The 14
th EAHIL conference was held in Rome and
organised by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Italian National Institute of
Health) and held at the National Central Library of Rome. Details of the slides
and posters
can
be found here.
There were a variety of speakers, mainly from Europe as you
might expect, but also some presenters from Canada and the US.
I presented a poster and gave a “gone in 60
seconds” presentation in a poster plenary session about the
LIRG
work that I did with Andrew Booth. The focus of the poster was on the use
of ephemeral evidence in a scoping review of LIS practitioner’s relationship
with research. I had quite a few visitors during the poster session and I can
definitely cite colleagues from Ireland, Sweden and Norway who introduced
themselves.
The poster session was a
very busy two hours as it was scheduled straight after the poster plenary,
which provided a taster of the work.
Aside from the poster I attended a number of other events:
There are
a
number of special interest groups in EAHIL, one of which is the
Public Health Information Group. This
is co-chaired by Sue Thomas from Public Health Wales and Tomas Allen from the
WHO. I attended a friendly meeting with people interested in a variety of
different aspects of public health information such as HINARI, patient
information, cancer patients, open repositories, documents in native languages,
systematic reviews and WHO.
I also attended the board meeting which featured reports from key officers in the usual manner. The representative
of JEAHIL encouraged people to consider submitting to the
journal (the
next copy deadline is 5
th August). She also recommended
three key sections of JEAHIL as being
good for current awareness: “take a look”, “new publications” and “emerging
challenges” which is a tech column.
Also mentioned at the meeting was the
council election. There are vacancies for country representatives
across Europe including the UK. If you want to vote (or stand), you have to be
a member and it is free to join,
you can register here.
There is more information on all this in the journal and the September issue
will be dedicated to the conference.
Maria Cassella from the University of Turin was the keynote
speaker. She talked about the
“open
paradigm” (open access, open source, open data, open learning, open
knowledge) and the changing environment of increased marketisation, global
competition and student demand. She referred to the G8 open data charter and
the open research data pilot from Horizon 2020. She described Altmetrics as
open social peer review and as being complementary to traditional metrics. One
problem is that Altmetrics are not standardised and she referred to the NISO Altmetrics
project which aims to develop a published standard. She suggested that more
granularity is required with the need to drill down to article level metrics
and gave the example of Plos One articles where you can do this.
The NISO Altmetrics standards white paper
is
open
to public consultation until July.
Valeria Scotti also spoke about
Altmetrics and gave a useful introduction to the topic, linking
to
http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/ Her research involved comparing the
Altmetrics scores from a number of academics at her institution with the
citations received in Web of Science, number of Mendeley readers and PubMed
citations.
She described Altmetrics as
covering academic and social impact and referred to a couple of sources:
Shona Kirtley presented on the EQUATOR library of
health research reporting guidelines. “The
EQUATOR (Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research) Network is
an international initiative that seeks to improve the reliability and value of
published health research literature by promoting transparent and accurate
reporting and wider use of robust reporting guidelines.” (Info from EQUATOR
website). The group provides online toolkits aimed at different user groups
such as authors, librarians and teachers. They are also hoping to set up an
international librarian network, an advisory group and representatives from
each country to feed into this work.
Please get in touch if you are interested in
any of these opportunities – or just join the network at
www.equator-network.org.
Contact details
shona.kirtley@csm.ox.ac.uk. There
are also promotional leaflets which can be downloaded freely from the website
to display and promote the service.
Suggestions
on how to support EQUATOR
Patrice X. Chalon presented an update (from their JEAHIL
article) on the SuRe information project run by the HTA IR group which aims to identify,
appraise and summarise relevant literature on
information retrieval for HTA. There are currently 34 appraisals
and 7 chapters on the website. Four chapters are in preparation to be published
in 2015. The project is a contribution to evidence based information retrieval
practice and can be used to update institution’s own methods handbooks or for
use in designing teaching sessions. They are looking for people to participate
in the project and contribute to the writing, so please feel free to
get in touch if interested.
Janet Harrison
and Barbara Sen did a double header
reporting back on two EAHIL 25th Anniversary research grants awarded
in 2012: European Library Quality
Standards and experiences of European health information professionals
respectively. The full report for project WHIPPET (Barbara Sen’s project) is in
the White Rose repository.
