From librarian to data scientist? Reflections and next steps

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From January-March 2022 I embarked on a 9 week intensive data science coding bootcamp at Le Wagon London. I had a truly fantastic learning experience, but I’m a little anxious about what happens now. Here’s my reflections on how it went and what my next steps are.

Batch #805 Data Science, Le Wagon London on Demo Day at the Barbican

Why?

I’ve been a librarian for 10 years and whilst I did really love some aspects of being an information professional (especially helping people, and the community of fantastic colleagues), I kept coming up against the same organisational barriers repeatedly: “we’ve always done it this way”, having to fight very hard to justify “value”, lack of resources. I was also disillusioned by structural issues in the public sector and the academic publishing hellscape, and how little progress has been made in these areas over the past decade. Opportunities in libraries are few and far between, and it seemed to me like these were sector-wide issues that would be hard to escape. I felt frustrated and was looking for a change. 

Two of my friends had done the web development bootcamp at Le Wagon London and had so many positive things to say about their experiences. They had successfully changed from careers as professional classical musicians to software development in their 30s, and I thought that their success showed that maybe a change would be possible for me too! So after doing some research into coding bootcamps, I got in touch with Le Wagon, scheduled my admissions interview, and took the plunge. The data science course looked more interesting to me than the web development course, and I thought it would utilise more of my existing professional skill set.

Preparing for the course

Coding bootcamps are not cheap – mine cost £6,900 and as it’s full time, you won’t be able to work and get any income for the duration of the course and probably for a few months after as you job hunt. So I’d say you’d need at least 6 months of living expenses saved up, as well as the course fees. Money is now very tight for me and I’m lucky to have a supportive partner. Some of the people on my course were able to get their workplaces to provide unpaid study leave whilst they studied, and had a job to return to afterwards. There is one scholarship available, which I applied for but was not successful in obtaining. You can also study part-time (16 hours a week), but I think this would only work if you were working part-time as well, not full-time, as it’s really all just a bit much to handle. I’ll discuss the intensity of the learning experience later – it takes a lot out of you but is worth it.

The people on my course were varied. Broadly they fell into two camps – people in their late 20s and up looking for a career change (like me) or recent graduates straight out of uni with little to no professional experience who wanted something to spice up their CVs. We had a 50/50 gender split on the course and at least 8 people of colour out of a class of 32. 

Some basic knowledge of Python, algebra, calculus, and statistics was required. We had an admissions test and about 40 hours of prep work to complete before the course started. I had not studied maths formally since GCSEs (all my higher education qualifications are in arts and social sciences subjects), but I have taught medical statistics as part of my professional responsibilities in the past and was always good at maths at school. I did a lot of homework to prepare and still feel some imposter syndrome in this area. I didn’t know any Python before I registered for the course but as my previous blog posts show, I’m pretty happy to teach myself basic coding skills, and there are so many courses available for free.

A typical study day

Classes were from 9am-6pm, Monday-Friday. The day would begin with a lecture from 9-1030, followed by ‘challenges’ for us to work through individually on the online learning platform. The challenges are automatically marked and progress is tracked. Each day, we were randomly allocated one of our coursemates as a ‘buddy’ – someone to turn to for help and to discuss our work with throughout the day. You can see your buddy’s progress through the challenges, and if they are behind you are encouraged to check in on them before moving on. This was a great way to get to know the other people on the course and was instrumental to the building of an exceptional learning community. If we still remained stuck or needed further clarification, we could request 1:1 help from a teaching assistant. I usually requested help between 1-5 times per day and the 1:1 teaching was (with only a couple of exceptions) great. At 5pm, we would reconvene for a recap of the key learning points. In the evening, there were flashcards to complete, which again reiterated the day’s learning objectives. If you hadn’t done these by 8pm, you got an automated message reminding you to do so. The last 2 weeks of the course did not follow this structure as they were fully dedicated to our projects, which I’ll elaborate on later.

When I did the course it was fully hybrid and I thought this worked really well. I caught covid and had to self-isolate for 2 weeks during the course. It was one of the most tiring things I’ve ever had to do, studying online whilst ill, but I’m so grateful that I was able to complete the course despite this and didn’t have to defer. Some of my coursemates had childcare responsibilities or disabilities and I know that the hybrid format really worked for them too. I did enjoy the on campus experience – it was easier to form social connections and to ask questions – but my commute was over an hour each way, so I appreciated having the flexibility to use that time in other ways, if needed. A fully remote option is also available.

Final presentation for our AI abstract art generator project

What did I learn?

The number of topics covered over the duration of the 7 weeks of teaching was mind boggling. We raced from topic to topic, building on previous things that we had learned. We’re encouraged to use this template text to summarise our learning on our CVs, which is a real mouthful but does drive home how much was covered: 

I studied Data Analytics with SQL, BigQuery, Pandas, Numpy, and Matplotlib; Statistics with Scipy, Seaborn and Statsmodels; Machine Learning with Scikit-learn; Deep Learning with TensorFlow Keras; and developed Data Products with Google Cloud Platform, Docker, Heroku and Streamlit. 

We also learned to use Git, Github and the Linux command line. Being switched on from 9am-6pm 5 days a week was incredibly tiring – combined with my commute, I had barely any energy for anything else in my life during the 9 weeks. It was an incredibly intensive experience, but one that I really thrived on.

Where Le Wagon really excelled was in building a cohesive ‘learning community’ – by the end of the whole bootcamp we had really gelled as a team. Of course the standard varied within our class – some people were absolute whizzes, utilising packages and data engineering tools not even covered on our course, whilst a few struggled to keep up with the pace. But we all got along well and helped each other out, and I made some excellent friendships.

The way in which the teaching was scaffolded was really interesting to me from a pedagogical point of view. We had a few days of ‘mini projects’ which gave us the opportunity to practice actual coding concepts, whilst also exercising softer skills such as project management, teamwork, and communication. The combination of live lectures, pre-recorded versions of the same lecture we could go back to, guided exercises, 1:1 support, daily recaps and flashcards all worked well to help us understand and retain all the information we were given.

