Things I ’ve Learned Managing a Library During this Crisis

First I want to recommend Zach Osborne’s post “Hospital Librarianship during the COVID-19 Pandemic” as a really good description of what it is like right now as a hospital librarian. I couldn’t have expressed it better. I also want to share some of the things I have learned during this time. I think the easiest way is to just do a list. Some key library infrastructure systems do NOT work from home. We found both our ILS (Innovative Interfaces) and Illiad do not allow for us to do back office work (set up accounts, catalog, order articles, etc.) when we aren’t on our institution’s IP range. VPN isn’t the answer because our IP is still our personal Internet Service Provider not the institution’s IP address.We had to create a frustrating work around and that limits the number of people who can get into the systems. But at least it is a work around.NOT everything is available online!!! I can’t stress this enough. There are articles that healthcare people need from the 1990’s that aren’t online. These are older articles on antivirals, ventilators, triage, etc. that are VERY MUCH needed by frontline personnel, researchers, and administration during this pandemic.This is especially difficult to deal with since the National Library of Medicine and many academic medical libraries are not providing ILL’s to these type of articles because they have nobody in their libraries. I feel sick to my stomach that we ...
Source: The Krafty Librarian - Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs