Karen Gutzman

The Medical Library Association’s InSight Initiative provides an open and collaborative environment for library and industry partners to discuss vexing problems and find solutions to better serve their users. The initiative’s fifth summit, continuing work from the previous summit, focused on understanding how users discover and access information in the clinical environment. During the summit, participants were divided into working groups and encouraged to create a tangible product as a result of their discussions. At the end of the summit, participants established a framework for understanding users’ pain points, discussed possible solutions to those points, and received feedback on their work from an End User Advisory Board comprising physicians, clinical researchers, and clinical faculty in biomedicine. In addition to the pain point framework, participants are developing MLA InSight Initiative Learning content with modules to educate librarians and publishers about critical aspects of user behavior. The 2020 Insight Initiative Fall Forum will serve as a virtual home for constructive dialogue between health sciences librarians and publishers on improving discovery and access to information.

Academic health centers, CTSA hubs, and hospital libraries experience similar funding challenges and charges to do more with less. In recent years academic health center and hospital librarians have risen to these challenges by examining their service models, and beyond that, examining their patron base and users’ needs. To meet the needs of employees, patients, and those who assist patients, hospital librarians can employ the CTS Personas, a project of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program National Center for Data to Health. The Persona profiles, which outline the motivations, goals, pain points, wants, and needs of twelve employees and two patients in translational science, provide vital information and insights that can inform everything from designing software tools and educational services, to advertising these services, to designing impactful and collaborative library spaces.

Assigning authorship and recognizing contributions to scholarly works is challenging on many levels. Here we discuss ethical, social, and technical challenges to the concept of authorship that may impede the recognition of contributions to a scholarly work. Recent work in the field of authorship shows that shifting to a more inclusive contributorship approach may address these challenges. Recent efforts to enable better recognition of contributions to scholarship include the development of the Contributor Role Ontology (CRO), which extends the CRediT taxonomy and can be used in information systems for structuring contributions. We also introduce the Contributor Attribution Model (CAM), which provides a simple data model that relates the contributor to research objects via the role that they played, as well as the provenance of the information. Finally, requirements for the adoption of a contributorship-based approach are discussed.

Librarians at the Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center evaluated citation data from clinical trials and patents as potential indicators of library collection strengths and research trends at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. These under-examined resources were of interest because of their relation to translational research, which is a central area of focus in the library’s mission. Digital Science Dimensions (Dimensions) was used as a data source to capture the clinical trial and patent data as part of a collaboration between Galter Library and Dimensions. Upon completing a brief pilot using clinical trials to identify collection gaps, various analyses were applied to data for all patents that had Northwestern University as an assignee from 2008 to 2017. The findings were compared with traditional metrics such as Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) compliant usage statistics and journal impact factor to identify core resources and trends unique to patents. This study is potentially of interest to libraries supporting research-intensive organizations where patents may shed new light on collection use.

Twelve evidence-based profiles of roles across the translational workforce and two patients were made available through clinical and translational science (CTS) Personas, a project of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program National Center for Data to Health (CD2H). The persona profiles were designed and researched to demonstrate the key responsibilities, motivators, goals, software use, pain points, and professional development needs of those working across the spectrum of translation, from basic science to clinical research to public health. The project’s goal was to provide reliable documents that could be used to inform CTSA software development projects, educational resources, and communication initiatives. This paper presents the initiative to create personas for the translational workforce, including the methodology, engagement strategy, and lessons learned. Challenges faced and successes achieved by the project may serve as a roadmap for others searching for best practices in the creation of Persona profiles.

While research metrics may seem well established in the scholarly landscape, it can be challenging to understand how they should be used and how they are calculated. The Metrics Toolkit is an online evidence-based resource for researchers, librarians, evaluators, and administrators in their work to demonstrate or assess the impact of research.This article was selected by the Virtual Projects Advisory Committee of technology experts after an annual call for projects in MLA-FOCUS and announcements to encourage submissions from all types of libraries.

Librarians from the Galter Health Sciences Library at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine undertook a citation analysis study in early 2017 to supplement traditional electronic journal usage data in the hopes of more effectively demonstrating journals’ value. The authors developed a methodology for gathering comprehensive publication and citation data for authors affiliated with the Feinberg School of Medicine, using Web of Science as the primary data source. Using this data, various metrics were employed to measure and evaluate journals in institutional and field-specific contexts, including co-citation networks, and increases or decreases of references over time per title. These metrics were compared against more traditional tools like Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources usage reports, cost-per-use analysis, and interlibrary loan statistics, to identify correlations and discrepancies. This use case demonstrates the potential value of incorporating publication and citation metrics into library collection development and evaluation practices.

Objective: The paper review provides a review of current practices related to evaluating support services reported by seven biomedical and research libraries.Methods: A group of seven libraries from the United States and Canada described their experiences with establishing evaluation support services at their libraries. A questionnaire was distributed among the libraries to elicit information as to program development, service and staffing models, campus partnerships, training, products such as tools and reports, and resources used for evaluation support services. The libraries also reported interesting projects, lessons learned, and future plans.Results: The seven libraries profiled in this paper report a variety of service models in providing evaluation support services to meet the needs of campus stakeholders. The service models range from research center cores, partnerships with research groups, and library programs with staff dedicated to evaluation support services. A variety of products and services were described such as an automated tool to develop rank-based metrics, consultation on appropriate metrics to use for evaluation, customized publication and citation reports, resource guides, classes and training, and others. Implementing these services has allowed the libraries to expand their roles on campus and to contribute more directly to the research missions of their institutions.Conclusions: Libraries can leverage a variety of evaluation support services as an opportunity to successfully meet an array of challenges confronting the biomedical research community, including robust efforts to report and demonstrate tangible and meaningful outcomes of biomedical research and clinical care. These services represent a transformative direction that can be emulated by other biomedical and research libraries.

The DigitalHub scholarly repository was developed and launched at the Galter Health Sciences Library for the Feinberg School of Medicine and the greater Northwestern Medicine community. The repository was designed to allow scholars the ability to create, share, and preserve a range of citable digital outputs. This article traces the evolution of DigitalHub’s development and engagement activities, highlighting project challenges, innovations, success stories, and the team-based approach that was employed to successfully achieve project goals.