The projects that we worked on were really varied and interesting. All the project ideas were generated by our peers, we had a ‘pitch night’ which was a bit gameshow-esque where we presented our ideas and had to vote on the projects we wanted to work on! The project was a fantastic way to utilise our skills in a ‘real world’ scenario. I worked on creating a deep learning abstract art generator, and utilised transfer learning and machine learning to find similar images to what our generator had created in the dataset. You can see a video of our presentation above and view our live website here https://share.streamlit.io/FlavKV/website/website.py. It was such a change working in a relatively unstructured/unsupervised way and it really brought everything together. I loved checking in with the other groups every day and seeing all the other amazing things they built, such as a model for detecting respiratory diseases from audio tracks of lung auscultations https://youtu.be/W1zSTjx_0MI , and a comedy bot trained on standup routines https://youtu.be/PqE2JQ-mf8I.

We’re going on a job hunt

So what happens next? There was a career week at Le Wagon the week after we finished, which was really helpful. We spruced up our CVs, Github, and Linkedin profiles, and wrote some cover letters. I’ve been applying for about 5-10 jobs per week and it’s been a little disheartening so far with little to no response, but I will keep persevering. I don’t have a quantitative background, which is on a lot of job descriptions. My motto when job hunting is to think “what would a mediocre white man do?” – I’m trying to embody a confidence and self assurance that is not really there! I finally felt after 10 years as a librarian that I kind of knew what I was doing, but now I’m a fish out of water.

My priority for the moment is to jazz up my portfolio – I’m working on a few projects, including an analysis of NHS research publications https://github.com/yiwen-h/nhs_oa. I also have a part-time job as a teaching assistant at Le Wagon helping the next batch of wannabe data scientists which has been great for revising the course materials.

This next step is both challenging and terrifying and I’ve been feeling very anxious about it. But nothing ventured, nothing gained – let’s see what happens next. If you want some data analysed or cleaned, get in touch! I’m available as a freelancer now 😉

On leadership

Posted in NHS librarian, personal, professional development by

I recently completed a Senior Leadership course for NHS library managers, funded by Health Education England. It was comprised of lots of online seminars on various leadership/management topics, an action learning set that met 3 times (really really good), as well as a project to work on together. It was overall quite an interesting experience and I felt like I learned a lot. Most of all, I really appreciated the opportunity to think about leadership and what it means at this stage in my career.

When I look around at very senior librarians – those in leadership/management positions in large organisations – I do not really see anyone who really openly and consistently challenges the capitalist, racist, misogynistic, transphobic status quo. Does being a senior leader mean only promoting a ‘positive narrative’? What does it mean for me – will I have to tone things down to make myself palatable if I want to move up in my career? I guess I also just don’t really see anyone who is ‘like me’ in senior positions right now.

Looking outside of librarianship, at the senior leaders I have interacted with in recent years, what has particularly struck me is the disconnect between words and actions. People who would say they appreciated my work, that the library provides fantastic and essential service, and yet would actively undermine and exclude me. Or who would claim ‘team spirit’ and ‘all staff are valued’ in departmental meetings, and follow this up with really quite unfriendly and alienating behaviour in one-to-one contexts. Is this what it takes to become a ‘senior leader’ – just talk the talk?

Also, as a minor aside, I didn’t enjoy a lot of the traditional leadership/management literature and theories that were covered on the course. I just didn’t see my values and principles reflected in the language used. I think I need to do my own research to find something that works for me – anyone have any tips?

Many of the people I regard as the most influential role models in my career, who I look up to, are not necessarily in super senior leadership/management positions. But they’ve been able to inspire positive change – perhaps because they’re not in those super senior leadership/management positions? I see strength and value in community, and more informal relationships. I still feel (most of the time, when I’m not overwhelmed with despair) that we can change things from the ground up and champion social justice issues in librarianship and society more generally. And to me, that’s what leadership is.

OpenRefine for NHS Librarians

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I have been lobbying for Library Carpentry courses for NHS librarians for years now and they are finally happening – yay! Thank you so much to Holly Case Wyatt and Health Education England for making this happen. I think that data skills can be quite intimidating for many librarians for a couple of reasons: 1) the terminology/jargon is impenetrable! 2) it’s hard to see how it can be useful in a practical, day-to-day sense. To help encourage other librarians to get involved with data manipulation using OpenRefine, I’m going to write some step-by-step tutorials on how to accomplish some basic tasks relevant to NHS librarianship.

There are loads of reasons to learn to code. For me personally, it comes down to two main ones:

  1. Save time – it really is quicker in the long run. Yes, you have to invest the time and effort to learn initially – it took me about 7 hours to figure out how to configure the spreadsheet that I share in example 2 and I could probably have catalogued all 136 books in that time. But now I can repeat this task with a spreadsheet of 10000 books in less time!
  2. It is empowering. I think we should be better equipped to communicate and negotiate with vendors. I also think that librarians should actually be at the forefront of developing our own software and championing open source solutions – we know our needs and our users’ needs best, so we are best equipped to create solutions that work for our context.

First, some background and disclaimers. I am largely self-taught and am by no means a programming wizard. I learned HTML and CSS as a kid to make my Final Fantasy fansite pretty, and have taken an Introduction to Python short course in 2019 and a MySQL one about 10 years ago, of which I remember very little. I have also started a few Code Academy courses online but never finished any! I think the key to learning basic coding is to just be willing to try things out and make mistakes. Also I learn a lot from example and do plenty of shameless googling and copying of other people’s code, editing it so it works for me. Often I don’t actually know why it works but as long as it does what I need it to do, that’s enough for me. My Google search history looked like this: ‘openrefine add column from another spreadsheet’ ‘openrefine delete comma end of string’ ‘openrefine extract text after a string’ – someone somewhere has probably tried to do what you are trying to do and there will be a post on the internet with the answer.

Any questions do let me know and I will do my best to answer! yiwen.hon@rmh.nhs.uk or on Twitter as @yiwen_h

Step by step guides for 3 different practical use cases for OpenRefine for NHS librarians:

Useful resources:

OpenRefine example 2: Converting MARC21 files into Heritage-friendly CSV

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I learned how to catalogue with MARC21 right at the beginning of my career when I was a graduate trainee librarian but haven’t had to do this for many years! Recently Health Education England (HEE) purchased a big bundle of 164 Oxford University Press (OUP) e-books for all NHS England staff and I needed to get these onto our library catalogue. The catalogue records were made available to download in MARC21 format but unfortunately the library management system I use, Heritage, does not accept this format. I didn’t want to manually catalogue 164 e-books, so I needed to translate MARC21 records into a Heritage-friendly CSV file and strip out all the weird MARC encoding… which OpenRefine was perfect for.

Convert MARC21 into Tab delimited OpenRefine readable format
I downloaded MarcEdit (free software) and followed the instructions on this website https://guides.uflib.ufl.edu/c.php?g=147853&p=6878235 to convert it into a tab delimited file.  Use this file that I’ve already created to save you time. WordPress only allows me to upload XLS files and not CSVX so I’ve had to convert it into XLS, I’m sorry… Email me for the proper CSVX.

Work out what the end product needs to look like
I exported a spreadsheet of my existing e-book holdings and read up on the documentation to see what format my data needed to be in. Here’s the finished product for us to refer to so we know what we’re aiming for. WordPress only allows me to upload XLS files and not CSVX so I’ve had to convert it into XLS, I’m sorry… Email me if you need the proper CSVX.

Start transforming the data – one column at a time.

020$a – Get rid of the (ebook) : text – do a simple find and replace. To do this, EDIT CELLS > TRANSFORM > value.replace(‘(ebook) :’,’’)  
This bit of code is essentially the same as ‘Find and replace’ in Microsoft Word/Excel. The first part of the bit in parantheses is what is being found, and the second part is what it is being replaced with. value.replace(‘TEXT BEING FOUND’,‘TEXT USED TO REPLACE IT’)  – more information is available here https://guides.library.illinois.edu/openrefine/grel


245$a – Needed to get rid of the punctuation at the end of the titles. For example Oxford handbook of emergency medicine. should be Oxford handbook of emergency medicine
and Oxford handbook of renal nursing / should be Oxford handbook of renal nursing
EDIT CELLS > TRANSFORM > Use this bit of code to remove punctuation at the end of cells:  replace(value, /[.]$/, ”) …I got this from https://groups.google.com/g/openrefine/c/9LB9OT0q2rY
Do the same transform process but this time replace the [.] in the code with [/] to address the issue with titles like the Oxford handbook of renal nursing.
When done, then do EDIT CELLS > COMMON TRANSFORMS > Trim leading and trailing whitespace to get rid of any extra spaces at the end of cells.

250$a – This is where OpenRefine really comes into its own. You can use the FACET > TEXT FACET option to see all the different ways that the edition info is given and edit them to be more standard. First, use the built-in similarity detector (CLUSTER) to group some together, found on the left hand panel. The ones that OpenRefine thinks are similar can be grouped together and renamed en masse. Click on Merge Selected & Close when you’re done.

 

For the remaining ones, you can click on the little ‘edit’ button next to them and change them so that they are standard. When finished, click on the little ‘X’ in the top left next to 250$a to close the facet.

Before
After


260$a and 264$a are both equivalent to the PLACE column required by Heritage. We can just delete one of the columns by clicking on EDIT COLUMN > REMOVE THIS COLUMN

Then I used the TEXT FACET option to mass edit the cells so they all said Oxford – luckily all 136 books have the same place of publication and publisher!

260$b and 264$b are also both the same, they equate to the PUBLISHERcolumn. So you can do pretty much the same processes as above – delete one of the columns and change the text to Oxford University Press for the rest.

260$c and 264$c Unfortunately the dates are in two different columns… and we can’t just delete one of them. So it’s time to MERGE COLUMNS. I used this info: https://guides.library.illinois.edu/openrefine/combining

I then had to do a bit more tidying – some of the years also had a random full stop at the end for no reason, and a c at the beginning, e.g. c2011. You can fix this using the EDIT CELLS > TRANSFORM > value.replace(‘TEXT BEING FOUND’,‘TEXT USED TO REPLACE IT’) method we used earlier.


520$a – finally a column that is just fine and doesn’t need any changes – it will just go in the NOTESCSVX column with the string (CON) at the beginning as a ‘contents’ note.


650 – This one is quite simple. There’s a lot of annoying MARC21 punctuation such as \0$a  $v $x that can be gotten rid of with the same find and replace value.replace method as above. To make it readable by Heritage we need to replace the $v and $x with ‘ – ‘, and just delete the \0$a. Note that to remove the \ symbol you need to do value.replace(‘\\’,’’)


700$a – What I did here was split this column into several columns using the ; separator so that I could tidy up the data on each individual author. EDIT COLUMN > SPLIT INTO SEVERAL COLUMNS

I thought that whether the authors were identified as ‘editors’ or ‘authors’ was not very important to the catalogue record so I just left this information out altogether. I used the code for removing specific punctuation from the end of cells several times – replace(value, /[.]$/, ”) and replace(value, /[,]$/, ”)
When I’d tidied up the individual columns I then merged them back together using EDIT COLUMN > JOIN COLUMNS. You need to use the separator ;

Those are the main bits of information that required transformation. I exported as a CSV (comma separated values) file and pasted information into my Heritage file under the right sections.

I also did quite a lot of work to turn the dois and URLs provided in the MARC21 file into WAYFless URLs but will describe this separately.

OpenRefine example 1: How to identify the % of Open Access papers published by staff at your organisation using OpenRefine and the Unpaywall API

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So this is stolen from the brilliant Aaron Tay, but I have adapted it here for NHS librarians specifically and step 5 is a bit different from in his post as I think the Unpaywall API changed since he wrote it. Thank you so much Aaron for your brilliant work! And also thanks to Liam Bullingham who pointed me towards the very helpful and informative blog post.

1. Get a list of your organisation’s publications for a given year in a format that includes DOI. For the purposes of this example we will use Pubmed but do be aware that this does miss out some nursing and allied health publications which may be on CINAHL instead. (1)
On Pubmed Advanced Search, use the AFFILIATION and DATE – PUBLICATION fields to identify papers published by authors from your organisation in a particular year. This is what my search looked like, you will need to change the info in the ‘Affiliation’ bracket to match your organisation.
((“2020/01/01″[Date – Publication] : “2020/12/31″[Date – Publication])) AND (“royal marsden”[Affiliation])

I had 996 results. I clicked on Save and downloaded them all in CSV format.

At this stage, you can use Excel to delete some of the lines of the CSV and create a ‘test’ CSV file with only 5-10 lines of data instead of hundreds! This is because the checking process can take a few hours if it’s processing hundreds of lines and it will be much quicker to check a few first to see if your code is correct, before asking it to do the whole lot.

2. Open your CSV file in OpenRefine

Run the OpenRefine software. I use the 3.4.1 version with Java and it opens in Google Chrome with some weird background program running at the same time. The first screen you see should give you the option to Get data from > This computer > Choose Files. Open the Test CSV file that you have created. Give your project a name, leave all the other options unchanged, and then click on Create Project.

3. Delete blank rows if they are there (Optional)

At this stage although I thought I had deleted several hundred rows in Excel to create my TEST spreadsheet with only 5 lines, they were all still there, just… blank. You can delete these blank rows by doing this:
Click on the little arrow next to the ALL column and select ‘Facet by blank (null or empty string). This allows to you select only the blank rows if you click on the relevant facet on the left. Then you can click on the little arrow next to ALL again, select EDIT ROWS > REMOVE MATCHING ROWS to delete the blank ones. When you’re done, click on the little X next to Blank Rows on the left to close the Facet.

4. Run the Unpaywall DOI
Click on the little arrow next to the DOI column that Pubmed has created for us. Click on Edit Column > Add column by fetching URLs

A popup box will appear. Copy and paste this code into the Expression box, and give the new column the name UNPAYWALL API. Edit the info after the email to be your real email address! It doesn’t matter what address you use, it won’t send you any spam or anything, it’s just for validation.

“https://api.unpaywall.org/v2/”+value+”?email=YOUR@EMAIL.HERE“

When you’re ready, click OK and wait! It can take several hours if you’re doing a few hundred records, so go away and do something else if this is the case. If you’re only doing a test document with 5-10 it should take only a few minutes.
What is the OpenRefine software doing? It is talking to the Unpaywall API, checking the info for each doi, and reporting back what it finds there.

5. Pull out the relevant information from the Unpaywall data

So you should now see a new column appear that has lots of complicated info! This is everything that the Unpaywall API has reported back in a format called JSON, and lots of it is not relevant to our question of whether or not the paper is Open Access or not. The only bit that is important is the bit that says “is_oa” – this is set to either TRUE or FALSE.

To get only the “is_oa” information out, we need to create yet another column. Click on the small arrow at the top of your new UNPAYWALL API column, then select EDIT COLUMN > ADD COLUMN BASED ON THIS COLUMN. In the popup box that appears, give your new column the name IS OA and type this into the EXPRESSION box: value.parseJson().is_oa
Then click OK.

6. Analyse your data
So all the papers that say TRUE in the IS OA column are Open Access, and all the ones that say FALSE are not freely available to read! Click on the little arrow next to the IS OA column and select FACET > TEXT FACET to quickly identify how many are true and how many are false. Then it’s simple maths to work out what the % of Open Access papers are – for my institution, of the 996 papers published in 2020 that are indexed on Pubmed with a DOI, 671 were available Open Access (67.3%). There were 3 that Unpaywall didn’t have information on – these showed as ‘blank’ in the IS OA column. You can also do further analysis on what type of Open Access they are if you repeat step 5 above with the code value.parseJson().oa_status
If you used a test spreadsheet you can try and repeat steps 2-5 above with the full dataset – just be prepared to wait a few hours for the results when doing step 4.

Any problems or questions do let me know! I will do my best to help – yiwen.hon@rmh.nhs.uk  

(1)If you have used sources other than PubMed for your list of publications then you might need to do some extra cleaning to get the DOI info onto its own column. For example, I do searches on CINAHL as well as Medline/Pubmed and deduplicate on Endnote. I usually export as a big bibliography in APA format and end up with lots of references in this format:
Aggelis, V., & Johnston, S. R. D. (2019). Advances in Endocrine-Based Therapies for Estrogen Receptor-Positive Metastatic Breast Cancer. Drugs. 79, 1849–1866. doi:10.1007/s40265-019-01208-8
From this, you can get a column just with the DOI information by doing this: Edit column > Add column based on this column > value.split(“doi:”)[-1]  (I got this from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47088117/extract-text-after-a-string-using-grel)

Another very useful bit of code for getting rid of punctuation at the end of cells is: replace(value, /[.]$/, ”) I don’t understand this code much but it works! So if you have a doi that is wrongly written as 10.1007/s40265-019-01208-8.  it will become 10.1007/s40265-019-01208-8
Only the full stop at the end of the data is removed, not the full stop at the beginning. You can also replace the bit in between the square brackets [.] with other punctuation, like commas. I got this from https://groups.google.com/g/openrefine/c/9LB9OT0q2rY

Building library communities in a pandemic world

Posted in NHS librarian, professional development by

I think that community is a really important part of librarianship. The first few years of my career, I worked in larger HE libraries, with more people around to bounce ideas off and develop friendships with. I was also lucky enough to be in a cohort of graduate library trainees with others at a similar stage in their career journeys, who I really clicked with. It was fantastic to be able to talk about library-related (and non-library related!) things with people who understood where I was coming from, and go to others for help and advice. I think librarians are, largely, a very helpful and warm group of people, and I credit so much of my learning and development to the expertise, kindness and activities of others.

