Valerie Florance

To understand the experience of the informationist recipients of NLM-funded Administrative Supplements for Informationist Services and gather evidence for their impact on NIH-funded biomedical research A mixed methods approach consisting of a survey of principal investigators and a focus group of informationists. Informationists appeared to have a positive impact on their team’s research, especially in the areas of data storage, data management planning, data organization, and literature searching. In addition, many informationists felt that their involvement had increased their research skills and made them true research partners. Assessing their own impact was a challenge for the award recipients, and questions remain about the best evaluation methods. The overall experience of the informationists and researchers was mixed but largely positive. The NLM-funded informationist supplement award appears to be a successful mechanism for immersing informationists into research teams and improving data management in the supported projects.

Valerie Florance of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) discusses NLM's support programs to encourage new roles for health sciences librarians, specifically the NLM Administrative Supplements for Informationist Services in NIH-funded Research Projects program.

An information need (the problem) cannot be divorced from its context. The problem context determines the urgency, granularity of detail, authority, and level of certainty required for an acceptable answer and dictates the expertise and resources that can be brought to bear. The size and diversity of the sources that can be marshalled during clinical problem solving is cognitively unmanageable--too large and too complex for a single person to process effectively in a constrained timeframe. Can the clinical team, as currently constituted, collectively handle this information-processing task, or is there a need for special information expertise on the team? If there is such a need, what is the best way to prepare information specialists to participate in context-based problem solving? This article explores preparation for work in information-rich, problem-solving environments. The authors provide two case studies, one clinical and one bioscientific, that elucidate knowledge and training requirements for information specialists who work as peers in patient care and research settings.

This paper reports on a four-part qualitative research project aimed at designing an online document surrogate tailored to the needs of physicians seeking biomedical literature for use in clinical problem solving. The clinical extract, designed in collaboration with three practicing physicians, combines traditional elements of the MEDLINE record (e.g., title, author, source, abstract) with new elements (e.g., table captions, text headings, case profiles) suggested by the physicians. Specifications for the prototype clinical extract were developed through a series of relevance-scoring exercises and semi-structured interviews. For six clinical questions, three physicians assessed the applicability of selected articles and their document surrogates, articulating relevance criteria and reasons for their judgments. A prototype clinical extract based on their suggestions was developed, tested, evaluated, and revised. The final version includes content and format aids to make the extract easy to use. The goals, methods, and outcomes of the research study are summarized, and a template of the final design is provided.

Skill in creating, finding, managing, and using biomedical information is a vital component of modern medical practice. Medical schools recognize the revolutionary implications of computing technology and use a number of different strategies to integrate “informatics education” into their curricula. In many institutions, leadership for this effort rests with the health sciences library and/or the department of medical informatics. Examples are presented of how nine medical schools have implemented informatics education; no single informatics-education strategy prevails, and these schools' strategies do not exhaust the possibilities. Informatics education programs will require better planning and integration in the future because of the need to keep pace with curriculum reform, the changing context of medical practice, and the speed of technological innovation.

As digital information proliferates and the difficulties of managing it threaten to overwhelm traditional publication and information delivery processes, new visions of a digital library are forming. Exactly what a digital library is and how it is to be organized have not yet been determined, and bibliographic organization of digital information has not been sufficiently addressed. Bibliography is the systematic description or classification of writings or publications considered as material objects. In today's digital world, such material objects may no longer be relevant, but the need for systematic description remains. The important issue is not whether digital bibliography is needed but, instead, whether or not existing bibliographic techniques are appropriate for this new media. A second issue is the location of the responsibility for a new digital bibliography. Does it rest with medical informaticians, often the producers of this new digital information, or with librarians, traditionally the classifiers of information? Developments in both medical informatics and medical librarianship indicate a need for greater collaboration between these specialties in order to achieve their common purpose--the creation, classification, and dissemination of scholarly information.