Goals
When medical librarians talk to Third Iron staff about their priorities, there are two that recur: the need to support clinical staff with quick, easy access to their research collections; and the need to get as much value as possible for the money they spend on their purchased resources.
Among clinicians, the need for information is often immediate — preparing for a patient meeting or seeking out the latest research on a treatment methodology, for example.
Clinicians often start their search for information at PubMed, Google, or other websites. When their search yields article citations of interest, there is often confusion about whether the article is available and how to access it. This causes delays or even blocks access to important information and causes library resources to be underutilized.
LibKey Nomad, the browser extension technology from Third Iron, enables libraries to achieve their goals of easily identifying available articles and providing immediate access to them for their patrons and clinicians. LibKey Nomad is an extension that seamlessly integrates into users’ browsers. When users visit sites like PubMed, LibKey Nomad inserts buttons that clearly indicate what content is available, whether from subscribed publisher and aggregated sources or Open Access, then provides one-click access to the articles. By clearly indicating what content is available at sites like PubMed, and providing one-click access to articles, LibKey Nomad saves clinicians valuable time. By seamlessly connecting to the library’s content, LibKey Nomad increases the usage and value of the resources purchased by the library.
Delivery
Medical librarians have found that the best way to ensure clinical staff realize all the benefits of LibKey Nomad is to install the it site-wide on all networked computers used by health professionals.
This usually means asking the IT department to deploy LibKey Nomad. IT departments in health care settings are understandably concerned about security. The good news is and LibKey Nomad has been designed to meet hospital IT security requirements. As a result, many large and small hospital systems around the world have installed LibKey Nomad across their networked computers. Some have LibKey Nomad installed on more than 200,000 computers!
Following are brief stories of three different medical libraries, each of which completed a site wide installation of LibKey Nomad on thousands of their computers. These stories relate the installation process and the benefits clinicians and libraries see as a result.
Monash Health – Australia
Monash Health library, which has four physical locations, serves six hospitals with 18,000 staff located in Victoria, Australia.
Cassandra Gorton is the Manager of Access and Discovery for the library and, in conjunction with the Monash Hospital IT team, she helped guide the site-wide installation of LibKey Nomad.
Based in part on a survey they conducted she found that sometimes awareness among health care staff about resources that were available to them was lower than the library staff hoped it would be. She said, “We know there are people out there that don’t use our resources and are possibly wasting their own money and time trying to access them or trying to buy them for their department.”
This lack of awareness did not help in supporting the mission of Monash. “Here at Monash Health our focus is on patient care. So whatever barriers we can eliminate to make sure that health professionals are spending their time on patient care, instead of having to follow up with all those boring administrative tasks is an improvement,” Cassandra said.
She added, “This doesn’t happen as much, but we will sometimes get requests for articles that we already have access to. So people aren’t even searching or looking for them first. They’re saying, ‘Please get this for me.’ They’re busy doctors, they don’t want to spend the time searching for it.”
“And we’ve also had instances of a doctor or researcher who’s tried to get access to a journal online, and they’ve gone directly to the vendor or the publisher instead, and have asked, ‘Can I buy this? How do I buy this for my department?’ And the vendors included us in the email response and said, ‘You actually already have this journal through the library.'”
This was a problem they wanted to solve.
LibKey Nomad Site Wide Installation
In 2022, after another case where a staff member requested material the library already had, the library proposed a group policy deployment of LibKey Nomad to the hospital IT team.
Cassandra sent a simple email that said, “A group deployment of LibKey Nomad will save people time and money. I’d like to get this deployed. Here’s the technical advice from LibKey,” adding a link to a support webpage on the Third Iron website specifically written for IT professionals.
The IT department came back and asked some questions about security and about the purpose of the browser extension. Satisfied with Cassandra’s answers, the IT department installed LibKey Nomad on thousands of Monash Health computers within a week.
Results
“Our full text download stats have doubled since the group deployment went in, which is excellent,” Cassandra said.
“The feedback I have had is, ‘Yes, this is very useful. I like it.’ When we do custom information sessions for particular groups, and I’ve shown people LibKey Nomad, I’ve specifically had the feedback, ‘This is a life changer,'” Cassandra said.
Trillium Health Partners – Mississauga, Canada
Antonia Giannarakos is a Senior Librarian and manages the library program at Trillium Health Partners serving around 10,000 clinicians and researchers.
Antonia says that they attempt to make access to their resources as “seamless and direct as possible.”
“In a hospital setting, a lot of our patrons need quick access to evidence. It can be a fast-paced environment.”
Over the last several years they have made changes and added applications (like a discovery layer) to help get patrons to resources quickly and directly.
To support in that effort they decided to try to do a site wide installation of LibKey Nomad, “We thought that the best way to ensure direct access and to impact usage of our resources was to make sure clinical staff were aware of Nomad, and deploying it on every computer was the key. It was a no-brainer since we know that not all of our staff go directly through our webpage when they are searching for evidence.”
