An Older, Less-used Hat

This morning I conducted an online orientation session to our library's resources for a group of 4 clinical instructors in our Physical Therapy department.

Background Info
Our physical therapy program results in a doctor of physical therapy degree. Students go through a hands-on training experience in offices where current professionals are actively seeing patients. This is called a clinical internship. Arcadia University has somewhere in the range of 500 clinical instructors in clinics all over the country. CIs who wish to have access to our library's resources online may request it. The session this morning was the first online orientation to help those CIs become familiar with what we have to offer.

I bring to this position an interest in the health sciences, but I'm a general reference librarian as well, and general reference is what I do for the most part.

Technology Issues
I was using Wimba to conduct the session, an application with which I've had a pinch of experience but not recently. Wimba allows participants to use either a computer headset or a telephone to participate in the session aurally and verbally. It took me 15 minutes of negotiating a computer headset, a telephone handset, and a wicked echo before realizing that all I needed was the telephone. Wimba connects the computer with the telephone through the phone handset. And this was happening AFTER the session started.

I also had 2 people of the 4 unable to follow my computer presentation because I failed to register them. (Fix that quickly.) A 3rd didn't know his password, but obtained a temporary one from the PT staff member helping me to organize the orientation. The first participant got on only because I noticed his voicemail message to me and was able to get him the conference call information before the other issues arose. All this juggling happened because I got into my office 5 minutes before the session was to start. Which itself required me getting the kids to a friend's house 45 minutes early so they could get to the bus stop.

Presentation Issues
Have you ever done a presentation without any visual or aural feedback from your audience? It must be what actors go through when they have to play to the camera. Wimba is like that because everyone is just listening to you. You have to maintain your train of thought, be animated, navigate the website, And sound capable with no audience feedback. Happily, that changed as I proceeded through the session and began inviting participation. I'm not afraid to call on people by name. And with a list of attendees in front of me in Wimba, no one is immune regardless of eye contact or lack.

Instructional Issues
I usually poll students to find out what they already know about using article databases. In the chaos of getting the session running, I never thought to do this with the participating clinical instructors. I learned further in that one of the participants Teaches students how to find clinical evidence. The rest had largely never used article databases.

Another of my practices during library research instruction is to make sure participants know how to limit searches to full-text because that's what so many university students want. If you're looking for one article on abortion, you don't have to be too picky. Limit the search to full-text, find an article, and force your paper to accommodate what the article says.

For anyone trying to do a comprehensive topic search, this isn't good enough because only a fraction of the total number of articles you retrieve in a search may have full-text. For students like these, I tell them not to worry initially how they will obtain the article. Find good information first, then use supplemental strategies to obtain the article.

With these CIs, I was in general searcher mode. I showed them how to limit their search results in PubMed. Them not being on campus to get any articles from journals we might have in print, I received a couple murmurs of approval. My experienced searcher interjected that she discourages her student interns from limiting to full-text because the articles might not be comprehensive enough to help make a clinical decision that will benefit patients.

I wholeheartedly concurred with her and offered mea culpa for presenting with the wrong hat on my head. Then I pointed to the supplemental strategies for obtaining articles.

The session ended up serving the purpose, both of educating the CIs about our resources and reminding me that I'm a little out of touch with the needs of health science researchers. No problem. I'm ready now for my next session Thursday night.