Abstract
At the Medical Library Association’s InSight Initiative Summit 2, held September 27–28, 2018, academic and hospital librarians joined with publishing industry partners to develop a deeper shared understanding of technology- and social interaction–driven changes in how health sciences researchers and clinicians discover and consume information in their fields. Through a mixture of keynote talks, a panel discussion with health care professionals, and small-group problem-solving exercises, the summit program invited participants to collaboratively develop strategies for helping users recognize the value of curated or peer-reviewed content obtained through institutional access channels. Themes of the summit included the existence of different user modes of information discovery and access, user reliance on professional societies and Twitter as information sources, the extent to which smartphones are used to find medical information, the importance of inducing disorienting dilemmas in library users that cause them to recognize librarians as true partners in information seeking and research, the dangers of depending on non-curated information, and the need for publishers and librarians to work together to ease barriers to access and enrich the user experience.
Highlights
Doody reiterated some key questions raised in the summit
Based on the data that Gardner shared from the Renew survey, are publishers and librarians spending too much time and attention on pirate sites like ResearchGate and SciHub and on delivery of content through mobile devices? Based on what participants learned from the panelists, some users are highly dependent on their smartphones for accessing information
What are the take-aways from this? What are the implications of traditional A&I databases maintaining a leading role in information discovery? As librarians, how can we induce disorienting dilemmas in our users? As publishers, how can we induce disorienting dilemmas in our authors and readers? How can we systematically use library evangelists to help communicate our value proposition? Librarians say that engaging users is easier in some areas and more difficult in other areas
Summary
Users always rely on their preferred information sources (e.g., ResearchGate, Google Scholar). There was little difference between medical and academic sectors in how people accessed books, those in the medical sector were again more likely to go to a society web page Together, these survey findings led Gardner to wonder what people in the medical and academic sectors could learn from each other and, in particular, how professional society relationships are involved in the search for and discovery of information. During the question-and-answer session, a librarian asked which personalization features on publisher or journal web pages were least valued, regardless of medical or academic sector. To understand how librarians at the New York University (NYU) Health Sciences Library have adapted their services to respond to users’ changing needs, Williams asked his librarians several questions in a focus group setting, including: What are some changes in the needs and behaviors of library users over your career? By performing textual analysis of focus group transcripts, Williams identified five major themes related to evolving user needs
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