Guest post by Joyce Backus and Kathel Dunn, both from NLM’s Division of Library Operations.
As shrinking budgets tighten belts at hospitals and academic institutions, medical libraries have come under scrutiny. In response, librarians have had to articulate the value they bring to the institution and to the customers—students, researchers, clinicians, or patients—they serve.
In 2011-2012, as such scrutiny swelled, Joanne Marshall and her team set out to study the very question these medical institutions faced: Do libraries add value? They collected 16,122 individual responses from health professionals at 118 hospitals served by 56 health libraries in the United States and Canada. The team sought to determine whether physicians, residents, and nurses perceived their libraries’ information resources as valuable and whether the information obtained impacted patient care.
The resulting article, “The Value of Library and Information Services in Patient Care,” published in 2013, gave medical librarians strong talking points, including the overall perceived value of libraries as time-savers that positively impact patient care.
Now the datasets from that study are being reused to great result.
Over the last year we teamed up with Joanne Marshall and Amber Wells, both from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, to dive into the data.
Our goal: to understand the value and impact of MEDLINE in medical libraries.
We re-discovered (as has been written about before) the value of MEDLINE in changing patient care. We also found its preeminent role shines even more brightly in a dataset like this one that includes other sources. We saw the significance of MEDLINE as a single source of information but also as a source used in combination with full-text journals, books, drug databases, websites, and colleague consultations.
We were reminded, too, of the importance of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NNLM) to our work; the trust in the NNLM; each library’s connectedness to the other; and how the everyday web of relationships prompts cooperation and collaboration, including the successful implementation of the value of libraries study itself.
For us this re-discovery comes at a key time, when we’re examining NLM products and services as part of the strategic planning process. We are actively identifying methodologies and tools to elevate all our collections—from datasets to incunabula—and make them greater engines of discovery in service of health.
But what about your library’s resources?
The data mining challenge we gave ourselves is our guide for medical librarians everywhere: look at your data, what’s in front of you, and then others’ data. What can they tell you about what’s happening now, what will likely happen in the future, what’s being used, and how it’s being used?
If you don’t know where to start, check out the Medical Library Association’s Research Training Institute, recommended research skills, and mentoring program. In addition, the NNLM’s site on program evaluation includes tools for determining cost benefit and return on investment.
Librarians positively impact health care and health care research. Now it’s time to have that same impact on our own profession. The data are there. It’s time we see what they have to tell us.
More information
Value of Library and Information Services in Patient Care Study
References
Lindberg DA, Siegel ER, Rapp BA, Wallingford KT, Wilson SR. Use of MEDLINE by physicians for clinical problem solving. JAMA. 1993; 269: 3124-9.
Demner-Fushman D, Hauser SE, Humphrey SM, Ford GM, Jacobs JL, Thoma GR. MEDLINE as a source of just-in-time answers to clinical questions. AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings. 2006:190-4.
Sneiderman CA, Demner-Fushman D, Fiszman M, Ide NC, Rindflesch TC. Knowledge-based methods to help clinicians find answers in MEDLINE. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2007 Nov-Dec; 14(6):772-80.
Joyce Backus serves as the associate director for Library Operations at NLM. Kathel Dunn is the NLM Associate Fellowship coordinator.
Nice to read about ‘Big Data’ analysis of libraries’ own data sets, in a way that makes sense and makes a difference, for solo librarians, as well as their colleagues at larger libraries. DOCLINE ILL data has been demonstrating library value and informing collection and resource sharing decisions for decades!