Added to my reading list:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR280.html

The research described in this report was performed to develop a more complete picture of how hospital emergency departments (EDs) contribute to the U.S. health care system, which is currently evolving in response to economic, clinical, and political pressures. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, it explores the evolving role that EDs and the personnel who staff them play in evaluating and managing complex and high-acuity patients, serving as the key decisionmaker for roughly half of all inpatient hospital admissions, and serving as “the safety net of the safety net” for patients who cannot get care elsewhere. The report also examines the role that EDs may soon play in either contributing to or helping to control the rising costs of health care.

In Boston, at the 2013 Medical Library Association’s Annual Meeting I blogged as the Unofficial MLA Insider.  In the past I noticed that both MLA new members as well as long time members aren’t always sure as to how things work.  My posts were meant to shed some light on what happens at the meeting as well as within MLA.

MLA is a great group full of interesting and helpful librarians, and even though we aren’t the size of ALA, it is sometimes hard to know the structure, how things work, who does what, etc. within the organization.  So I have decided to continue my unofficial MLA insider posts with an attempt at pulling back the curtain of the organization. 

One note, much of the stuff I will be blogging about is available on the organization’s website, MLANet.org, and available to current members, but I think the best way to really understand is to also get involved.  It is one thing to read and another to do.

I will still continue writing about other things on the blog, but I will throw in an unofficial insider post every once and a while. 

If you didn’t read the MLA 2013 blog, here are links to my posts which will give you an idea of what I intend to write about.

• 2015 NPC Ideas Starts Now -What all happens when planning the annual meeting. Timelines, speakers, programs, selecting a theme, etc.
• What is the Leaders Tea and Who is a Leader? -It isn’t the medical version of Library Journal’s Movers and Shakers, it is a meeting on what you need to do now that you are chair of a Section, Committee, Task Force, etc.
• How Things Get Done in MLA - Basic background of how things happen within the MLA structure.

In the following weeks I plan to write a post about Sections, SIGs, Chapters and other entities within the larger MLA.  My intention is to shed light on what is sometimes a very confusing area for members.  I will be answering the often asked question, “What is a Section and how is it different than a SIG?”

What are some of the things you always wondered about MLA?  Let me know and I will try and shed some light on it.  I need your imput and questions to help make this unofficial insider series work

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Data highlights and preliminary analysis from the recent national survey of DOCLINE libraries as part of the NLM strategic planning initiative exploring the future of resource sharing. The presentation also gave a brief overview of recent and upcoming releases. A PowerPoint presentation is available.

Via PaleoFuture, this Knight Ridder video describes the iPad (okay “the tablet”…but Apple got there first) pretty damned well. Fascinating to me that an entity created by a newspaper company had this sort of prescience…and totally failed to act on it.

“Tablets will be a whole new class of computer, they’ll weigh under two pounds. They’ll be totally portable. They’ll have a clarity of screen display comparable to to ink on paper. They’ll be able to blend text, video, audio and graphics together and they’ll be part of our daily lives around the turn of the century. We may still use computers to create information, but we’ll use the tablet to interact with information.”

 

 

Thanks to On the Media for the heads-up on PaleoFuture.

 

Wow there were a lot of bloggers who wrote great stuff at MLA 2013.  I tried to attend as much as I can but of course I can’t hit everything so I have come to really enjoy reading the Official Meeting Blog  after the meeting to review the things I wasn’t able to attend.  I have taken it upon myself to organize the posts from the blog into some general categories and I thought I would share them. (I am such a librarian I am organizing blog posts…sigh..)

The organization is very rough.  I tried to group like posts on the same topic together, but I am sure I made some mistakes.  I also added some extra details such as the section program title on some of the blog titles where it wasn’t immediately obvious as to what it referred to. 

One thing to remember…. The e-Conference stuff is not just for those who paid for the e-Conference.  Those who physically attended the conference can also access all of the great stuff online using their badge number.

