Presentation Type
Poster
Location
Montvale Event Center, Spokane, WA
Start Date
15-10-2018 4:45 PM
End Date
15-10-2018 6:00 PM
Description
This poster was previously exhibited at MLA 2018 Atlanta.
Objective: Librarians at Seattle Children’s Hospital and Research Institute, providing a robust mediated literature search service, lacked a collaborative platform for archiving and sharing search strategies and documentation. Available information request management systems traditionally track a library’s reference service workflow. Librarians modified Altarama’s RefTracker Express to improve our search quality, increase efficiency, leverage search expertise, and demonstrate alignment with institutional goals.
Methods: Librarians customized RefTracker system forms to capture client demographics, question refinement, resources consulted, and database strategies. In addition to traditional metric categories, librarians adapted records to show the relationship between searches and institutional strategic goals, generating data for service value. All new incoming requests are entered into the system. To jumpstart the internal knowledge base, past searches were selected for inclusion based upon their topic significance and strategy complexity. Before initiating searches, librarians check for duplicative requests and reoccurring search topics. When matches are found, librarians build upon past strategies incorporating peer expertise. Final search result files are uploaded to the request record, allowing for future retrieval and use. Service improvement will be measured by the percentage of searches that use previous RefTracker records.
Results: To date, librarians closed 354 records in RefTracker. Each record captures full request or information, client-librarian communication, databases searched, search strategies, and the search summary with results. There is an increasing trend in the number of searches completed per month that reuse existing strategies. In the first six months, an average of 5% of requests reused a previous strategy. In the subsequent six months, an average of 27% of requests reused previous strategies. The time saved by using search strategy components from previous requests allows for potential refinement of search concepts, synonyms, and syntax. The archived strategies serve as a knowledge base of the team’s areas of expertise.
Conclusions: RefTracker forms are flexible, easy to customize, and easy to incorporate into daily work. Staff training, record audits, and form revisions improve entry compliance and reporting accuracy. Since implementation, data shows improved search efficiency and greater sharing of search expertise. Demonstrating connections to hospital strategic goals is more challenging; the current method is inconsistent and requires ongoing surveillance of hospital communications. Next, the team will implement a RefTracker-automated literature search survey, deployed when records are closed, and use system communication for librarian-client interactions, further streamlining workflow and data entry.
This poster was previously exhibited at MLA 2018 Atlanta.
Recommended Citation
Cruse, Peggy; Groshong, Susan; and Morton, Jackie, "Poster: Transforming a Literature Search Service: Adapting a Reference Management System" (2018). Pacific Northwest Chapter of MLA Annual Meeting. 15.
https://digitalcommons.providence.org/pncmla/2018/monday/15
Poster: Transforming a Literature Search Service: Adapting a Reference Management System
Montvale Event Center, Spokane, WA
This poster was previously exhibited at MLA 2018 Atlanta.
Objective: Librarians at Seattle Children’s Hospital and Research Institute, providing a robust mediated literature search service, lacked a collaborative platform for archiving and sharing search strategies and documentation. Available information request management systems traditionally track a library’s reference service workflow. Librarians modified Altarama’s RefTracker Express to improve our search quality, increase efficiency, leverage search expertise, and demonstrate alignment with institutional goals.
Methods: Librarians customized RefTracker system forms to capture client demographics, question refinement, resources consulted, and database strategies. In addition to traditional metric categories, librarians adapted records to show the relationship between searches and institutional strategic goals, generating data for service value. All new incoming requests are entered into the system. To jumpstart the internal knowledge base, past searches were selected for inclusion based upon their topic significance and strategy complexity. Before initiating searches, librarians check for duplicative requests and reoccurring search topics. When matches are found, librarians build upon past strategies incorporating peer expertise. Final search result files are uploaded to the request record, allowing for future retrieval and use. Service improvement will be measured by the percentage of searches that use previous RefTracker records.
Results: To date, librarians closed 354 records in RefTracker. Each record captures full request or information, client-librarian communication, databases searched, search strategies, and the search summary with results. There is an increasing trend in the number of searches completed per month that reuse existing strategies. In the first six months, an average of 5% of requests reused a previous strategy. In the subsequent six months, an average of 27% of requests reused previous strategies. The time saved by using search strategy components from previous requests allows for potential refinement of search concepts, synonyms, and syntax. The archived strategies serve as a knowledge base of the team’s areas of expertise.
Conclusions: RefTracker forms are flexible, easy to customize, and easy to incorporate into daily work. Staff training, record audits, and form revisions improve entry compliance and reporting accuracy. Since implementation, data shows improved search efficiency and greater sharing of search expertise. Demonstrating connections to hospital strategic goals is more challenging; the current method is inconsistent and requires ongoing surveillance of hospital communications. Next, the team will implement a RefTracker-automated literature search survey, deployed when records are closed, and use system communication for librarian-client interactions, further streamlining workflow and data entry.
This poster was previously exhibited at MLA 2018 Atlanta.
