evidence-based-practice-at-ntl

Tuesday, 1st May 2007

2007-04-30T22:11:00.000-07:00

In today’s Journal Club meeting the basis for discussion was the article:-

'Wikis in the workplace: how wikis can help manage knowledge in library reference services' by Angela Kille, published in LIBRES Number 16 Issue 1 2006, available at http://libres.curtin.edu.au/libres16n1/

A very practical article with lots of good tips and links to websites. However, due to the presence of one person who was rather more technologically literate than the others present, the discussion was wide-ranging and included mention of other techie things such as social bookmarking (http://www.del.ici.ous/), virtual communities such as Second Life (www.secondlife.com) and RSS feeds, complete with live demonstrations as the aforesaid techie person had had the foresight to bring along a laptop!

When setting up wikis it is important to plan properly – decide what your wiki will be used for, what will be included, who will be able to add and change content, etc.

The article mentioned several ways in which libraries could use wikis, eg as a database for FAQs, as a peer resource guide for sharing subject specialist knowledge, library instruction material specifically for a community of users such as the Oregon Library Instruction Wiki (http://instructionwiki.org/), and subject-specific resource guides such as BizWiki at Ohio University Libraries (http://www.libraryohiou.edu/subjects/bizwiki)

This discussion article certainly inspired this writer to investigate wikis further with the aim of developing some wiki applications for the library’s website.

2007-04-29T17:50:00.000-07:00

The article for tomorrow's Journal Club meeting is
'Wikis in the workplace: how wikis can help manage knowledge in library reference services' by Angela Kille
http://libres.curtin.edu.au/libres16n1/
Same time, same place - Speaker's Corner cafe, Parliamnet House, Darwin, 9-10am, Tuesday 1st May 2007.

2007-03-27T00:28:00.000-07:00

Comments on article:
'When I'm 64': the public library after the retirement of the baby boomers"
Book, travel and news clubs, life-long learning programs, access to new technology, volunteering, social and cultural activities are future needs of the growing group of baby boomers who are hitting retirement and have more leisure time. All these needs could be met by Libraries with decent coffee shops, of course! This article has a number of excellent suggestions on ways libraries can provide information and recreational resources for such a significant section of the community.
Further reading:
http://www.fola.org.au/pdfs/FOLA_Seniors.pdf

Tuesday 27 March 2007

2007-03-14T16:31:00.000-07:00

The first meeting of the NTL Journal Club for 2007 is on Tuesday 27 March, 9-10 am at Speaker's Corner Cafe, Parliament House, Darwin. The article for discussion will be
'When I'm 64': the public library after the retirement of the baby boomers" by Williamson, Kirsty et al. In Proceedings of Research Applications in Information and Library Studies (RAILS) Conference, held at the National Library of Australia, 17-18 September 2005. Wagga Wagga: Centre for Information Studies, Charles Sturt University. http://www.csu.edu.au/faculty/educat/sis/CIS/epubs/RAILS2/RAILS2_When_I'm_64.pdf
See you there!
Dates for the remainder of 2007 will be: 24 April, 29 May, 19 June, 31 July, 28 August,
25 September, 30 October, 27 November - so put them in your diary now!

Tuesday 21st November 2006

2006-11-19T16:29:00.000-08:00

The 'article' for this week's meeting at Speakers Corner Cafe, Parliament House, Darwin,
9-10am is actually two chapters from a book:-

http://libraryjuicepress.com/barbarians-ch1.php
> Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library [Ed D'Angelo]
Chapter 1: The Crisis of Democracy and the Public Library
Chapter 2: Democracy and Professional Librarianship

This will be the last meeting for the year so come along and make it a good one!

Tuesday 7th November

2006-11-02T22:25:00.000-08:00

The article for Journal Club this week is:-

Smith, Richard
The highly profitable but unethical business of publishing medical research
Journal of the Royal Sciety of Medicine, 2006, 99;452-456

Meeting at Speaker's Corner Cafe, Parliament House Darwin 0900-1000 Tuesday 7/11/06.

Tuesday 24th October 2006

2006-10-23T17:55:00.000-07:00

Two brief items provided information for the group to discuss the implications for our own libraries of the 2005 Heritage Health Index:

an abstract of Yakel, Elizabeth. "Examining the implications of the Heritage Health Index" OCLC Systems and Services; 2006: 22(2), 92-96 and
Heritage Health Index: valuable library collections at risk. Available http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6291703.html. Accessed October 2006.

The full report is available at http://www.heritagepreservation.org/HHI/index.html

This survey commenced in 2001 and was completed with the December report in 2005 with the support of the Luce Foundation and at a cost of $100,000. It provides an assessment of the condition of 4.8 billion cultural heritage resources held in 30,000 archives, libraries, museums, historical societies and scientific research insitutions.

Initial discussion was around the types of materials that are being held in Australian and American institutions in comparison to European instutions and how these would possibly contain a higher proportion of modern materials. The nature of modern materials creates archival problems.

The group discussed what is being done within our region and other Australian regions - in particular NSW and WA.

Chapter 9 of the full report discusses how preservation can be used as a tool, delivered via the web, tours and workshops, to attract donors and visitors. The article discusses this in terms of "extending the mentorship model". Local experiences indicate that demonstrating preventive conservation methods in place by means of a tour attracts donors and library users. Extended mentorship can also include Friends groups of volunteers and custodians.

Many of the American institutions lacked emergency plans. In the Territory situation, there is a high level of informal cooperation and now a formal MoU exists between the major cultural institutions.

The next Journal Club to be held Tuesday 14th November 2006 Speaker's Cafe Parliament House 9:00 - 10:00. Topic still to be announced. Please forward any recent articles which you think have implications for local practise to journal blog for future discussions.

Monday 23rd October 2006

2006-10-22T18:25:00.000-07:00

The article for tomorrow's meeting is:-

Examining the implications of the Heritage Health Index. By: Yakel, Elizabeth. OCLC Systems & Services, 2006, Vol. 22 Issue 2, p92-96, 5p

Note that we will be discussing this topic from the ABSTRACT ONLY - available on Academic Search Premier (EbscoHost) - a landmark American study involving libraries, archives and museums that commenced in Dec 2001 and finished Dec 2005.
Check out http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6291703.html for a summary of the report so you can see more background information.

The meeting is at Speaker's Corner cafe, Parliament House, Darwin from 9-10 am.

Tuesday 10 October 2006

2006-10-03T00:06:00.000-07:00

The article for next week's journal club is:

"Why the Archives Introduced Digitisation on Demand"
Ted Ling
RLG DigiNews August 15, 2002, Volume 6, Number 4

http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/v6_n4_feature1.html

Meeting Speaker's Corner Cafe, Parliament House, Darwin, 9.00-10.00am.
Please join us or leave your comment on our blog.

Last Tuesday's article

2006-09-26T16:23:00.000-07:00

The article we discussed was:
Library 2.0 by Michael E Casey and Laura C Savastinuk
Service for the next generation library
Library Journal September 1, 2006
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6365200.html

One of the ideas we explored from the article was about 'customer as collaborator' and we discussed developing user forums, or 'communities of practice' (connecting users with users in particular areas of interest), involving our users in helping themselves to enhance our collections/catalogue (a point which also came up at yesterday's collection development meeting), and we suggested adapting the 'subject guides' so our users help keep them current, suggesting links, resources etc

Wikis and blogs may be tools we could use, and we thought we would start in the area of Family History, as this has a very strong following and access to resources could be improved. We also noted that Constance Wiebrands from Curtin Uni Library (Business School liaison librarian - see absracts below) gave papers on wikis and blogs at the September CLICK06 conference in Perth(http://conferences.alia.org.au/alia2006/programme_programme.html#Creating),

One of the important points about wikis was to get the structure organised.
Blogs are more of a diary form, and may be easier to manage from our website. The abstract: Creating community: the blog as a networking device states: "The blog, one of the new “conversational technologies” that has arisen in recent years, has a part to play in creating and supporting our professional communities."

The paper about wikis was titled:
Collaboration and communication via wiki: the experience of Curtin University Library and Information Service
and the abstract states:
"The idea behind the wiki, a website that can be created and edited by many different users, can sometimes be difficult to come to terms with. Unlike traditional content management and web authoring systems, the wiki is “egalitarian”, enabling all users to have access to its writing and publishing features. Within the organisational context, the wiki is emerging as one of the more flexible, dynamic and simple yet powerful online tools available for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Its version control and change tracking capabilities can also facilitate efficient record keeping and promote transparency." This could be a useful tool for collaboration among teams of reference librarians to communicate and improve access to resources in subject areas, as a complement to the public blog and website.
AR

Tuesday 26th september 2006

2006-09-25T16:19:00.000-07:00

The article for today's Journal Club meeting will be:-

Library 2.0 by Michael E Casey and Laura C Savastinuk
Service for the next generation library
Library Journal September 1, 2006
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6365200.html

Same place, same time, ie Speaker's Corner Cafe, Parliament House, 9-10 am.

Tuesday 12th September

2006-09-07T00:39:00.000-07:00

The article for the NTL Journal Club to be held next Tuesday 12 September is:
Author: Joseph Esposito
Title: What if Wal-Mart Ran a Library?
Source: Jounral of Electronic Publishing, vol 9, no 1, Winter 2006
URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0009.104

We meet at Speaker's Corner cafe, Parliament House, Darwin from 9 to 10 am. All welcome! If you can't make it you are welcome to leave a comment on this blog.

29th August 2006

2006-09-03T22:37:00.000-07:00

The article we discussed was Libraries and the Long Tail: Some Thoughts about Libraries in a Network Age by Lorcan Dempsey. D-Lib Magazine, April 2006, Vol 12, No. 4.

It was recommended for reading for a CASL (now NSLA - National and State Libraries Australasia) Electronic Reference Resources Working Group meeting. The article provides a great way of conceptualising a future vision for library networks, facilitating access to library resources, as people can grasp the idea of streamlining the D2D -Discovery-Locate-Request-Delivery process.

The author bases the article on 2 statistics from OCLC research. The first is that interlibrary loans account for 1.7% of overall library circulations (4.7% if we only look at academic libraries), suggesting that 'we could do a better job making it easier to find and obtain materials of interest wherever they are' i.e. finding the 'long tail' - the deep and rich library collections - or 'aggregating system-wide supply'.

The second statistic is about circulation - that in 2 research libraries examined, about 10% of books accounted for 90% of circulations. (It is possible that in other libraries the rough 80:20 rule applies.) This suggests that as well as limited exchange between libraries, many library materials may be underused within an individual library. As the author states: "As we move forward, we will be increasingly asked if this is an optimal system-wide arrangement" - this statement is relevant to our library networks.

The idea of aggregation of supply and demand is a distinct possibility in a national and state library context, with national site licensing progressing, and consortium purchasing among state libraries a reality.

Libraries could follow google's lead, providing a simple google-type federated search interface (we already have LibrariesAustralia) - the mechanism for aggregating demand (a content management system, but with clustering as well as ranking results) sitting over open access and subscription journal publications, digitised and born-digital collections, other library databases (for which libraries have already supplied the metadata 'handles'). This is the 'Discover' stage.

The 'Locate' and 'Request' steps can be condensed and streamlined if the 'Delivery' is electronic full text (and passwords or authentication mechanisms are built into the system), and where libraries' cooperative interlibrary loans mechanisms sit behind the scenes and enable users to request direct to the source library. The reference process, whether electronic or in-person, will help users refine their search requests and use the systems more effectively, and the D2D model would facilitate access to our resources.

14th August 2006

2006-08-13T19:32:00.000-07:00

At tomorrow's Journal Club Meeting, 9-10 am Speakers Corner, Parliament House, Darwin, we will discuss the article:-

Wainwright, Eric
The future of the 'research' library in an age of information abundance and lifelong learning
AARL: Australian Academic & Research Libraries Vol 36(3); Sept 2005

It was great to see a comment put on the previous post by a colleague from WA. Keep 'em coming!

18th July 2006

2006-07-13T18:52:00.000-07:00

At the Northern Territory Library's Journal Club of 18 July 2006 we discussed an article recommended as suggested reading by the ALIA President. The article 'Making "E" Visible' by Lesley Williams was published in the Library Journal on 15 June 2006 http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6341888.html The article focused on drawing patrons past the Googles of the world, to revolutionize how electronic resources are promoted.

The article posed a question: Do beer companies leave it up to individual bars to promote their brands?

Of course not! There are huge promotional campaigns (we were able to list off quite a few beer commercials at the Club today) that create consumer demand for beer brands therefore forcing bars to source and purchase the brands best promoted to meet consumer demand. Yet the vendors of electronic resources have entrusted the marketing of their products to library staff that in most cases don't have marketing skills, use jargon and create or honor difficult systems of providing access.

We went on to discuss that "Librarians" are not "marketers" by way of education. Marketing is a profession in itself and quite distinct from that of information management. Few librarians have devoted years refining their marketing skills and why should they. Electronic resource vendors have reps to promote products and they usually do this within the library walls, by visiting libraries and leaving bookmarks and posters behind. According to an OCLC survey "Perceptions of Libraries and Information resources" (http://www.oclc.org/reports/2005perceptions.htm 39 percent of information seekers learn about electronic resources through promotions or advertising outside of the library. Imagine if vendors took their marketing outside of the library walls and ran tv campaigns and the like and clients started contacting libraries and requesting access to this or that electronic resource they'd seen promoted during the AFL broadcast - imagine!

In the meantime while libraries are left to do the marketing of electronic resources we librarians need to really look at the terms used to describe these products and the websites we design to promote them. John Kupersmith's website "Library Terms That Users Understand" (www.jkup.net/terms.html) provides suggestions of non jargon terms that can be used like "e-collection" and "24 hour library" in place of terms clients don't relate to like "databases". The article also provided tips for librarians tackling electronic resource promotion that are worth checking out. At the end of the day though promotion of these resources will only prosper if the vendors get behind the promotion and take it outside of the library - and if they don't should we continue to patronize them?

I'll leave you with this question, because this is a Blog and comments are encouraged.

4th July 2006

2006-07-03T19:17:00.000-07:00

At the last journal club we discussed using the session as a "springboard" to deeper learning. It seemed from the discussion that day, that there was a general need to find information to assist us to organise in-depth information about items within our collection. I have been requested to find further reading. Unfortunately I have not found the "definitive" further article to discuss at tomorrow's journal club, Tuesday July 4, rather I have got myself into the world of metadata. There is no clearly defined way to proceed on this, but the following articles help.

First I went looking for a library which has organised "unusual" resources and had a requirement for information far more in-depth than the normal bibliographic record within most cataloguing systems.Topper, Joby Library History Nov 2004: 20(3); 183-206 Saved from oblivion: the organisation and management of the Douce Collection at the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology at Oxford. The article is available as full text from EbscoHost and describes a very unusual research collection, where far more detail is required on the items than the detail offered by the usual bibliographic type record. (I have a copy if you would like to read)

The other useful article that I found is one titled Provenance-Aware Storage Systems which is on the web at http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/papers/usenix06-pass/paper.htmlThe article discusses the advantages of retaining provenance data within the storage system rather than as separate manual annotations or in a separately administered database.I have not managed to track down the definitive person in our museum to discuss their collections management system, but the following link http://www.chin.gc.ca/English/Standards/metadata_intro.html will give you an idea of what a typical museum collection management system has to do.

Outcome: Options paper to be prepared

Next meeting: Tuesday 18th July 2006 Speaker's Corner 9-10 am
Article: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6341888.htmlMaking "E" Visible [Library Journal]

20th June 2006

2006-07-03T19:10:00.000-07:00

I will be presenting the journal article titled "Modernizing the Journal Club". Citation details are at this webaddress http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10962660&dopt=Abstract This is a summary of the article: Educational should be about "Deep Learning" which is a process of learning that builds on existing knowledge and constructs new knowledge. Critical appraisal helps the person make sense of information or a subject. This contrasts to "Surface Learning" which is memorising and repeating information, that is easily forgotten. The authors of the article suggest traditional journal clubs use the "surface learning" approach. Suggested new format for journal clubs: Use a "guided discovery approach, which puts the learning process in the context of clinical problem solving". The steps involved: Identify a problem search the literature appraise the evidence store the information for future use Authors assessed the impact of this new approach after 4 months and found an increase in reading time, and knowledge of the critical literature appraisal. Although the journal club in this article was discussing research based articles, and our club isn't limited to research based articles, I think the approach is a good one. Use the journal club as an opportunity for problem solving. It is an Evidence Based approach.

6th June 2006

2006-07-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

Andrea McKey, Manager Peter Spillett Library will present Papa's got a brand new (virtual) bag: real-time chat and reference discourse by Darren Chase from the Electronic journal of Academic and Special Librarianship 6(1-2) Summer 2005. The URL for this is http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v06n01/chase_d01.htm

23rd May 2006

2006-07-03T17:27:00.000-07:00

Shenton, Andrew K. (2004). Strategies for ensuring trustworthiness in qualitative research projects. Education for Information 22; 63-75. IOS Press

The journal club met yesterday and discussed an article about qualitative research in libraries, and strategies for assessing the 'trustworthiness' (another word for validity or quality) of these types of studies. To put this in context of library research, an article published in J Info Sci, 2004 found that in libraries, descriptive research (an observational method) is published more frequently than any other type, and the domains with the highest number of research studies, in order, were Information Access and Retrieval, Collections, Management, Education, Reference.

The group spent most of the time discussing various methods which fall under the 4 broad criteria (these are credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability), relating these to particular examples from our own experiences in conducting and assessing research (or what we'd like to research). Some of the methods discussed were: triangulation, the role of the researcher's 'reflective commentary', the importance of context for transferability, and of having 'thick' i.e detailed descriptions of the context and the processes followed, researcher bias and objectivity, discussing methods and hypotheses with peers and colleagues, validating the meaning of the data with participants, and more!

Outcome: We decided that on the whole, we thought it would be possible to use these methods in our own research projects, and when applying the findings of research studies to our own situations.