Prior to a conference

• Getting connected when you are the newbie
• Don’t Miss the Colleague Connection
• Colleague Connection
• Mapping out a Conference Itinerary
• Keep your Conference Momentum
• Why come to an MLA Annual meeting?
• Get your backchannel on at #MLAnet13

About MLA and Getting Involved

• 2015 NPC Ideas Starts Now
• What is the Leaders Tea and Who is a Leader?
• How Things Get Done in MLA
• What are you looking for from MLA?

CE’s

• CE Session: Beyond Powerpoint: Leveraging Technology to Enhance Instruction and Learning
• Why teach a CE class?
• CE 503 Session: Emerging Technologies for Librarians
• The Power of Libraries to Reduce Disaster Impact and Speed Recovery
• CE601 Beyond PowerPoint: Leveraging Technology to Enhance Instruction and Learning

Sunrise Seminars

• Discovery Services Helpful for Finding Content, but Don’t Minimize Time We Need to Spend on Search Strategy and Info Literacy Instruction

Plenary Sessions

• A Year of Positive Energy (Plenary 1)
• The Role of Communication in Librarianship and One Health
• MLA Conference – Sunday Morning Speaker
• The Value of the Non-Librarian Perspective: Thoughts on Plenary 2
• What We Can Learn from the Accidental Journalist
• The Threat of Pandemics, Not to Mention Fear and Panic (Plenary 4)
• Sheila Davis and Laurie Garrett: Major Speakers on the Last Day of the Conference

Exhibitors

• MLA 2013 First Time Exhibitors
• Publishing Innovations
• More Than Free Goodies
• Items of Interest in the Exhibit Hall

Section & Sig Stuff

• History of Health Sciences Section Spotlight
• Informationist SIG
• Clinical Librarians & EBHC SIG Meeting – 2pm Sunday 5th May
• Hospital Libraries Section Activities Sunday with a Glimpse at Monday
• A Special Birthday Celebration for the Hospital Libraries Section
• Public Services Section Meeting
• International Cooperation Section (ICS) Business Meeting

Posters

• Poster Session 1
• Poster Session 1 – Posters That Attract Attention
• Poster Session 1 – A Few More to Check Out
• Poster Session 2 – Monday, May 6
• Poster Session 2: “Partnering for Value”
• Poster Session 2: The learning curve for One Health blogging
• Poster Session 3
• Poster Session 4

Programs

• Online Proceedings Now Open
• One Health One World -Surveying Current One Health Initiatives
• Catching the Welch Medical Library Timeline
• Doing Things Differently: Informationists at the Welch Medical Library
• Order, please: taming the Web with semantics
• Integrating our expertise -Integrating Our Expertise: Engaging Our Partners in Resources at the Bench or at the Point of Care Session
• Quality Assurance -Quality Assurance for Clinical Librarians, Informationists and Embedded Librarians
• Get organized… and save the time of the reader -Leading by Design, Not Default: Focused Direction in Support of the User
• EMTS Session Recap — One World: Online Education 
• The Role of Librarians in EBM: part 2
• Education and Media Technologies Section (Program Section II)
• Lots of carots and sticks, and things with teeth -Librarian’s Role in Systematic Reviews, and Global Data Sharing to Advance Science and Enviornmental Aspects of Global Health
• A Few Highlights FromThe International Clinical Librarian Conference
• Librarians on Animal Use Committees
• An Irish Perspective-Informing future roles through research: a national approach
• Data Management? Yeah, we got that.
• Final Thoughts - Education and Media: Creative Advice from the Media Experts
• ICLC 1: Quality Assurance for Clinical Librarians, Informationists, and Embedded Librarians
• The Impact of the Clinical Informationist -ICLC1 : Quality Assurance for Clinical Librarians, Informationists and Embedded Librarians
• ICLC 2: Emerging Roles for Health Librarians and Finding New Information in Novel Places
• ICLC 3: Practicalities of Searching for Clinical Librarians, Informationists, and Embedded Librarians
• Practicalities of Searching -International Clinical Librarian Conference 3: Practicalities of Searching for Clinical Librarians, Informationists, and Embedded Librarian
• Healthcare Information for All by 2015 (HIFA2015)
• Open Access Presentations - Open Access in Action: Trends, Policies, and Institutional Activities in Support of Open Information
• Structuring Our Services for the Future in Health Care
• Altmetrics and Scholarly Communication- Altmetrics and Revolutions: Web-Native Science and the Future of Scholarly Communication
• Collaboration for Patient-Centered Informed Consents -Pharmacy and Drug Information Section and Leadership and Management Section:Enabling and Enriching Transnational and Interprofessional Collaboration

NLM Stuff

• News from the NLM Booth
• NLM News: Sunday Poster Sessions
• NLM DOCLINE Users Group
• NLM implements the new Library Dark Art, RDA is here!
• NLM Update – my favorite part of MLA
• NLM Update in a Nutshell

Other things

• A taste from afar: reports from ICML and the international experience
• International Visitor’s Reception
• Flipping the MLA Conference

After Conference and the e-Conference

• I’m attending MLA 2013 – I’m just not in Boston!
• Watch and listen to yesterday’s Plenary Sessions
• Thank Goodness They Are Taping This
• New content now available for e-conference
• Audio and slides now available for most sessions
• Don’t worry – you can still access MLA ’13 online proceedings long after the meeting has ended

 

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Storified: Heritage Roundtable on Library & Archives Canada, 2013/05/07 http://sfy.co/fJsu #lacpanel #cdnpoli #saveLAC

[View the story "Heritage Roundtable on Library & Archives Canada, 2013/05/07" on Storify]

Progressive Librarian’s Guild’s statement http://plggta.org/archives/201

BCLA’s statement http://bibliocracy-now.tumblr.com/post/50658397169/my-statement-to-the-heritage-roundtable-on-lac-17-may

Providing better care for patients with chronic disease requires well-connected networks, each consisting of a primary care provider, specialists, and hospitals. Ideally, the combination of good care and good communication between a family doctor and specialists will reduce re-hospitalizations and improve patients’ well-being, while reducing the costs to an overburdened health care system facing ever more chronically ill patients with long-term, complex care needs.

This week Open Medicine published a paper in which the authors investigated the possibility of identifying existing multispeciality physician networks.

Therese Stukel and her coauthors (from the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences) found creative ways of identifying existing networks of care providers who are linked not as a formal network but rather by the natural patterns of where people seek out health care and where they get referred. The authors used available health administrative data for the province of Ontario to link Ontario residents to their primary care providers, specialists to the hospitals where they provided most in-patient services, and primary care physicians to the hospitals where their patients were most often admitted. Then they measured “loyalty” as the proportion of care that patients received from the physicians and hospitals in their networks.

The findings? The authors identified 78 multispecialty physician networks across the province. In fact, they found that an informal, multispecialty, relatively self-contained network could indeed be identified for virtually all Ontario residents eligible for inclusion in the study.

“It’s like you look into the sky and you see a blur of stars and someone suddenly says ‘hey, there’s a pattern’,” lead author Dr. Stukel told Open Medicine about her team’s findings. “We’ve revealed the patterns which are virtual networks in which hospitals and physicians are already practising.”

As policy-makers fret over better ways to organize the health care system to improve outcomes (including, in Ontario, by establishing a system of Health Links),they would do well to check out this research, which will be relevant for any region struggling to improve chronic disease care and reduce re-hospitalizations.

Topics: primary carehealth policy

RefWorks Mendeley Zotero 2013 from Dean Giustini

Some of this week's items: Grand opening of the library of the future / Copyright Debate Hits the House of Commons: Opposition Won't Support C-11 Due to Digital Locks / CANARIE Supports Arctic Research - CANARIE Appuie la recherche dans l?arctique / Research for the masses / Whatever happened to the Digital Economy Act? / À qui appartiennent nos gènes?

Some of this week's items: Harper Government Invests in Research Excellence at Canadian Post Secondary Institutions Creating Jobs of the Future US intelligence wants to predict human behavior with ?data eye in the sky? Canadian universities must reform or perish Digital Public Library of America planning initiative to hold public plenary meeting in Washington, DC on October 21, 2011 Princeton bans academics from handing all copyright to journal publishers

Some of this week's items: The Writers Union of Canada, U.K. society representing 50,000 book authors, along with Norwegian, and Swedish writers? unions, join literary property rights suit against HathiTrust and five U.S. universities / ITHAKA ?Sustainable Scholarship / University research essential to Canada?s prosperity - La recherche universitaire : essentielle à la prospérité du Canada

Some of this week's items: The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) applauds the government for recognizing education as a fair dealing purpose in its latest version of the Copyright Modernization Act / L?Association des bibliothèques de recherche du Canada (ABRC) a salué la reconnaissance de fins pédagogiques comme utilisation équitable d?une oeuvre, dans la plus récente version de la Loi sur la modernisation dudroit d?auteur / Tories vow to push through copyright overhaul as written / National Science Foundation taps Carolina researchers to develop national data infrastructure / U-M Library Orphan Works Project undaunted by lawsuit / Virtual museum' to showcase Rideau Canal

Some of this week's items: IFLA Presidential Newsletter September 2011 / Sheikh's version: Ex-chief statistician picks apart cancellation of long census / Jean-Pierre Côté désigné lauréat 2011 du Prix de reconnaissance pour services exceptionnels Ron MacDonald décerné par le RCDR / Copyright confusion dogs European digitization push / Comprehensive Brief on Open Access to Publications and Research Data / Document d?information sur le libre accès aux publications et aux données de recherche

Some of this week's items: Data Sharing Shortfall / New resource to help university communities improve learning experience, outcomes / Une nouvelle ressource aidera le milieu universitaire à améliorer l?expérience et les résultats d?apprentissage / U.S. colleges hit with copyright infringement complaint from Canadian writers / Cinq universités américaines poursuivies pour violation du droit d?auteur par des auteurs américains, australiens, britanniques et québécois / E-learning in university: the digital natives are restless / Amazon 'to launch book rental service'

Some of this week's items: Long-awaited copyright bill returns, but top court to wade in too / Pirates of academe? We laugh / The Big Deal: Not Price But Cost / Rallying Cries vs. Reality: Profits and Publishing Meet Academics and Idealism

Some of this week's items: Qui contrôle Internet ? / RLUK Develops Journal Subscription Analysis Tool / Federal investment in research spurs growth and innovation / Lawful Access Legislation: 8 In 10 Oppose Internet Surveillance Without A Warrant / Fair Use Face-Off, Canadian Edition

Some of this week's items: Librarians at University of Minnesota Make an Impact with Data Management Program / UC Libraries expand access to orphan works / UBC?s University Librarian first Canadian to head global group / British Libraries Push Back

Some of this week's items: Britain revamps 300-year-old copyright laws / KU establishes first coalition of institutions practicing open access / Call to action: Sign the Berlin Declaration / Rogue Downloader's Arrest Could Mark Crossroads for Open-Access Movement / British Library Group Develops Cost-Benefit Tool to Analyze Journal Pricing / What is wrong with Scientific Publishing and can we put it right before it is too late?

Some of this week's items: Stratford digital program nearly fully subscribed / DuraSpace to Bring Cloud-Based Platform ?Direct-to-Researchers? / Rebelling against Access Copyright / British Research Libraries Say No to ?Big Deal? Serials Packages / Europe lines up hefty science-funding hike

Some of this week's items: Frustrated judge pushes Google digital book deal / Microsoft Wants to Make It Easy for Academics to Analyze ?Big Data? / Amazon announces textbook rentals for the Kindle platform / Libraries Abandon Expensive 'Big Deal' Subscription Packages to Multiple Journals / Recording industry honours Peterborough MP for work on copyright legislation