and take a typing course next time.