London Health Libraries ‘Library Assistants’ Day’ 2013

Library Assistants’ Day is an event run yearly in the London Health Libraries network. I attended this event last year as a non NHS delegate and found it helpful and informative. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet new people and learn about key changes to the NHS. When I began my current post in an NHS library in April, I was already looking out for the 2013 event.

This year, Library Assistants’ Day was held at The Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. Delegates were welcomed by Richard Osborn, Strategic Library Services Development Manager, who introduced us to our first speaker, Jane Moore, NICE Implementation Consultant. Jane told us more about her role and the resources provided by NICE for healthcare professionals. She discussed the guidance and standards that NICE produce, including Clinical guidelines; Quality standards, Technology appraisals, Interventional procedures, Medical technologies, Diagnostics guidance and Public health guidance. Jane also discussed NICE Pathways, which consolidate information regarding evidence and recommendations in a accessible way. Each pathway contains an introduction, information for the public, and information about relevant updates. From each pathway, you can link straight through the the relevant guidance and quality standards information for the pathway you have selected. As well as the resources mentioned above, NICE have produced three smartphone and tablet apps, the NICE Guidance App, NICE BNF app and the NICE BNFC app. You can find out more information about these apps here. An NHS Athens account is required for access.

For more information about NICE resources, you can take a look at Jane's presentation.

The second session of the day was led by Daphne Grey and Ziba Nadimi who are part of CLIST (Clinical Librarians and Information Skills Trainers). Their session was on searching the Cochrane Library. Daphne explained that the Cochrane Library consists of seven databases;

• Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews
• Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials
• Cochrane Methodology Register
• Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects
• Health Technology Assessment Database
• NHS Economic Evaluation Database
• About The Cochrane Collaboration     

 These databases are useful for accessing systematic reviews and for gauging the effectiveness of clinical interventions. The databases use MESH subject headings and a 'search manager' facility to pull together the different elements of your search.You can register for an account, which will allow you to save your searches and allow you to sign up for alerts and information about particular areas of interest. I found this session particularly helpful as I had no previous experience searching Cochrane. I will certainly be using this resource regularly in my role going forward.

Daphne and Ziba's presentation can be viewed here.

The final session of the day, was led by John Nyman of Imperial College London, who presented on 'Searching Google and Google Scholar'. This session was really engaging and provided some really good suggestions on how to 'tame' Google and preform more efficient search tasks using the search engine. John firstly explained how Google works and the algorithms that enable its results, and explained that Google uses page ranking to determine the importance of a particular webpage, which influences the results we see. John gave us some handy tips on how to focus our search using Google, including searching by file type and date range. We also talked about Google's advanced search facility, which allows you to filter results by reading level and usage rights.

After providing us with some useful information on searching Google, John's presentation moved on to discussing Google Scholar. Google Scholar searches across disciplines and sources to retrieve articles, theses, books and abstracts from a wide range of academic and professional sources. What I found particularly interesting about Google Scholar, is that you can configure its settings to access your institution's full-text e-journals. Finally, John pointed us towards some other search engines which we might find useful, including;

• www.bing.com
• http://blekko.com
• https://duckduckgo.com
• http://www.zuula.com

For more information about John's session, I would recommend taking a look at his presentation.

You can access the resources and handouts for this workshop at http://www.londonlinks.nhs.uk/events, alongside information about other events that have been organised by the network.

London Health Libraries visit the British Library

I wrote this report for NHS London Links, to summarise the recent LHL visit to the British Library. It was a fantastic visit and I thought I would share the report here.  

On Wednesday 12^th June, two groups of library staff from London health libraries visited the British Library (BL), the national library of the United Kingdom. I was really interested in going on this visit to learn more about the BL collections and to explore some of the history behind the organisation itself.

