Archive | Day-to-Day RSS feed for this section

Top 10 Informationist Moments of 2012

27 Dec
Closing the Whiteboard on 2012

Closing the Whiteboard on 2012

I’ve only been at this informationist work for a few months, thus a true “Top 10” list is a bit of a stretch for my New Year’s post, but a few really terrific things HAVE happened, thus I figured coming up with some list warranted at least a college try. Here goes:

#10. An Invitation to the Party

I was invited to attend a retirement party for the project administrator of the research study I’m working on. What makes this special is that the invitation came before I officially became a part of the research team and while I wasn’t able to make it, it let me know that I was included in the group, by the group, before I ever even became part of the group. Inclusion, both physically and cognitively, is an important part of success in this arena.

#9. A Weekly Schedule

It took a little while, but eventually I was able to carve out some semblance of a regular weekly schedule that included the hours I’m committed to working as an informationist on the study. It’s not perfect yet, but we’re headed in the right direction. I imagine that balancing time and tasks between being in and out of the Library will remain a key focus in 2013.

#8. Office Space

Going along with a weekly schedule, securing a physical place outside of the Library to work on the project was also a coup. I was lucky in that the research team has other consultant-type people as members, thus having a research staff office was both known to be important and already existent. I’ve found that if/when I go into the Library on the days that I’ve scheduled myself to work on things related to the project, I too easily get pulled into other things. Staying away is important!

#7. Impromptu Conversations on Sidewalks

Being able to bring up my role as an informationist to researchers that I already know on campus is both easy and productive. I’ve had several conversations with individuals in the process of writing grants and as they tell me about their ideas, because I know them personally, it’s easy to say, “Have you thought about including an informationist on your team and/or in the proposal?” What I’ve also discovered is a lot of overlap between the researchers that I know. Part of this is expected (you do a lot of work in one department or division, and you tend to know many people who naturally work together), but it’s the unexpected connections that have been the biggest thrill. They’re also the ones with the greatest potential to build further collaborations. Cross-discipline research is really important in translational science and an informationist is very well suited to help build the bridges between the people and research currently happening in different areas.

#6. The Bucket List

During about the third or fourth weekly team meeting that I attended, I confessed that I was completely confused by the word “eligible”. It seemed to me that women were eligible for the study several different times. In other words, there were different levels of eligibility. I said, “I’m lost. Who is eligible for what, when?” In voicing what might appear like a weakness (after all, I was brought on board as the “expert” in communication), I hit on something that everyone was struggling with! Too many times, people were using the same word to describe different things. It was confusing not just me, but others as well. The result was my first tangible item to the team – a very simple list of what we would all agree to call each “bucket” of subjects. Producing something (an actual THING, in this case a list of words) was the first step to make me feel like I was a contributing member of the team.

#5. Presentation Proposal with a PI

It was a 2012 highlight that one of the principal investigators on the study agreed to submit a presentation proposal with me to the New England Chapter of ACRL’s next annual meeting. I hope it will be a 2013 highlight that we are chosen to present on our work together as informationist and researcher. The more that we can get researchers themselves to talk about the importance of embedded librarians and/or informationists in their work, the further we will advance in this area of our profession. I’m convinced of this.

#4. Informationist Invasion 2012

If you’ve been a regular reader of this blog, you know that in early November, informationists representing each of the NIH-funded awards gathered in Worcester, MA to share with science and medical librarians from New England about their new roles. “Embedded with the Scientists: Librarians’ Roles in the Research Process” was a big success! Personally, I was really happy to have the chance to meet my colleagues from around the country; to share ideas, talk about issues and roadblocks and how we might overcome them, to plan ways to support one another in our work, and to make new professional friends. Pursuing new directions is a lot easier with the support of colleagues.

#3. I Lost My Old Job

It’s nice to know that people care about you. When the announcement that my Library was (still is!) accepting applications for my current position as the Head of Research and Scholarly Communication Services, I got more than a few phone calls and emails from friends and colleagues. “Is everything okay?!” “Where are you going?” “What happened?” For once, I was happy to say that I’d lost my job. Even before we received the supplemental grant award, the management team of my Library saw that charging a librarian with the task(s) of becoming embedded in research teams was a direction we both wanted and needed to go. Receiving the grant only further solidified this commitment and my Director began to work the budget as she was able to move me into this new position, thus freeing me from the responsibilities of the former. To be successful in this area, we need such commitment. In today’s environment, creating new positions requires structuring budgets and workloads in ways we might not have thought before, but unless a Library is willing to do this, the work of the informationist, if it proves valuable, will ultimately be consumed by research departments or Information Technology, and the library profession will find itself missing out on a very relevant path.

#2. Supplemental Grant Award

It kind of goes without saying that there likely is no “Top 10 Informationist Moments of 2012” without the awarding of the NIH Supplemental Grant for the R01 study that I’m now a part of. It was not the beginning of the embedded librarian/informationist idea and/or role by any means, but as noted above, it solidified our movement forward into this new direction. My Director and the PIs stated, while we prepared the grant application, that we would pursue the project regardless of whether or not we got funded. This showed the level of commitment to it. But the fact that we DID get funding, opened doors that otherwise might have taken a bit longer to unlock. By offering these awards, the National Library of Medicine, through NIH, demonstrated that the role of the informationist in biomedical research is one worth supporting and examining to determine its longterm value. Sometimes professions need this kind of support to make big changes.

#1. Guest Lecture Invitation

You might think that #2 would be #1, and I admit that I went back-and-forth on deciding what moment I’m giving top billing to. What I ultimately decided is that moment #1 happened only yesterday, squeaking in just under the wire! I got an email yesterday morning from a researcher I’ve worked with in the past in a different capacity. She told me that she’s teaching a class this coming semester on Team Science. To avoid misquoting, I’ll share the text of the email:

“I’m teaching a class called Team Science in the Spring, the focus of which is to help students (in the MSCI program) to understand the importance of teams in science, how to build their research teams, and how to effectively function in teams.  You have talked a lot about how many researchers and docs don’t understand the role of the informationist in their work, so I wondered if you might be interested in coming as a guest some time and talking about the role of the informationist on an academic team?”

Perhaps you can see why this invitation wins out in the “Big Moments of 2012” contest. Here is a pretty prominent researcher on my campus who gets it – or at least is willing to give me a shot to convince her, as well as a classroom of future researchers, of the important role librarians and/or informationists can play on research teams. Here is an opportunity to make my case that we are, in fact, part of the team. We’re not just a supporting cast on the sidelines.

Of course, I took her up on the offer right away. Stay tuned for a post in early March telling how it all goes.

So, while it’s only been a short few months in Informationist-landia, I feel confident saying that it’s been filled with more than a few memorable moments. In short, I’ve learned a great deal about the importance of building relationships, of harnessing the possibilities of existing relationships, of finding and exuding confidence, of setting boundaries and limits, of setting priorities, of finding balance, of speaking up, and of accepting change. And perhaps most importantly, I’ve learned the importance of articulating what I can do, what I can’t (or won’t) do, and what I’m capable of learning to do. Above all else, I believe being able to state these things clearly to a researcher is the way to open the door to their world, but it takes some work to be able to do that. Do the work.

In his book, Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon writes, “Ironically, really good work often appears to be effortless. People will say, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ They won’t see the years of toil and sweat that went into it.” To step into a new area professionally requires work. You need to take the time to read and explore and emulate and try and eventually find your own way; a way that is ultimately a blending of who you are and what you can do. This is the “you” that succeeds. This is what I learned, maybe more clearly than anything else, in 2012. I learned it in this new role as an informationist and I learned it in life. As I close the calendar on this year, I can’t complain much about that.

[Looking for a New Year’s book for yourself? Pick up a copy of Kleon’s book. You can read it over a cup of coffee on a Saturday (or a snowy) morning and you’ll come away with 10 pretty good tips (or more) for being creative in your work and in your life.]

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

In Theory…

4 Dec
Pythagorean Theorem

Pythagorean Theorem

Last Friday, I attended the 2nd annual Community Engagement Research Symposium sponsored by the section of the same name that is part of the University of Massachusetts’ Center for Clinical and Translational Science. The Community Engagement and Research Section is the arm of the CCTS charged with helping researchers from the University work with the local communities and community leaders to address issues related to public health.

We do this by helping university researchers and community leaders form equal partnerships for health research. This approach is called community engaged research. Other names for this type of approach include Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR), Community Collaborative Research, Community Partnered Research, and Participatory Action Research. (CCTS website)

The program featured an excellent keynote address by Elmer Freeman, Executive Director of the Center for Community Health Education Research and Service, a community-based organization that provides research funding and support for issues related to professional development and education for community healthcare providers, community advocacy programs, health disparities and inequities, and health policy. Freeman is a veteran of the trenches, an individual who has spent his career at the forefront of community-based health care and who never shies away from speaking frankly about the realities of healthcare in poorer neighborhoods, the gap between health research and medical practice in community health, the politics of funding bodies and academic institutions, and the frustrations that come with trying to address the many challenges of doing community partnered research. Among the many great, quotable lines he spoke (and I tweeted) was this one, “Health care providers in community health centers want practice-based medicine, NOT evidence-based practice.”

As I listened to Freeman and the other panelists of the day, and as I looked at the many poster presentations from projects around the state, and as I took note of comments from the audience, I couldn’t help but draw a whole bunch of parallels between the situation(s) they were describing and much of our own in the world of academic librarianship. Several times, I overheard people say, “We need to create research methodologies that work for a community, not just publication.” Another UMMS leader said, “Academics need to integrate themselves into the community.” Many spoke of the big difference between theory and practice.

Today I had lunch with a friend and colleague who is working to develop curricula for teaching data management practices. I described for him a task that I’m beginning to tackle in my informationist role, i.e. the creation of a data request form with an integrated (or perhaps attached) data dictionary. He asked, “Where is the data for this project stored?” To answer, I began to describe how some data comes from insurance claims (claims data), collected and maintained by the insurance company. Other data comes from electronic health records (staging data), managed by different health care providers. Another source is the system used by schedulers and counselors, the database where they input all of the information that they collect while making their phone calls (intervention data). Lastly, there is analytic data, kind of a collection of the relevant data that comes in from these other sources, ultimately used by our analyst for statistical analysis.

As I talked on, I could see a crinkle form on my friend’s forehead. “There isn’t one dataset?” he asked. Technically, I guess I can say that there is. The analytic dataset is probably the closest to that, but that dataset is derived from others. It’s dependent upon others. As we talked more about other “data” – things like minutes from meetings, progress reports, email correspondence related to the study – he said, “I imagine data management as creating this one neat file folder. You click it and it opens to have everything related to a study organized, accessible, easy to share.”

What a nice image.

And then I told him about last Friday’s meeting and how I’d been thinking about the huge gulf between theory and practice, not necessarily in healthcare, but in our own profession. Library school was all about theory. I remember sitting in classes when I was earning my LIS degree and the faculty member would say that grad school was about learning the theory of librarianship and information science. We would learn how to BE librarians on the job. I feel a lot like this is what’s happening to me now as an informationist. We’ve been talking about eScience and data management for a few years now, in theory. We keep saying that when it comes to managing data, librarians can do this and this and this. We talk about best practices, yet have a bit of a gap in our knowledge base when it comes to knowing what the current practices are. I feel, in a way, like the academic researcher who’s come up with an interesting hypothesis about what an informationist is and now I’m all about testing it.

So far though, what I’m finding is that our theory of what an informationist is and does, and the reality of my day-to-day work is not quite on the same page. I do believe we’re on a good path to figuring out the answer to our “research question” and ultimately, to knowing what our role can be here in the research process. I also think that the researcher who implored her fellow academics to integrate themselves into the community was speaking to me, too. Embedded librarians and informationists are trying to heed the message. I am integrated into this study and it’s a huge step towards putting our theories into practice, in a truly meaningful way.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Thoughts and Updates (It’s Been a LONG 10 Days)

19 Oct

Every now and then, Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe titles his column “Picked Up Pieces.” I used to find this kind of lame, a column of random thoughts and pieces, things that he could easily elaborate on if he took the time. However, now that I’ve adopted this weekly writing regimen and have people actually following what I write (kind of like Dan, on the mini-Dan scale), I clearly see the advantage. Sometimes, lots of things happen in a short time frame and in order not to miss capturing them, we collect the bits and pieces and put them in a column – or in my case, a post. So here goes:

The Missing Link

Last week, I wrote about the need for documentation, for writing code and logic and field descriptions based upon guidelines, and how often we skip this crucial step. Pressures of time and staff shortages, coupled with the ease by which we can make changes in practices and procedures, lead us to take shortcuts that may well prove beneficial in the moment, but later end up costing much more. After another exasperating hour that found the research team going round-and-round questions that they simply couldn’t answer, we decided to go to the source this week, and called for a meeting with the IT guru for the study. At this meeting, Scott graciously drew pictures, showed us code, and clearly laid out the details we were lacking. I left the meeting not with the problem solved, but with a MUCH clearer understanding of it. I also had the beginnings of the tools needed to begin putting together the documents that we need that will, in time, give us the solution we need.

Could the research team have done this at the outset? Sure. But it’s hardly a fault that they didn’t. They did what most studies do, working within the constraints that we all find ourselves in today. What sets the PIs and this team apart is that they realized how this pattern was detrimental to their outcomes and the insertion of an informationist can help prevent the same in the future. To date, it’s the clearest indication of my value to the team. Now to get to work with the tools I’ve been given.

INFRARED SATELLITE IMAGE – OCTOBER 30, 1991 (NOAA Archives)

What Did You Say?

Communication shortcomings continue to baffle me. As I posted earlier, this isn’t a bafflement confined to the study. I am universally baffled. “Baffusally” – (see my name in that word? makes sense.) I feel like I keep repeating myself over and over and over again. And unlike Einstein’s famous quote about insanity, I’m not repeating the SAME thing over and over. I feel like I practice saying something this way and that, different ways to try and get my point across. But still… my efforts seem to be falling short. Am I alone in this? Do others feel like they give clear instructions, offer clear descriptions, state clear facts, yet people keep coming back asking for more and more explanation? I wonder if it’s overload – the information overload, stimulation overload, an epidemic of an inability to pay attention. Maybe it’s just more of what I stated in the previous paragraphs; continuous high pressure of time shortage meets the wall of information flow meets too few people to do all that needs to be done… it’s the perfect storm.

What I take away from this is that I need to continue to work on being clear, being concise, stating things in multiple (even if frustratingly obvious) ways. We’re all in this rocking boat together. (Bet you thought I was going to type “sinking ship” didn’t you?)

All Beagles are Dogs, But Not All Dogs are Beagles

I was really lucky to be invited to speak on a panel at last Friday’s “Emerging Roles Symposium” sponsored by the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Medical Library Association. It was a wonderful day of learning, meeting new friends and colleagues, and soaking in so much positive energy. (As an aside, if everyone and everything related to Portland, OR is like I found it/them, I’m moving there tomorrow! What a wonderful place.) One thing that I appreciated most from the event was how many different emerging roles were covered. Steven Bell, current President of ACRL, got us started by sharing a plethora of examples and ideas we need to embrace in the age of the “Alt-Librarian.” I talked about eScience, data and scholarly communications, embedded librarianship, and being an informationist. Mary Anne Hansen from Montana State University talked about teaching library skills via online/distance courses. Amy Harper from Harborview Medical Center in Seattle shared how clinical librarians at her hospital are really engaged in providing the tools and resources to give clinicians the information that they need in the most seamless manner.

That was just the morning!

In the afternoon, Erica Lake from the Eccles Health Library at the University of Utah told us about all that she’s doing to successfully integrate herself and her skills into the world of the EMR. Stephanie Wright showed off a fantastic tool she’s built to help researchers at the University of Washington manage their data. And finally, Jerry Perry, Director of the Health Sciences Library at the University of Colorado and immediate past president of MLA (and all-around good guy – we love Jerry!) presented role after role, activity after activity, opportunity after opportunity, that he sees librarians at his library, as well as around the country, becoming engaged in. It was a terrific recap AND for me, a much-needed reminder that there is no one direction that we need to be looking and/or heading as health sciences librarians. We can, we do, and we are evolving and emerging in so many ways we likely never imagined before. It’s hardly a time to fret, friends. We may look different, but we’re still here.

The Tail Wagging the Cat (for Tater, my cat, because I titled the previous segment about dogs)

My latest philosophical pondering goes something like this… When did we stop creating new environments for the sake of adopting ones? In other words, when did we give up teaching behaviors and instead, simply build environments to suit the behaviors we’ve adopted. I’m sure that I’ve posted on this before, but it’s still there, the big question that I come back to again and again in my mind. We talk so much of control, yet have given so much of it away. It’s kind of what I teach people who are struggling with weight issues (this would be when I’m wearing my exercise physiologist hat) – you need to create your own environment, a healthy environment. It takes work. Restaurants serve the foods people will eat, not the healthy foods we are better off eating. Ball parks and airlines and movie theaters install larger seats, because that’s what we need. We sit a lot traveling, watching movies, watching others play instead of playing ourselves. The ballplayers like the big salaries we give them by filling the seats. They’ll build bigger seats in bigger stadiums to meet our behavior. (If you find this of interest or need help and support in becoming more healthy, follow my favorite researcher/doc in this area – @drsherrypagoto on Twitter and at FUDiet.) 

What does this have to do with being an informationist? Oh, pretty much everything. The one common thread that is emerging in our profession is our need to take chances, take risks, and be more creative. I was asked last week how one goes about getting over his/her fears or resistance to step out and do this risk-taking that we keep talking about. My response, “Film yourself playing your mandolin and singing a song and then post it to YouTube.” More seriously (sort of), I added, “I don’t know if it’s building self-confidence or just lowering your fear.” Control your own environment, as much as you can, and you’ll have a lot more confidence and a lot more success. I feel pretty certain about that. So does Tater.

Happy Friday, everyone! Enjoy a little weekend ahead. And if you live in or around Worcester, come out and see my band, RedRock, tomorrow night. 🙂

 

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →