Using a Survey Tool to Establish Preservation Priorities: Results from the Historical Folio Collection Survey at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University

Objective: An item-level survey was undertaken to reveal the preservation needs of a unique collection of rare medical historical folios and oversize anatomical atlases at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University. Methodology: During a re-shelving project, surveyors noted detailed preservation information in a FileMakerPro database. Recorded information included: dimensions, whether a new enclosure was needed, external status (condition of boards, spine, cover), internal status (cover-to-text attachment, paper), attributes (covering material, binding type, inclusions, bookplate owner, decoration), value/damage (value, damage summary, treatment summary), and photos. Results and Conclusions: Survey data revealed vital information for determining preservation priorities. The surveyors found that 13% of the collection was significantly damaged and 30% was in poor condition. A query of the survey tool identified the approximate value of the damaged folios and priority was subsequently given to items designated as treasures to the institution. The survey also revealed which items required immediate treatment for concerns such as active mold that threatened the security of neighboring materials. The surveyors recorded attributes of interest to historians and researchers (provenance, unusual bindings, the presence of hand-painted illustrations, etc..) which were used to identify items for exhibits. Special handling instructions were also assigned to fragile items to prevent future damage. Finally, the folio survey resulted in a proof-of-concept for other item-level surveys of valuable collections. Once conducted, the survey prevented further handling of rare materials and resulted in concrete information needed to make preservation decisions

Provision of pandemic disease information by health sciences librarians: a multisite comparative case series.

Objective: The research provides an understanding of pandemic information needs and informs professional development initiatives for librarians in disaster medicine. Methods: Utilizing a multisite, comparative case series design, the researchers conducted semi-structured interviews and examined supplementary materials in the form of organizational documents, correspondence, and websites to create a complete picture of each case. The rigor of the case series was ensured through data and investigator triangulation. Interview transcripts were coded using NVivo to identify common themes and points of comparison. Results: Comparison of the four cases revealed a distinct difference between “client-initiated” and “librarian-initiated” provision of pandemic information. Librarian-initiated projects utilized social software to “push” information, whereas client-initiated projects operated within patron-determined parameters to deliver information. Health care administrators were identified as a key audience for pandemic information, and news agencies were utilized as essential information sources. Librarians\u27 skills at evaluating available information proved crucial for selecting best-quality evidence to support administrative decision making. Conclusions: Qualitative analysis resulted in increased understanding of pandemic information needs and identified best practices for disseminating information during periods of high organizational stress caused by an influx of new cases of an unknown infectious disease

‘When you're sitting in the room with two people one of whom… has bashed the hell out of the other’:Possibilities and challenges in the use of FGCs and restorative approaches following domestic violence

Domestic violence continues to be a primary reason for referrals to state child welfare services in advanced industrialised countries. There is growing concern in many state child welfare services to develop responses to it that are both more effective and more humane. The use of restorative approaches, in particular Family Group Conferences (FGCs), has been suggested as one such response. This article draws from data gathered from an evaluation of a UK Government funded “Innovation Project” part of which extended the use of FGCs in an urban local authority area which was already making extensive use of them. This paper presents and explores a typology of FGCs used in situations of domestic violence: pragmatic, resolution-focussed and restorative FGCs, developed from the evaluation data and augmented by relevant literature. The study data revealed pragmatic FGCs to be the most used, restorative the least. It is suggested that each type of FGC brings potential benefits but only restorative FGCs offer the possibility of full restoration in the traditionally understood sense. It is argued that the present mother-centric, risk-adverse, child protection systems which currently operate in many countries provide a powerful resistor to the greater implementation of this restorative way of working.</p

Machine learning reduced workload for the Cochrane COVID-19 Study Register: development and evaluation of the Cochrane COVID-19 Study Classifier

BACKGROUND: This study developed, calibrated and evaluated a machine learning (ML) classifier designed to reduce study identification workload in maintaining the Cochrane COVID-19 Study Register (CCSR), a continuously updated register of COVID-19 research studies. METHODS: A ML classifier for retrieving COVID-19 research studies (the 'Cochrane COVID-19 Study Classifier') was developed using a data set of title-abstract records 'included' in, or 'excluded' from, the CCSR up to 18th October 2020, manually labelled by information and data curation specialists or the Cochrane Crowd. The classifier was then calibrated using a second data set of similar records 'included' in, or 'excluded' from, the CCSR between October 19 and December 2, 2020, aiming for 99% recall. Finally, the calibrated classifier was evaluated using a third data set of similar records 'included' in, or 'excluded' from, the CCSR between the 4th and 19th of January 2021. RESULTS: The Cochrane COVID-19 Study Classifier was trained using 59,513 records (20,878 of which were 'included' in the CCSR). A classification threshold was set using 16,123 calibration records (6005 of which were 'included' in the CCSR) and the classifier had a precision of 0.52 in this data set at the target threshold recall >0.99. The final, calibrated COVID-19 classifier correctly retrieved 2285 (98.9%) of 2310 eligible records but missed 25 (1%), with a precision of 0.638 and a net screening workload reduction of 24.1% (1113 records correctly excluded). CONCLUSIONS: The Cochrane COVID-19 Study Classifier reduces manual screening workload for identifying COVID-19 research studies, with a very low and acceptable risk of missing eligible studies. It is now deployed in the live study identification workflow for the Cochrane COVID-19 Study Register

Social media for the dissemination of Cochrane child health evidence: evaluation study

© Michele P Dyson, Amanda S Newton, Kassi Shave, Robin M Featherstone, Denise Thomson, Aireen Wingert, Ricardo M Fernandes, Lisa Hartling. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 01.09.2017. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.Background: Health care providers value ready access to reliable synthesized information to support point-of-care decision making. Web-based communities, facilitated by the adoption of social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, are increasingly being used for knowledge dissemination, bridging the gap between knowledge generation and synthesis and knowledge implementation. Objective: Our objective was to implement and evaluate a structured social media strategy, using multiple platforms, to disseminate Cochrane Child Health evidence to health care providers caring for children. Methods: Our social media strategy had three components: daily "tweets" using the Cochrane Child Health Twitter account, weekly WordPress blog posts, and a monthly journal club on Twitter ("tweet chat"). Each tweet, blog, and journal club shared Cochrane evidence on a child health topic. We evaluated the strategy through (1) Twitter and blog site analytics, (2) traceable link (Bitly) statistics, (3) Altmetric.com scores for promoted evidence, and (4) participant feedback. We also tracked the resources required to write the blog, tweet content, and manage the strategy. Results: The 22-week social media strategy ran between November 2014 and April 2015. We created 25 blog posts, sent 585 tweets, and hosted 3 tweet chats. Monthly blog visits and views and Twitter account followers increased over time. During the study period, the blog received 2555 visitors and 3967 page views from a geographically diverse audience of health care providers, academics, and health care organizations. In total, 183 traceable Bitly links received 3463 clicks, and the Twitter account gained 469 new followers. The most visited and viewed blog posts included gastrointestinal topics (lactose avoidance), research on respiratory conditions (honey for cough and treatments for asthma), and maternal newborn care (skin-to-skin contact). On Twitter, popular topics were related to public health (vaccination) and pain management. We collected Altmetric.com scores for 61 studies promoted during the study period and recorded an average increase of 11 points. Research staff (n=3) contributed approximately 433 hours to promotion activities and planning (6.5 hours each per week) to implement the social media strategy, and study investigators reviewed all content (blog posts and tweets). Conclusions: This study provides empirical evidence on the use of a coordinated social media strategy for the dissemination of evidence to professionals providing health services to children and youth. The results and lessons learned from our study provide guidance for future knowledge dissemination activities using social media tools.This work was supported by Alberta Innovates—Health Solutions, grant number 201300653. LH and ASN are supported, in part, by Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator Awards.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Crowdsourcing and COVID-19: a case study of Cochrane Crowd

Cochrane has used crowdsourcing effectively to identify health evidence since 2014. To date, over 175,000 trialshave been identified for Cochrane’s Central Register of Controlled Trials via Cochrane Crowd (https://crowd.cochrane.org), Cochrane’s citizen science platform, engaging a Crowd of over 20,000 people from 166 countries. The COVID-19 pandemic presented the evidence synthesis community with the enormous challenge of keeping up with the exponential output of COVID-19 research. This case study will detail the new tasks we developed to aid the production of COVID-19 rapid reviews and supply the Cochrane COVID-19 study register. The pandemic initially looked set to disrupt the Crowd team’s plans for 2020 but has in fact served to further our understanding of the potential role crowdsourcing can play in the health evidence ecosystem

UWE Science Communication Postgraduate Papers

ForewordThis second volume in the Postgraduate Papers series has been produced as part of the celebrations of ten years of Science Communication postgraduate programmes in the Faculty of Health and Applied Sciences, University of the West of England, Bristol.Every year, some fifteen to twenty students undertake a Master’s level project as part of their MSc studies. These papers represent just a small selection of the projects carried out between 2009 and 2013 but they persuasively demonstrate the wide range of subjects tackled by our students and the innovative research they conduct.Bonnie Buckley, Jennifer Garrett and Melanie Davies looked at aspects of science communication in science centres and museums. Bonnie examined the motivations that lead people to be volunteers in science centres; Jennifer investigated how science centres can play a role in communicating environmental sustainability and Melanie explored how science centres can use a range of activities to sustain and develop creativity. The Internet offers new modes and new routes for dialogue and science communication. Felicity Liggins, Mathieu Ranger and Robin Longdin undertook projects in this dynamic medium. Felicity explored attitudes to blogging in the UK Met Office, while Mathieu looked at the particular challenges faced by science bloggers and Robin investigated whether online interaction with scientists could positively affect school students’ attitudes to science.Amy Seakins, Maya Herbolzheimer and Sarah Venugopal’s projects were all based in the lively and diverse world of festivals. Spanning the worlds of traditional and online communication, Amy considered how citizen science projects could make the most effective use of the media; Maya investigated the effectiveness of a Festival of Nature in engaging a wide range of attendees with nature conservation, while Sarah examined the relationship between arts and science at a science event embedded in an arts festival.The final two papers, by Michal Jane Filtness and Alexander Brown defy grouping but clearly illustrate the variety of audiences our students address. Michal investigated researchers’ views of the Pathways to Impact tool created by the UK Research Councils to increase the public impact of research, while Alexander evaluated the impact on school students’ attitudes to science among young people who had undertaken work experience placements at a UK research council. We want to congratulate those graduates whose research is included in this volume and thank them for the time and care they have taken in creating their contributions. Thanks should also go to the graduates’ academic supervisors, who are the co-authors on these papers; in particular Dr Karen Bultitude and Dr Helen Featherstone, who are now based at other institutions. We would also like to thank the many organisations whose support made these projects possible.We are honoured to share in our graduates’ success and delighted to have this opportunity to open up their work to a wider audience. We wish all our graduates every success in their careers as science communicators

Association between e-alert implementation for detection of acute kidney injury and outcomes: a systematic review

Background. Electronic alerts (e-alerts) for acute kidney injury (AKI) in hospitalized patients are increasingly being implemented; however, their impact on outcomes remains uncertain. Methods. We performed a systematic review. Electronic databases and grey literature were searched for original studies published between 1990 and 2016. Randomized, quasi-randomized, observational and before-and-after studies that included hospitalized patients, implemented e-alerts for AKI and described their impact on one of care processes, patient-centred outcomes or resource utilization measures were included. Results. Our search yielded six studies (n = 10 165 patients). E-alerts were generally automated, triggered through electronic health records and not linked to clinical decision support. In pooled analysis, e-alerts did not improve mortality [odds ratio (OR) 1.05; 95% confidence intervals (CI), 0.84–1.31; n = 3 studies; n = 3425 patients; I2 = 0%] or reduce renal replacement therapy (RRT) use (OR 1.20; 95% CI, 0.91–1.57; n = 2 studies; n = 3236 patients; I2 = 0%). Isolated studies reported improvements in selected care processes. Pooled analysis found no significant differences in prescribed fluid therapy. Conclusions. In the available studies, e-alerts for AKI do not improve survival or reduce RRT utilization. The impact of e-alerts on processes of care was variable. Additional research is needed to understand those aspects of e-alerts that are most likely to improve care processes and outcomes