Literacy Information

Here are some useful links to material about the European health librarians conference (EAHIL+ICAHIS+ICLC) that I was at a couple of weeks ago.

- There are my own posts about it on my blog.
- Workshop website: https://eahil2015.wordpress.com
- Most presentations from the event are at https://eahil2015.wordpress.com/workshop-presentations-for-download/
- The twitter stream: https://twitter.com/hashtag/researchminded
- Storify by Victoria Cormie https://storify.com/viche/eahil-icahis-iclc-2015-workshop
- Blog post giving a lot of detail about the session on focus groups: https://benchmarkingthreehealthlibraries.wordpress.com/2015/07/01/focus-said-the-focus-group/
- Catherine Voutier blogged several sessions: here, here, here, and here
- Hazel Hall's blog on her keynote: http://hazelhall.org/2015/06/29/incorporating-a-research-minded-approach-to-professional-practice-opening-keynote-at-eahil-2015-researchminded/

- Isla Kuhn's blog posts: here , here , and here
- Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1014174828599539/
- Flickr pool: https://www.flickr.com/groups/eahil2015/pool/
- A blog post in Finnish reporting on the conference
- This paper got tweeted a lot: Anton, B., Woodson, S. M., Twose, C., and Roderer, N. K. (2014). The persistence of clinical questions across shifts on an intensive care unit: an observational pilot study. Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA, 102(3), 201–205. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4076130/
Photos by Sheila Webber: the conference dinner at EAHIL+ICAHIS+ICLC, June 2015

I've just put up that slides that Bill Johnston and I used in our workshop on phenomenography, that was part of the EAHIL+ICAHIS+ ICLC workshop in Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago. This is the pleasant seminar room we were in.
Since delegates were from the healthcare sector, and phenomenography is a research approach that has been used quite a lot in healthcare, we asked participants to read a paper describing phenomenographic research into nurses' conceptions of caring:
Andresson, E.K., Willman, A., Sjostrom-Strand, A. and Borglin, G. (2015). Registered nurses' descriptions of caring: a phenomenographic interview study. BMC Nursing, 14:16. DOI 10.1186/s12912-015-0067-9 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6955/14/16
The powerpoint provides a short introduction to the approach, and then says something about the part of analysis that is to do with identifying the categories describing each of the varied conceptions.

I'm liveblogging from the EAHIL + ICAHIS + ICLC 2015 Workshop in Edinburgh: I will be catching up with blogging the workshops at this conference over the next day or two, by the way. In the final plenary today, Dr Liz Grant (Assistant Principal, Director Global Health Academy, University of Edinburgh) talked about Research minded: understanding, supporting, conducting research. She started by quoting T.S. Elliot (the lines "We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our rexploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time". This encapsulated some of her ideas about research and its outcomes.
Grant went on to talk about the goals of the Global Health Academy. It brought together staff, students and practitioners from different disciplines, and had 3 premises. The first was the equality of humanity (but we are born into unequal circumstances, so, you should try and make circumstances more equal for people). The 2nd premise was that many solutions are in the world already, but may be overlooked, perhaps are in unexpected places, or in different place to the one where it is needed. This obviously links to use of information. The 3rd premise was that "people in partnerships bring about change: investing in people to share knowledge across boundaries is essential": there needed to be collaborations across nations and disciplines to meet the many 21st challenges.
Grant went on to talk about the Millenium Development Goals and the extent to which, firstly they have not all been met, and secondly some statistics might be questioned. Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are about to take over from MDGs: the 3rd of these SDGs is "Ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages". This SDG3 includes, e.g., goals to do with non-communicable diseases, use of alcohol, infant mortality. However: how can these be achieved? For example "Universal Health Coverage" is seen as essential for "healthy lives for all" but is complex and difficult to achieve. Grant said that her own field was end of life care, and she had seen the cycle of poverty caused by healthcare systems that were not free.
Grant talked about three things that can help. Firstly, "Task shifting transformed to task sharing": this involved recognising the value of different types of skill or task, so there was equality in partnerships. This also involved using information differently, and crossing disciplinary/knowledge silos.
Secondly, there needed to be a "Continuity and continuum of care". She gave the example of newborn and child health, where you had to think of the continuum of support and care, not focusing on vulnerable points (e.g. birth) in a disconnected way. The third and final element was "Quality care that is compassionate": understanding that transmitting knowledge is not enough, and you needed understanding and engagement, so that there could be compassion in the approach to healthcare." You can demonstrate to researchers that using knowledge compassionately is transformative - information doesn't sit on a page"
So, coming back to the Elliot quote, Grant urged us to look in unusual palaces for solutions, to listen, to recognise resources that are there and to partner in equality. Through this, we can take what we have now, and make a change.
Photo by Sheila Webber: plaque for the Scottish writer and physician, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (author of Sherlock Holmes), in the square by the conference venues.

Yesterday, at the EAHIL + ICAHIS + ICLC 2015 Workshop in Edinburgh, Marshall Dozier (Edinburgh University) and I led a session on running a journal club (the picture shows the nice view out of the seminar room window). We ran a short example of a journal club at the start of the session, discussing:
Kean, E.B. (2013). Assessment and impact of a new role as an embedded librarian in nursing online journal clubs. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 101(4), 335-338. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3794692/

We gathered tips from participants and will post those up shortly. We also produced a handout with a list of relevant articles and links. I have embedded it below.

