LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

From The Star: Toronto Public Library is pulling its part-time librarian from the Reading Room at the Hospital for Sick Children.

"We’re worried, but we understand that Toronto Public Library has been hit with a budget that doesn’t allow them to continue their services across the city at the same level,” says Dr. Bruce Ferguson, the hospital’s director of community health systems. “The first thing we (will) do is talk about how we can maintain services for patients and families.”

Sick Kids is one of three Toronto hospitals losing its part-time library staff because of city budget constraints.

The reading room has a collection of 13,500 materials that includes books, CDs and curriculum material that supports schoolchildren from kindergarten to Grade 12. Some Toronto public board teachers work permanently in the hospital, holding classes for students of the psychiatric ward, epilepsy patients, and kids in the substance-abuse program. Teachers also school patients who are at the hospital for more than five days to ensure they don’t fall behind.

“The Toronto Public Library is an incredibly valuable contributor and we will miss that librarian,” said Ferguson. “But we will sit down with our partners and the woman’s auxiliary and volunteer services and figure out how they’ll cope without the part-time staff member.”

Drexel University College of Medicine's new Health Encyclopedia is a user-friendly guide that puts facts, photos and multimedia of more than 3,000 diseases and conditions at your fingertips. Click your way through causes, symptoms and treatment options. Make a doctor's appointment with our Find A Physician search.

Access: Drexel University College of Medicine's new Health Encyclopedia

You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much?

If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone else like him — with Sutent, your premiums will increase. Do you still think the drug is a good value? Suppose the treatment cost a million dollars. Would it be worth it then? Ten million? Is there any limit to how much you would want your insurer to pay for a drug that adds six months to someone’s life? If there is any point at which you say, “No, an extra six months isn’t worth that much,” then you think that health care should be rationed.

Full piece in the NYT

Follow up on a story we posted last week about the Rapid City Regional Hospital removing its librarian and closing its library (I like to think that maybe LISNews contributed to what LJ is calling the 'backlash'...)

Library Journal reports: Rapid City Regional Hospital (RCRD), SD, has ended public access to its medical library and fired its longtime medical librarian, provoking a negative reaction to the decision.

In response to a story in the Rapid City Journal June 9, some 70 people wrote about their displeasure with the hospital, bringing up salient points about the nature of libraries and librarians.

Unfortunately, closing libraries is an increasingly common occurrence in the private sector. But in this case, the public has been affected, and they’re making sure their displeasure is heard.

"A library is about INFORMATION, not about books," wrote one poster. "Librarians are skilled in helping people connect with the INFORMATION they need, AND they help to make the information accessible too," she continued.

Many posters made well-informed arguments for the profession. A past hospital employee wrote, "[Other hospitals] understand that the librarian is the key to making these electronic resources work, finding the best resources to buy, at the best prices, continuously teaching users and making the databases work well for the employees, doctors, and patients."

Medical librarian Pat Hamilton is out of a job on Friday as Rapid City Regional Hospital transitions to a self-help electronic medical library for internal use only.

For the past 24 years, Hamilton and her staff of volunteers offered medical library resources to doctors, hospital employees and medical, nursing and pharmacy students. The library's consumer health section also was available to the general public to do research on their medical conditions. Those materials have been donated to the Rapid City Public Library. The electronic library will no longer be available for public use.

Dr. Robert Allen, RCRH's vice president of medical affairs, said the library and its computer access will remain open for internal use, but it will be staffed partially by volunteers and by medical staff services personnel.

"With electronic advancements, health care facilities are increasingly moving to this type of library," Allen said in a statement. "Rapid City Regional Hospital will maintain some books and journals in its library."

The amount of money saved by the move is not known at this time, he said.

Library volunteer Joyce Herbst said: "They can put whatever spin they want on it, but brass tacks is that they're closing the library. I guess I just don't understand how you can take that resource away from a teaching hospital. How can it be a teaching hospital, without a resource library and someone to run it? I just think it's not a very smart thing to do."

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has a recent article about a medical library named after a suicide bomber.

Read more about it: Library Named After Palestinian Suicide Bomber Wafa Idris Inaugurated at a Yemen Children's Hospital

Progressive Librarians Guild Calls for Elsevier to End Corrupt Publishing Practices and for Library Associations to Take Advocacy Role on Behalf of Scientific Integrity

Progressive Librarians Guild. May 12, 2009.
Drafted by Progressive Librarians Guild Coordinating Committee members and approved by the Progressive Librarians Guild
Coordinating Committee May 12, 2009.

A Rexburg (ID) woman who spends her days helping doctors, nurses, and patients is also using her skills to help one of the most important people in her life...her son.

Teresa Murdock has been working at Madison Memorial Hospital's medical librarian for the past fifteen years. Just three months ago, Murdock's 19-year-old son Chance was diagnosed with an extremely rare type of terminal cancer. Story and video from Idaho CBS affiliate.

Technology can be used to heal both broken bones and cultural conflicts, James Billington, the 13th librarian of Congress, said Wednesday.

The Yale School of Medicine held the opening ceremony for the interactive exhibit “Medical Inventions and Innovations” in the school’s Harkness Auditorium yesterday afternoon. The ceremony coincided with the 60th annual lecture sponsored by the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library Associates, delivered by Billington.

Billington’s talk, titled “Freedom as Strategy: The Importance of an Ideal,” focused on the issues of globalization and intercultural understanding. More from the Yale Daily News.

From CBS News, here are details of how a librarian discovered the 'global gag rule' removing the word abortion from the Popline ("population information online" ) database.

Gloria Won, a librarian at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, was one of those who sent e-mails to POPLINE administrators after having trouble with searches.

Won got this response from POPLINE administrator Debra L. Dickson: "Yes, we did make a change to POPLINE. We recently made all abortion words stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now."

A "stop word" is a word that a search engine ignores; typically they are common words such as "a," "the" and "is."

Loriene Roy, president of the American Library Association, applauded the actions of Dr. Michael J. Klag, the dean of the Bloomberg school, who ordered the word abortion restored to the db, saying the restriction denied "researchers, students and individuals on all sides of the issue access to accurate scientific information."