Site Wide Installation of Nomad
Antonia started by installing LibKey Nomad on browsers on the computers in the library and discovered those computers could get a browser extension installed without being prompted for IT approval.
Antonia explained to IT what they were trying to accomplish, “I explained that we have these resources that we subscribe to, and for ease of access for our clinicians, researchers and our staff, this application removes barriers, and it gets them directly to the information they need, it makes access easier. I informed them of the pilot installation on our computers in the library. IT only allows downloading of a narrow range of applications, and Nomad wasn’t flagged during this process.”
“I didn’t go into too much library detail because I think that isn’t relevant to the IT process. I used the language from the Third Iron literature to explain it to them, but I have a feeling having it installed already on the systems in the library may have helped expediate the institutional deployment.”
“Every hospital’s a little bit different, how they set up their IT, but I believe if you can do a smaller installation and then show them how it works, and in our case since it wasn’t flagged, it’s beneficial to the process.”
The install went faster than Antonia expected, “I thought this was going to take a long time. I started the process in May or June, and I thought maybe by the new year I might get this up, but it was done before the summer, so we were very pleased.”
Results
“When we announced this, we got some really good feedback saying, ‘Oh, this is great. This is going to make it so much easier to find evidence,'” Antonia said.
“It seemed to go over very well, and from the stats we see, Nomad is the application that gets used the most.”
“The feedback is on ease of use. It’s almost like you don’t have to think about it.”
“I think having Nomad in the browser is a reminder. I find, especially in our environment, that reminders are great because our patrons are so busy. Reminding them that these applications are available to them is very valuable. We were trying to create a habit like when you see the little LibKey icon in the corner or you see it underneath the citation, you can click on it and it’ll take you to where you need to go, and that seems to be working.”
Leeds Community Health Care NHS Trust, United Kingdom
Helen Swales is the Library Manager at Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust. As a community trust, this NHS organization is not hospital-based. Instead, health services are delivered through in-home visits, as well as through over forty clinics and bases spread across the city. The library serves approximately 3,000 health care professionals that work for the Trust.
Objectives
For some time Helen and her library staff were themselves using LibKey Nomad, having downloaded it onto their own computers. As Helen said, “We loved it, we absolutely loved it. It was such a game changer for us as library staff. It was when I was covering the library desk and responding to queries for journal articles thinking, ‘We just need to give this out to our users because they’ll get much quicker access to information.’”
She went on, “Because what I strongly suspect is that otherwise, if someone finds a reference they can’t easily get, they often give up. They can request it from us, but life’s too short for everyone nowadays, isn’t it? So they don’t bother, whereas, if they could click on something, they will get that instant access.”
“While you’re looking for something, you’re in the here and the now, and you want to find that answer, and you don’t always have time to come back to it later. Or you might be looking for information for a patient that you’re going to see in half an hour, you don’t want to have to go, ‘Oh, I need to go to the library, or I need to fill out a form.’ You want that answer straight away.”
Installing LibKey Nomad
Rather unusually for an NHS Trust, Helen’s library is part of the informatics directorate. Helen made the case that this would improve services for their patrons, and the IT manager agreed to do the installation. LibKey Nomad was fully deployed across all devices in the organization in just a few weeks from the request.
Although IT had installed a desk top icon for the national NHS Knowledge & Library Hub, Helen suspects patrons tend to bypass this, and use Google or other search avenues first. Users come across the Nomad icon in the results and patrons interact with LibKey Nomad in that way. In any case, whatever the search pathway, resource usage is up.
Results
The Leeds Community Healthcare Trust library saw an immediate increase in resource usage after LibKey Nomad was installed, and that usage was the best indicator of the success of delivering LibKey Nomad more widely.
Helen said, “I don’t know that we got feedback as such, but usage and downloads went up. It’s amazing how many people said, ‘Oh, yeah. There’s this green teardrop now (the LibKey icon).’ The usage was the feedback.”
Helen and her staff have been happy with the wider deployment of LibKey Nomad. In addition to serving patrons better she says it helps fulfill their obligation to the public and the taxpayer.
“It’s really important to get value for money because we’re spending taxpayer’s money in buying these resources. Anything we do within the NHS, it should be efficient. We’re trying to make things efficient, easy to use for staff, and good value. We have a responsibility to spend wisely every pound we get. LibKey Nomad has enabled us to get much better value out of what we’ve purchased.”
Conclusion
In each case outlined above the librarians were concerned with making sure clinicians were aware of what content was available, wherever it was found, and with providing quicker and better access to the resources that represented a significant portion of their budgets. At these three hospitals, and many others who have installed LibKey Nomad on their computers, LibKey Nomad is helping libraries, and the clinicians they support, achieve these important goals.
Find out today how LibKey Nomad can transform information access at your library by setting up your free trial!