Wichor M. Bramer gave a presentation on the most effective
and quickest ways to remove duplicates
when conducting a search for a SR. Working with a group from the Netherlands
and the US, they firstly compared the performance of a number of reference manager
tools in de-duplication – using the default settings. He had an interesting
table which showed how many false duplicates were removed, so worth checking
out the slides for this. They then looked in more detail at the algorithm and
how easy it was for the user to adapt this to improve the de-duplication
performance. The team went on to develop their own algorithm for Endnote which
they found speeds de-duplication and has a good precision rate. Using this algorithm they have de-duplicated
libraries of 10,000 records in less than 30 minutes. Secondly, working with colleagues from the medical library
at the university medical centre in Rotterdam, Wichor Bramer presented a
poster on the search methods for
systematic reviews which have been developed to support over 200 SRs a
year. They work with the PI for each project to develop an optimised search
strategy checking the added value of individual terms. Working in a step by
step way they identify missing thesaurus and free text terms. When a search strategy is arrived at, they
use macros which they have developed in MS Word in order to translate the
optimised search into the appropriate syntax for other databases
Elena Springhall from the University of Toronto gave a
presentation about blended learning (also
known as the “flipped classroom” or “hybrid instruction”) which provided useful
background knowledge to this way of teaching.
She described a piece of research which is currently in progress to assess
the effectiveness of this approach and review its use in teaching Medical
students at the UoT. Preliminary finding suggest that achieving an optimal balance
between the two elements of online and F2F teaching is difficult but is still
overall a useful pedagogical approach. The project is due to be completed this summer.
Anecdotal info from the presentation include: make teaching sessions mandatory
or the message is that they are not important; she also commented that her
medical students often disliked the reflection side of her classes and
struggled with this skill. She also talked about having “online office hours”.
Marte Odegaard from University of Oslo gave a presentation
on knowledge management and her teaching
on an EBP course for final year medical students. She described a piece of
research she undertook where she analysed the methodology chapter of 29 final
assignments in order to establish the students understanding and improve her
teaching methods. Focusing on the students' choices on knowledge management and
search techniques, one of her methods was to use elements of FRESNO and the
PRESS checklist in order to grade the PICOs that students had written. The illustrations
from students’ work gave the usual contradictions such as students declaring
that a comprehensive search had been undertaken (which they defined as a
certain range of data sources) and then they searched only one source. She also
mentioned that less experienced students often investigated clinical
effectiveness questions with students in later years taking organisational /
management type questions.
Louise Farragher spoke about the theory and use of systematic reviews and other review types,
based on the work of Grant and Booth (2009) and Gough et al. (2012). She also
reported on the experiences of the team at the Irish Health Research Board which
was set up by the Department of Health to conduct “evidence reviews”. She
highlighted that a different approach is required from that of a traditional SR
to develop a rapid or scoping review to inform policy decisions. She referred
to a diagram from the Gough paper which outlines review approaches. It
indicates the different philosophical bases of review types, for example some
reviews rooted in an idealist philosophy, which in turn informed the
methodology – inductive, exploring or generating theory and the search process
– iterative and emergent. She commented on some of the challenges to producing
reviews to inform policy and how researchers sometimes found it ideologically
challenging to reduce information to small concepts in order to present to policy
makers.
The Embedded
librarian is obviously a concept we are familiar with at ScHARR and also,
of course, common in the NHS with the clinical librarian role. Norbert Sunderbrink, working in a
teaching hospital library in Hamburg, reported on how this role had been
developed at one of the departments in his institution, where an IS had been
employed separately from the University library. He gave a background to the
notion of the embedded librarian/informationist/ISIC (Information specialist in
context), before covering some of the main advantages and disadvantages of the
role. One feature he described was of the embedded librarian being a “power
user” of the institutional library services and able to identify information
needs of researchers sooner, as in situ. He also spoke about “the move from a
transaction based to relationship based model”.
Other highlights include – the development of a new ontology to translate indexing
concepts into Finnish, which is a language which has no structural
relationship to Indo-European languages such as English, French or German:
“FinMESH” presentation by Raisa Livonen (University of Helsinki)
Valerie Durieux spoke about collaborative tagging and folksonomies. Molinari et al from Italy conducted a survey
to capture the location of HTA centres in Europe and the extent to which
information professionals are involved in the HTA process. (poster number 16)
Finally, the next
EAHIL conference is in Edinburgh, 10-12 June 2015. The theme is research; doing
research, supporting research, promoting research…
Helen
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