Intro to SLSP Services Transcript
Good morning and welcome to an introduction to shared library services partnership. This is a short introduction today to SLSP service. It will take approximately 15 to 20 minutes.
Speaker 1 [10:42 min]
The purpose of today's short introduction is to provide you with a bit of background about who we are, what services we offer and how you can access us. We, the shared library services partnership, were first established in 2012 by Public Health Ontario.
For the past ten years since 2012, we've worked out of four public health unit locations with pre-existing and house libraries. To provide services to a large geographic region, as you can see from this map, we were built as a remote centralized team based out of Thunder Bay District Health unit.
Simcoe Muskoka District health Unit KFL&A public health and then in the South Middlesex London Health Unit.
In the beginning, this model had its challenges, but as you can imagine, in recent years technology has made our model much easier to execute. With online chat spaces, a SharePoint site housed at Public Health Ontario for our common standardized resources, and the capability to easily connect with clients and each other on a variety of online platforms from multiple locations across the province.
The stars radiating out from the pin drops on the map represent the client healthiness that belong to each SLSP library.
Since inception we've committed to reviewing our practices and try to gather feedback to improve client services. For example, in 2016, Public Health Ontario completed a formal evaluation of our services to help us form recommendations for our partnership. And in 2017, we surveyed key staff at each client health unit to help us build a strategic plan and work towards tailoring our products such as building an external facing website for our 22 client health units. This year we've drafted an annual report which will be distributed to each client health unit to provide feedback.
We also offer training sessions for staff online (and perhaps in the future) in-person. Online consultations can be small, informal, one-on-one sessions, or they can be larger formal team training opportunities. As per our contract with each client health unit, there is an appointed library liaison at each client health unit who assists us select library training that staff may be interested in.
Training topics can vary by need and by health unit, but our most common topics include
- Question development, usually for larger research projects.
- Basic searching, for example learning how to navigate the virtual library,
- Advanced bibliographic database,
- Searching types of studies, and different evidence-based pyramids
- Introduction to grey literature
- Reference management software such as Mendeley, Zotero or Endnote,
- and copyright.
We will be offering an online training session November 18th and 22nd on the 1st 2 topics. If you're interested, we'll send out an invitation for those sessions in the coming weeks. But please feel free to contact us or your library liaison if you'd like to set up some training at your health unit.
Beyond conducting a search and providing training, we can also help you or your team define your research question and apply it to a framework such as PICO or PISCO.
Assist in identifying appropriate databases and resources for you to search, or search databases you don't have access to on your behalf. We can provide guidance navigating specific databases or peer review your search strategy if you'd like to develop your own.
Our team regularly peer reviews each other's work just to ensure consistency and rigor. And lastly, you can also request for us to send you new research tailored to your topic area of interest, either on a regular or semi regular basis just to keep you up to date on new and emerging findings in your field.
And most importantly, we're always open to consultation on individual or group projects, so please let us know how we can help.
Speaker 2 [6:41 min]
If you are looking to submit a literature search request or you need the full text of an article, you can do this by filling out an online request form on our website by selecting request service or select contact at the top right of the page.
The contact page will provide you with the contact information for each SLSP library, as well as our list of clients. You can make requests either by emailing us or using physical telephone or depending how your health unit set up. If you have Microsoft Teams.
Regular old mail or any other method of communication that suits you. We are a barrier free service and we are open to any form of communication.
When you request a request for a full text Article, book loan or research report, just let us know if you are in a rush and we will try to make sure that we can get it to you in time. There isn't a restriction on the number of articles that you can request, and generally there's no cost. We do have a small budget for interlibrary loan. Fortunately, we belong to a large international borrowing consortium, and we can most often access titles for free from other libraries. Lastly, your librarian can answer copyright questions regarding what you can do with the article and how you must store it after receiving it, general rule is a single copy sent to research or private study and cannot be reproduced or distributed.
As a public health employee in Ontario, you have access to the online journal content through the Virtual Library, a suite of databases and journals that have been purchased by Public Health Ontario which has been available for use since 2007. It is a mix of both full text and abstracts. So if you are doing a search in there and you see an abstract in the full text isn't available within the database itself, don't hesitate to reach out and we can get that article for you.
You can access the virtual library and other databases by using our SLSP website. Under “find” “databases and journals”.
If you are interested in grey literature, we also have a number of materials on our website such as knowledge producing organizations and general repositories.
If you want to explore more, simply click on the expansion button or plus sign beside the text to access websites. Custom search engines, repositories, and tutorials as well.
We also have an EIDM page with resources from searching to synthesis and evaluation. And lastly we have a list of resources and feeds for emerging researchers topics which are updated regularly on
COVID-19 variants as well as MPXV as well.
We are continually working on updating the website. If there's ever a link that doesn't work or an area that is difficult to navigate, don't hesitate to reach out so that we can ensure ease of access and usability.
Lastly, why user services? Since we are remote centralized service, we're able to pool our funding and purchase shared access to standardized tools, databases and resources. Often, we'll use standardized peer reviewed language for public health concepts so that we can provide a quick turn around time on systematic searches for our clients instead of starting from scratch each time. And we do share the search strategies or any other newly published evidence we find for further dissemination to our clients and colleagues.
By sharing your research project with us, with your permission, we can connect you with other potential researchers who may be working on the same topic at another health unit, promote interagency collaboration, and build upon previous work and disseminating those final products.
During the pandemic some library staff were redeployed or deployed to the COVID-19 response, while others provided coverage and assisted with additional Public Health Ontario projects. With the many changes health units have experienced over the past 2 1/2 years, we wanted to reintroduce our services today and offer support to staff.
So this concludes our short introduction recording of this presentation, thanks for joining us.
I hope you have a great day and as a reminder, the contact information for each LSP library is here, and feel free to check out our website at www.SLSP.ca. Thanks so much for attending.