Again I'm liveblogging a keynote from the EAHIL + ICAHIS + ICLC 2015 Workshop in Edinburgh. Johanna Rivano Eckerdal was talking about Qualitative research methods: interviewing as a way of learning and knowing.
She started by talking about how she became interested in qualitative research. This was when she was alibrarian, working with young people, and observing that they didn't seem so interested in what librarians had to offer. This made her curious about exploring issues of information literacy, and joined a PhD programme. This research was ethnographic research into young women's choices about contraception (which I've blogged before, the citation is at the end of this post).
She quoted Denzin and Lincoln, emphasising that qualitative approaches aim to uncover meaning. Eckerdal listed various kinds of approaches and data collection methods used in qualitative methods. She picked up a point made earlier by Alison Brettle, that your overall standpoint as a researcher (your view of the world and what reality and knowledge are) determines how you will talk about your research and data.
The particular focus of this presentation was interviewing. Interviews occur in context, and that is where they have key value (in helping to understanding a person in context). By interviewing we are getting to know what what people think: even if they don't say exactly what they think, communication is occurring and there can be insights.
Kvale's two metaphors for interviewing were given (interviewer as miner or traveller; seeing interviewing respectively as knowledge collection or knowledge (co)production). In the latter view, the interview is seen as a discourse, a narrative, in which both interviewer and interviewee participate.
Eckerdal gave an example from her own research, showing "understanding being created during an interview" as the interviewee talks about how she feels about contraception, finally coming up of the metaphor of "personal bodyguard". This was a metaphor, but also expressed the reality of the situation for the young women. Eckerdal also talked about the issue of the power balance between interviewer and interviewee: power is generally with the interviewer, and to encourage a meaningful discourse, the interviewer can seek to make the power balance more equal. She gave an example of asking interviewees drawing information sources horizon maps (there is an article about this here) and of their own situation. These pictures, drawn by the interviewee, could be triggers for narratives, to go deeper and get the interviewees more active in the knowledge production.
Eckerdal also talked about the importance of being transparent about the research, with the participants and with others who are reading about the research. She identified that all research has limitations: if we expect research to always give definite answers, we will be disappointed. A strong theme from her talk was research as a way of learning, and that qualitative research enables both researchers and participants to get insights into the way they engage with information in their lives.

Eckerdal, J.R. (2011). "To jointly negotiate a personal decision: a qualitative study on information literacy practices in midwifery counselling about contraceptives at youth centres in Southern Sweden" Information Research, 16(1) paper 466. http://InformationR.net/ir/16-1/paper466.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: spring herbs and flowers, June 2015

This week I will be doing some liveblogging from the EAHIL + ICAHIS + ICLC 2015 Workshop in Edinburgh. This mainly consists of workshops, which I will blog about afterwards rather than liveblogging. However there are some interesting keynotes, and I aim to liveblog those.The hashtag is #researchminded

The opening keynote was from Professor Hazel Hall (Edinburgh Napier University) talking about: Incorporating a research-minded approach to professional practice. She started by talking about the four Edinburgh Universities (Heriot-Watt, Queen Margaret, Edinburgh Napier and Edinburgh Universities), highlighting the medical and healthcare faculties, the importance of Edinburgh medical research discoveries and her own personal connections (her father was a vet, graduating from Edinburgh!)
Turning to ther main topic of her talk, she described the work of the Library and Information Science Research Coalition, which has a website at http://lisresearch.org/ - there is a lot of information about it there, so I won't repeat it all here. Hazel was seconded part time to direct it the coalition, in particular to prepare the bids for, and implement, the RiLIES and the follow-on DREAM projects http://lisresearch.org/dream-project/. Hazel also highlighted the @LISResearch twitter feed, which I certainly find useful to follow to get news about library and information research.
The Coalition's main aims were "to facilitate a co-ordinated and strategic approach to LIS research across the UK." and specifically to: "bring together information about LIS research opportunities and results; encourage dialogue between research funders; promote LIS practitioner research and the translation of research outcomes into practice; articulate a strategic approach to LIS research;promote the development of research capacity in LIS."
Hazel identified that the Coalition was keen to enable people to make better use of exisiting research, to help improve service delivery, and use the evidence base to justify services' existence and development. It was felt that part of this could be done by improving access to research resources, and there are links and resources on the Coalition website. The website has not been updated since the project finished in 2012, but it still is getting hits and people find it useful.
The second strand was developing practitioner-led research, on the grounds that carrying out research can have benefits for the organisation, the service and the individual practitioner-researcher. Benefits for the individual can include being able to talk to academics about research, your job satisfaction and potential career progression.
Hazel moved on to talk in more detail about the DREAM project. It had a conference, 3 workshop events (where people had to commit to attend all three workshops) and another conference. These included expert sessions on a variety of research approaches (you can see details of workshops on the DREAM website, including videos and presentations), one-minute madness sessions, and participant research presentations.
Hazel finished by talking about the impact of the project (e.g. work by the "DREAMers"), and said that they were now doing an impact study (just about to be launched) which involves a questionnaire and focus groups. She then urged everyone to make the most of the research focus of the conference, for learning and networking.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Pollack Halls, where I'm staying during the conference.