I currently work in a tiny library team of just myself and a library assistant. Although there are other people in my department at work, they are not ‘library people’ and as such it can be hard to share my problems with them or get meaningful support. Before the pandemic, there was the opportunity to meet and discuss issues with other librarians through conferences and training events. I usually left these networking opportunities feeling refreshed, inspired and energised for my job. However, obviously in the past year it’s not been possible to ‘network’ with other librarians in the same way. Although some conferences and events have gone ahead, the online format has made it impossible to have more informal, personal conversations with others. I’ve also felt a little bit under surveillance when using my Twitter account to discuss work related frustrations, as a senior manager has pulled me up on some of my posts in the past. This has led to me feeling a little bit isolated and ‘professionally lonely’. This is where professional organisations like CILIP could help, but I left it last year to protest some of its questionable actions (good summary here). Also, I haven’t seen them do much to promote this sort of informal networking – all of the more successful initiatives in this area have been at a grassroots level (e.g. Jennifer Bayjoo’s excellent DILON community and Twitter chats like #ukmedlibs and #uklibchat).

As a result of these frustrations, I’ve been thinking about a few things over the past few weeks to try and stimulate the opportunity for more personal connections with other librarians, just thought I’d write them up here as a summary for myself and others.

My cat learning from his peer

Literature searching peer review

So this is a bit of an experiment! I had a really positive experience when the lovely Kirsten, a fellow health librarian working in a different organisation, gave me some feedback on a search strategy I’d put together for a systematic review. Around the same time, someone mentioned setting up a ‘Randomised coffee trial’ for health librarians in our region. I thought it would be a good idea to combine the two – pair up librarians for an informal chat to get to know each other, as well as improving our searching. We have 14 people involved in this pilot project, who should be meeting up in March 2021. I don’t often get the chance to speak one-to-one with others working in my field and I hope this will offer the opportunity for peer learning and mentoring in the area. I’ll do an evaluation in April. If successful I’d like to broaden it outside our area and encourage involvement from across the country, even! We have so much to learn from each other.

Discord – Library Social Club

I use Discord a lot for chatting with my friends whilst we play multiplayer games and am also in a couple of other public groups relating to my interests – specific videogames, bouldering, book groups. As mentioned previously, I don’t feel 100% comfortable sharing things openly on Twitter because it’s a more ‘professional’ kind of space, where I’m followed by senior managers in my organisation. Discord offers a little bit more privacy and I set up the ‘Library Social Club’ server for any UK based library workers to get together and discuss any work- or non-work-related things. It’s still quite new, and I need to work a bit harder on promoting it, I think. I’ve had some really interesting and supportive discussions with others on there – on topics as diverse as favourite cookbooks, which unions are appropriate for library workers, pet photos, or advice on Open Access resources and info. I also took part in my first ever Dungeons & Dragons campaign! I’m really enjoying being part of this community and it’s certainly helped to address the ‘professional loneliness’ feeling that I mentioned earlier.

Since setting it up I’ve heard some negative things about the Discord platform’s accessibility issues, so I need to think a bit harder about how to ensure that no one feels left out or unable to participate in this community.

Action learning sets

I am currently on a Health Education England Senior Leadership Development programme for Library Services Managers in NHS England. One of the elements of the programme is the chance to participate in ‘action learning sets’ led by the fantastic Jo Walley – which are essentially supportive peer mentoring groups. Groups are usually small, around 4-7 people, and the participants take turns to discuss an issue or goal that they are facing, whilst the others provide a safe space to explore these fully through asking open, supportive questions in a structured format. I was initially sceptical of this, but it was honestly such a positive experience. The chance to spend TIME on myself and my issues, to talk things through with my peers – I ended the day feeling so refreshed and inspired and supported!

I would love to be able to extend this opportunity to other librarians. I really enjoy being a mentor – I used to be a CILIP Chartership mentor before I left, and have also offered mentoring opportunities to other librarians and library school students wherever possible. I learn so much and am so inspired by others. There are a couple of issues to setting up effective action learning sets which I’m still thinking through. The first is getting buy-in. I probably wouldn’t have signed up if I hadn’t been made to by the leadership programme! It’s hard to describe how great it is on paper, it has to be experienced.

Secondly, it is a significant time investment and it’s not likely people will get time off from work to do this sort of CPD activity. A good session will be about 6 hours long, with loads of breaks in between. So ideally it would be a full day every 2-3 months. It does seem like a lot, but it’s important to have that space. It’s so rare that we get that opportunity to explore our issues and support other people in discussing theirs. At the moment there’s so much change in the world and people are probably really ‘zoomed out’, so I’ve suspended this idea for awhile but it’s on the backburner, to be pursued later in the year.

Anyway if you’re interested, or have any ideas/thoughts/comments, do feel free to get in touch! Librarians, you all inspire me and I’m always happy to hear from you. I’m trying my best to help enable these connections in this weird, lonely pandemic world.

Reflections on LILAC 2019

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I was lucky enough to have been awarded a bursary to attend the LILAC Conference 2019, held in Nottingham from 24-26 April. I’ve always wanted to attend LILAC as I’ve enjoyed tweets from this event in the past and I would definitely not have been able to afford it without the bursary.

Note taking and sharing learning

I experimented with a ‘sketchnote’ style of note taking, inspired by Aurélie Gandour https://twitter.com/i/moments/984805698122010625. I didn’t manage to sketchnote every single session that I attended, but what I did capture can be seen here. In the past, I have live-tweeted at conferences but this was a different way of processing, summarising and sharing information. I write much more slowly than I type, so I had to be more selective in what I wanted to record, and also had to rely more on paraphrasing and recall. It was a useful exercise and a few people said they found it helpful which was nice.

Notepad with handwritten notes laid out in a mind-map format.

‘Sketchnote’ from Kaye Towlson’s talk on her involvement in De Montfort University’s Freedom to Achieve project

The value of collaborative working

I think this was the main learning point of the conference, for me. The projects that most excited me, the New Literacies Alliance, and De Montfort University’s Freedom to Achieve, were built by teams of people working across organisations or departments. I was encouraged to see critical thinking and social justice issues being championed by librarians who valued working with others, and found strength through this. Working as an almost solo librarian, I have been feeling increasingly isolated in my role and have seen this as a wakeup call to look out for more opportunities for collaboration. Also, of course, the open access online learning materials created by the New Literacies Alliance are an amazing resource that I’ll definitely be using in my teaching.

Reframing information literacy and the role of the library/librarian

Two other talks that also resonated with me were Alison Hicks’s presentation on supporting international student information literacy practices, and Hannah Hickman’s, on imposter syndrome. These were both thoughtful and thought-provoking, and helped me to reexamine concepts that I had assumed familiarity with from a different perspective. The idea of information literacy as a repositioning of the self is an interesting one, which I need to explore more in my workplace context of busy healthcare professionals ‘transitioning’ into the role of learners when they come to use the library. Alison argued that we can maybe do more to encourage sociality, connections, and interaction – as well as enabling space for reflection.

I really valued Hannah’s funny, intelligent, and honest reflections on librarianship, professional identity, and where we situate ourselves in relation to students. She made some great points on how we should resist neoliberal ‘objective’ measurements of success such as the TEF and learning analytics, as well as making connections between the ‘performance’ of library instruction and the relationship between audiences and actors in theatre, thus arguing for the acceptance of ‘failure’ or mistakes in our practice. There was also a lovely moment when she mentioned Sajni Lacey’s work on imposter syndrome – who was right there in the room! – and they were both very excited about it. Librarians are such a warm and supportive professional body, and this perfectly encapsulated that.

Being on a panel

I was really fortunate to be part of the closing panel at LILAC, with four other fabulous librarians (Elizabeth Brookbank, Sajni Lacey, Darren Flynn, and Clare McCluskey Dean) discussing how we apply critical library pedagogy in practice. It was a terrifying experience as I definitely felt like such an imposter – I only know a little bit about this, and am by no means an expert. I dealt with this by admitting when I didn’t know the answer, relying on other members of the panel, and reflecting issues back to the audience. In future, if I’m ever asked to be on a panel again, I’ll ensure I’m better prepared! Being part of a team definitely helped, though, and I hope it was useful to others.

Overall, it was an excellent learning experience and such a good opportunity to meet and learn from others. Events like this help me make wider intellectual and professional connections, which I am grateful for. Thanks again LILAC!

@NHS Twitter Takeover

Posted in NHS librarian by

The @NHS twitter account was launched in October 2016, and each week since then it has been curated by different people working for or being treated by the NHS. There have been some really interesting takeovers over the past 2 years and it really highlights the huge variety of individuals working within and being treated by this wonderful organisation.

Screenshot of RM magazine article

Screenshot of an upcoming writeup in our trust’s magazine

I was really lucky to have been given the opportunity to take the reins from 27th-31st August. I didn’t go seeking this out actively, I got a Twitter direct message out of the blue from one of the NHS social media admins asking if I would be interested. At first I asked if I could share the week with other librarians, and suggested some Twitter active clinical librarians who might be more suitable – I didn’t feel I had a particularly exciting job to share with the wider public! I was told, however, that only single-person takeovers were allowed, except under special circumstances. They also didn’t seem keen on approaching any other librarians. After mulling it over, and discussing it with my manager and my hospital’s marketing and communications team, I decided it was too good an opportunity to pass up, and accepted.

The exact date of my Twitter takeover was moved around a bit which actually worked in my favour as I had more time to prepare. I had a preparatory phonecall with a member of the @NHS social media admin team and a representative from my trust’s comms team, which addressed some of my concerns. They provided a helpful ‘content plan’ template to help me theme each of my days in charge of the account and prepare some ideas in advance.

Before the takeover, I was given some guidelines (mainly: no politics, nothing offensive). Then, on the Sunday evening before the takeover, I was texted the login details and just left to it! I had very little interaction with any admin staff and was largely left to it. I’m sure they would have stepped in if I’d posted anything outrageous, however.

My themes were as follows:

  • Monday: Bank holiday, minimal tweeting
  • Tuesday: Introduction to health libraries; teaching and training
  • Wednesday: Open Access
  • Thursday: Healthcare information for patients and the public
  • Friday: Librarianship as a career, and being BME in the NHS

I also interviewed five lovely and incredibly helpful librarians from across the country, to give an insight into the varied roles and responsibilities that we have. They were Emma Halford (Princess Alexandra Hospital), Becca Howes (QAH library, Portsmouth), Laura Wilkes (West Suffolk), Tom Roper (Brighton and Sussex), and Louise Hull (University Hospitals Leicester). We agreed 2-3 questions in advance, and set aside a specific half hour in the week for each interview. I tried to vary the questions between each interviewee. As the week went on I improved my Twitter interview technique, introducing the hashtag #NHSLibraries and also checking via direct messages with each user if they were finished answering a question, before moving on. I’m really grateful to the interviewees for volunteering to help, and I feel the interviews added a much more interesting perspective to NHS library work as well as taking the pressure off me somewhat!

Reflecting on the week, I did find it really stressful being a spokesperson for health libraries on such a big platform (35k followers!!) but dealt with this by reaching out to others, like my five amazing interviewees. Other librarians provided helpful tips for content, and helped to amplify the messages by liking, retweeting, and sending supportive messages, which made it a bit less scary. I could see the stats for previous takeovers and was a little disappointed by the relative lack of engagement that my week got, but let’s be honest, libraries are not that exciting! Anyway, hopefully some people are now more aware of the existence of health libraries and how we can help, and of issues such as health literacy and Open Access. The tweets that got the most engagement were those around Open Access (a poll asking if users had ever been prevented from reading research due to a paywall – 98% of 482 respondents said yes!) and around the evaluation of healthcare information. These were both key messages that I wanted to get across, so I’m pleased with that. Also, I just feel incredibly grateful to have had this opportunity.

An archive of tweets from my @NHS Twitter takeover is available here: http://wke.lt/w/s/G1cDi.

Interactive teaching skills – HLG workshop

Posted in NHS librarian, professional development, training by

Teaching is something that I do a lot of and really enjoy. It’s a big part of many health librarians’ roles, but unlike in the academic sector there often is not much training available to improve our pedagogy. I was lucky enough to be able to do a teaching qualification in a previous role, and I thought I would share some of the theory and practice that I picked up there with my fellow health librarians at the HLG conference this year.

I made the workshop as interactive as I could! My main objective was to enable participants to write effective learning outcomes and tailor activities to suit these. I drew on the Library Juice academy training I had in Observational Assessment Techniques for the One-Shot Instruction Session as well as on the EDMAP1 module I completed at the University of Reading. I demonstrated a number of different types of activities; the slides and handout text are given below.

Before this session I was very anxious about lots of things. It was my first presentation at a national conference, there were lots of different activities and I was worried about time management, and I was worried that I would be teaching grandmothers to suck eggs. Luckily for me however, participants were lovely (librarians are, usually!) and willing to get stuck in! There was some really positive feedback left for me on post-it notes afterwards; I do hope some attendees will take back some new tools into their teaching practice.

Slides for Interactive information skills teaching HLG presentation

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Interactive teaching activities: some ideas (Handout)

Sorting cards

This activity is suitable for 2-6 people. Good for checking if students have understood a concept and for encouraging discussion. Options include:

  • Matching words to their definitions
  • Sorting cards into categories
  • Placing cards on a scale (least reliable evidence to most reliable evidence, for example)

Print-out games

These activities are suitable for smaller groups and can be good as an ice-breaker, but they do take a little more classroom time. They encourage interactivity and there is an element of competition as well which can make it more fun. With the Seek! Card game it is possible to create your own questions and answers as well.

Online quizzes

There are a range of websites that you can use to create interactive online quizzes. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses so it is worth exploring your options.

  • Kahoot (Interactive quiz but requires good internet connection)
  • Mentimeter (Also for presenting, but you only get 2 questions with a free account)
  • Poll Everywhere, Slido, Socrative are other options (I’m not so familiar with these so can’t comment!)

Online feedback walls

Padlet is a free online ‘noticeboard’. Useful because it doesn’t require a login and can be kept private. This was also the website that was used by Emma Shaw for her ‘flipped classroom’ approach to teaching literature searching.

Students as teachers

Asking students to correct a piece of work that has deliberate, commonly seen mistakes in it can be a really effective method of teaching. I’ve used this to teach referencing and literature searching but I’m sure it could be adapted to other topics too.

Creating a poster

This is an activity that takes a little more time but is a great way to get students to really explore a subject. Divide the class into groups of around 5-6. Each group should get a different topic to write a poster about. I usually provide them with a ‘resource pack’ to inspire their thinking and stimulate conversations. After about 10-15 minutes the groups are asked to explain their posters to the rest of the class. Example topics could be ‘What makes good quality evidence?’, ‘Where do you look for good quality evidence?’. I have also used this to teach critical appraisal.

Thought bombs

I found out about this activity from a blog post by Emily Wheeler, a librarian at the University of Leeds.  This one involves preparing three different options (e.g. different evidence sources), and asking students to debate which one they would choose. Every minute or so you provide a ‘thought bomb’, which is a new piece of information about one of the options, which reframes the discussion and disrupts their thinking. Quite time consuming to prepare but generates lively discussion.

Interactive stories

You can create free interactive choose-your-own-adventure stories using a website called Twine https://twinery.org/. Try http://www.depressionquest.com/ if you want to see some possibilities of Twine. Possibilities include creating a ‘Your research adventure’ story.

 

Further reading on educational theories

  • Adams, N. E. (2015). Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive learning objectives. Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA, 103(3), 152.
  • Aubrey, K. and Riley, A. (2016) Understanding and using educational theories. London: Sage.
  • Giustini, D. (2014). Utilizing learning theories in the digital age: from theory to practice. Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association, 30(1), 19-25.

Useful resources

 

 

Emerging technologies in health libraries – Workshop at the CILIP HLG Conference 2018

Posted in NHS librarian, professional development by

This year I was lucky enough to be able to present two workshops at the CILIP Health Libraries Group Conference in Keele, held in June 2018. I will write up my other workshop, which was on interactive teaching activities, as soon as I can – in the meantime here is a summary of the Emerging Technologies workshop that I facilitated together with David Low.

The session was a facilitated discussion between librarians. I tried to limit the size of the group to 24 (four groups of six librarians) but in the end there were a couple of extra people who squeezed in, who hadn’t pre-booked to be on the workshop – I think I ended up with 27 altogether. I feel that this made the discussions a bit more difficult to manage, and those who are more introverted may have struggled to get their voices heard in the larger groups. In future I will try to ensure that groups are kept smaller, or perhaps have an extra activity planned to accommodate extras.

There were four topics for librarians to discuss: Machine learning, AI/Voice assistants, Blockchain, and Virtual/augmented reality. For each topic I provided four questions to be discussed. The groups of librarians rotated between topics, so that they were able to discuss every technology over the course of the session.

I provided A3 paper and sharpies so that the groups could record their discussions. Below is a transcription of the posters created by the various groups. Each group only had around 10 minutes to get their head around the topic they were talking about, and answer the question. I think this is a little short – in future I’d provide 15 minutes for fewer topics, particularly given the larger size of the groups.

Overall I was really pleased with the quality of the discussions and how smoothly the workshop went. As with all group activities there were some groups which were more forthcoming in their discussions than others. Myself and David circulated around the room, prompting participants with questions and answering any queries; it was very useful having two people and I don’t think it would have worked as well with just myself. Some topics such as blockchain didn’t generate as much conversation as participants didn’t feel as confident talking about it. I think I’d either have to spend more time explaining the principles beforehand, or pick topics that are more accessible in future. I did also provide a ‘cheat sheet’ for each group, which was a printout of an article that was relevant to the topic being discussed.

Another way of running a workshop like this could be to keep each group looking at one topic only, answering all the questions relating to it; each group could then be asked to present back to the others about their topic and this would open it up to wider discussion. I’ll try this next time – if I get another chance to run a workshop at a conference!

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Machine learning

Posters on machine learning by workshop attendees! I have transcribed these for easier reading and accessibility.

Machine learning

 Marshall, I. J., Noel‐Storr, A., Kuiper, J., Thomas, J., & Wallace, B. C. (2018). Machine learning for identifying Randomized Controlled Trials: An evaluation and practitioner’s guide. Research synthesis methods. DOI: 10.1002/jrsm.1287

What is it?

Use of an algorithm to repeatedly run a process and selection, which mimics learning.

What Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are there for health librarians?

  • Strengths: Personalisation of current awareness, can improve search, act as a discovery tool
  • Weaknesses: Death of serendipity, deskilling staff, can we trust the system?
  • Opportunities: Better current awareness, Discovery tools, Search optimisation
  • Threats: Disintermediation

What are the social/ethical implications of this technology?

  • Accidentally training it with biased information i.e. racist sources or biased papers in a Systematic Review
  • Ability to teach diagnostics to a machine? i.e. Radiology
  • Uses in literature searching i.e. teaching it to pick out articles for different disciplines
  • Loss of human contact (particularly in medicine)
  • Lack of critical thought

What actions can/should librarians take?

  • Role in directing users towards best machine learning tools
  • Upskill in more complex tasks such as critical appraisal
  • Explain limitations of machine learning solutions
  • Purchase machine learning solutions?
  • Focus our attention on print books?

AI voice assistants

Cronin, S., & Doherty, G. (2018). Touchless computer interfaces in hospitals: A review. Health informatics journal, DOI: 10.1177/1460458217748342

What is it?

  • Siri, Alexa, Google Home, etc
  • Input data/give commands to a device via your voice using national language
  • Can interpret the question and improve the more you use them
  • May talk back to clarify question

What Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats are there for health librarians?

  • Strengths: Learns language through use
  • Strength and Weakness: Always listening
  • Weakness: Unreliable information quality?
  • Threats: Where do librarians fit in to the equation – what part of the process can we participate in?

What are the social/ethical implications of this technology?

  • Isolation
  • Laziness
  • Results bias as limited to the owning company e.g. Amazon/Apple/Google
  • Technology might give harmful advice
  • Security
  • Potential for remote healthcare
  • Can be an enabler for the vulnerable/isolated/disabled
  • Fast and efficient responses

What actions can/should librarians take?

  • Teach critical thinking skills and the ability to spot ‘fake news’ etc
  • Voice activated technology? E.g. for out of hours services, self issue – can replace standard procedural enquiries
  • Streamlining back office admin, e.g. for setting up meetings
  • Training opportunities for librarians – should we have maker stations in the library to showcase these new technologies and help users with them?

Blockchain

Hoy, M. B. (2017). An introduction to the Blockchain and its implications for libraries and medicine. Medical reference services quarterly, 36(3), 273-279.

Blockchains for the Information Profession

What is it?

Distributed ledger technology, growing series of encrypted records (blocks) to store information e.g. Bitcoin

What Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats are there for health librarians?

  • Strengths: Stronger encryption; can manage rights to material; business continuity
  • Weaknesses: What is it?? Only as good as the initial set up. Rubbish in = Rubbish out
  • Opportunities: Better sharing of resources; much stronger data storage potential?
  • Threats: Librarians not involved in early days/set up; is there a potential to make librarians redundant?

What are the social/ethical implications of this technology?

  • Data protection?
  • Use of electricity – unsustainable
  • Used on black market
  • Unknown consequences of the technology

What actions can/should librarians take?

  • Copyright
  • Access management and membership
  • Authority control
  • LMS

Augmented/virtual reality

Lessick, S., & Kraft, M. (2017). Facing reality: the growth of virtual reality and health sciences libraries. Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA, 105(4), 407.

What is it?

  • Augmented reality: adding info to the world around you. E.g. Pokemon Go and Minority Report
  • Virtual reality: Flight simulation, immersive tech – medium dependent. E.g. Matrix
  • Mixed reality: Holodeck

What Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats are there for health librarians?

  • Make available VR simulations as training materials for our users
  • Finding your way around the physical library using augmented reality for improved signposting?
  • Threat: Can we preserve the library as an information hub when information moves from books to apps?

What are the social/ethical implications of this technology?

  • Social isolation/exclusion due to cost
  • Addiction?
  • Practice in a safe environment
  • Learning environment
  • ‘Google glasses’: videoing, facial recognition etc in real time, potential privacy issues?
  • Safety/corporate control – who has your data
  • Programmable landscape
  • Physical space needed as well to use it

What actions can/should librarians take?

  • Promote use
  • Headsets in the library
  • Increase our own knowledge
  • Find relevant applications and highlight these for users
  • Set up space for practice e.g. for medical students
  • Engage users
  • Use beyond medicine e.g. in inductions and for library skills
  • Liaise with clinicians and academics – find champions
  • Use for wellbeing – e.g. relaxation on a beach