History of the British Library

The tour started in the main hall and our guide told us about the history of the BL and how it came to be in its present location. The BL was originally integrated with the British Museum, but moved location in order to acquire more space. The library became legally separate from the British Museum in 1973. The original library was created to house the royal library of George III which was given to the British Museum in 1757 under the conditions that the collection was;

-kept intact

-kept on display

-able to be used

These conditions have been followed through to this day, with 60 titles still being used on a regular basis.  The King’s library collection is today a centerpiece of the BL’s building at St Pancras, often called ‘the jewel in the crown’ of the library’s collections. The collection is presented in a glass display cabinet in the centre of the library; allowing a full a view of the items intricate bindings. This ‘foundation collection’ provides a stunning introduction to the library and illustrates the historical and cultural significance of the collections held at the BL.

The library building itself is a product of the work of architect Colin St John Wilson, work which took over thirty years to complete. The building is an example of Brutalism and was the largest public building constructed in the UK in the 20^th century. The building has total floor area of 112,000 sq meters and is spread over 14 floors (nine above ground and five below). St John Wilson’s vision and process for the building was anecdotally summed up by our guide who informed us that the architect wanted each of the 10 million bricks in the building to ‘smile’. The British Library moved fully from the site of the British Museum and its other numerous locations, to its new home on Euston Road in 1997. We were informed that when the collection moved from the British Museum, it was the largest book move in history.

The British Library collection requires over 625 km of shelves and grows by 12km each year. This works out as 2 million new items each year. The BL is unable to extend any further on current site due to a medical research development and half of the collection is held in Yorkshire at the Boston Spa site. This is where almost all cataloguing is completed and their document delivery service takes place. The library collects from all countries in 400 different languages and has specific language cataloguers based at its Boston Spa site. 
Since the 18^th century, the BL has been a legal deposit library, receiving a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland. The library operates on a budget of £100 million each year from government. We were told of research that was carried out that showing that for each £1 the BL is given, it produces £5 revenue for the UK, mostly from its Business and IP centre. You can read more about this research here: http://bit.ly/80niCo. We were informed that the library is not immune to staffing and service cuts, having suffered staffing cuts of 10% in 2012, mostly to its site in Yorkshire.

Collections

There is no classification scheme for books in storage; each item is given a unique identifier number on arrival. The exception to this is that books on open shelves, for example in the reading rooms, are classified using Dewey Decimal. We were shown the bust of former librarian Anthony Panizzi (1831-1866) who decided to shelve the library’s books by size to make the best use of space. The BL still uses card catalogues in many of its reading rooms and also uses Microfliche and microfilm readers on a regular basis, because of the stability and preservation benefits of this technology.

The library’s holdings range from material over 3,000 years old, to today’s newspapers. The library has a collection of; 310,000 manuscript volumes, 4 million maps, 260,000 million journal titles and the world’s largest music manuscript collection, after acquiring the Royal Music collection in the 1950s. The library has an automatic acceptance policy from publishers.

Digitisation

The BL is currently involved in several digitisation projects, one of which involves archiving 65000 websites, in order to preserve sites which are culturally significant and may be of value to research. You can find out more about this project here: http://bit.ly/19mOiTQ. Staff are also working with Google on an ongoing basis to make 250,000 books available online through Google Books; digitising 40 million pages from 1700-1870. Information about this project is here: http://bit.ly/149VP4X

Reader Services

We were taken to have a look around the reader registration area, where all users must first register for a readers pass by showing proof of address. You can order books in advance of your visit to the library through their website. All items are ordered from storage and library rooms are interconnected by track way to transport books to required areas. This track way covers 30003 ways around the library. We were advised that generally, readers should expect to wait up to 70 minutes before their item is delivered to their chosen reading room, although on many occasions this period is considerably less. Until recently, readers had to apply for a readers pass and a separate manuscript pass, although this is no longer the case. The library has gone through a process of widening its audience in recent times where previously use of the collections was only open to postgraduate students, academics and final year undergraduates.

The rooms open to readers are as follows;

Asian & African Studies Reading Room

Business & Intellectual Property Centre

Humanities Reading Rooms

Manuscripts Reading Room

Maps Reading Room

Rare Books & Music Reading Room

Science Reading Rooms

Social Science Reading Room

Treasures Gallery

Our visit ended in the Treasures gallery where we viewed some of the library’s rare and valuable material including the Codex Sinaiticus, which was written in the middle of the 4^th century. This codex is the earliest manuscript of the complete New Testament. The treasures gallery is also home to other important items such as Magna Carta, one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, a collection of the early works by Shakespeare and Beatles manuscripts.

I would like to extend thanks to Elisabeth Chalmers for organizing the visit and to the British Library staff who provided such an informative and engaging tour.

Change, library visits and exhibitions

The last few months have been busy and filled with change, trying new things and looking forward. I have been very fortunate to have been recently offered a new position of Library Assistant within a NHS library, which will provide an excellent opportunity to continue developing skills in health librarianship, a sector which I'm really enjoying working in.

I've recently been re-reading past posts and thinking about what I have learned during my time as a graduate trainee. Aside from working with knowledgeable staff and an outstanding collection, one of the highlights has been without a doubt, the opportunity to engage with lots of different library services and sectors. I recently visited the Wellcome Library with the University of London library trainees- a really interesting visit which exceeded any expectations I may have had.
The visit involved a comprehensive tour around the library and stores with one of the librarians (one of 70 members of library staff) who gave us a good idea about the content and organisation of the collections and informed us of the projects and resources library staff got involved with. One thing that surprised me about the library was just how much was freely accessible to the public. Once registered, users have access to a wealth of modern and historical materials, ranging from medicine, society and culture. To any trainees outside of London looking for an interesting library to visit, I would definitely recommend it. 

This month also saw the opportunity to host a visit from the University of London graduate trainees and give them an insight in to what it's like working in a health library. The head of the library organised colleagues from other health libraries to come and present about their roles and routes in to librarianship. I found the talks really useful as both visitors were working in very different roles within Health information services and it was interesting to hear what skills they thought were important for information professionals working in health. It was good to talk a little about my role and what I have enjoyed while working as a graduate trainee and was a nice opportunity to reflect on how the experience has developed me professionally and personally. Harriet Lam, graduate trainee at the Courtauld book library wrote an excellent summary of the visit which can be found here.

My final project in post will be finishing the exhibition on the life and work of early epidemiologist John Snow with the assistant archivist. We've been captioning, organising and putting together a biography and it will be great to see the exhibition process through to the end. The next steps will be putting it all together and publicizing it to members of the college and the public through the website and Twitter. I'm really grateful for the experiences I've had as a graduate trainee and I'm really looking forward to continuing to learn about the information profession.

Graduate Trainee- Month 4.5

I'm almost halfway through my traineeship and have already had lots of fantastic experiences within the library world. Much of my time recently has been spent aiding the implementation of the library's new e-journal subscriptions, which has been beneficial to the service and has given me a great insight in to the processes that are involved with acquiring new subscriptions. My work around this area has involved checking the holdings information for subscriptions and organising the upload of all new and revised information on to the library's link resolver. I have also been asked to write a report on the content of my traineeship to date and to present it at the next library committee meeting. Writing the report encouraged me to be reflective after the Christmas break and got me thinking about what I have gained from the experiences and the scope of the projects I've been involved with.

I'm lucky to be attending several library visits this month, including a visit to the Courtauld Library organised by ALISS and a visit to Senate House Special Collections and Archives, organised by the London Libraries Trainee Scheme. I'm really looking forward to these visits, as these particular libraries are sure to be rich in history and fascinating items. It will be interesting to see how these libraries operate on a day to day basis and what systems they use.  An interesting future project I'm due to be involved in is organising an exhibition in the library on the work of John Snow. Over the last month I have got involved in the preparation of an exhibition on the work of Andreas Vesalius, compiling information and a short biography. The Snow exhibition will give me the chance to see the exhibition process through from beginning to end.