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Librarians without Borders® HINARI and Internet Resources Workshop Report New Guinea: May 22-25, 2017

Papua New Guinea (May 22-25, 2017)

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This four day workshop was conducted at the Lutheran School of Nursing (LSON), Madang. It was supported by the World Health Organization, WHO Western Pacific Region Office and Librarians Without Borders®/Medical Library Association (LWB). The instructor was Professor Lenny Rhine.

Ably assisting with the logistics were Ms. Jessica Yiapupu, Ms. Keruma Gamu and Mr. Shaun Haung – all from the WHO PNG Country Office. Thanks to the support from Ms. Marie Villemin Partow, Technical Lead, Information Products and Service, WHO Western Pacific Region and Mr. Pieter Van Maaren, the former WR for the PNG WHO Country Office, a series of five regional workshops have been conducted in PNG during 2016 & 2017. Participants from 17 provinces and 31 institutions have attended Hinari training. An additional workshop is planned for institutions based in the Port Moresby (capitol) region. The venue was quite adequate being the library of the LSON. Internet access was a combination of the desktops spread out within the library and participants’ laptops that were connected via modems brought by the WHO staff. The breaks and lunches were held in a conference room in the adjoining building. 

Institutions in Papua New Guinea have access to all Hinari publishers except four minor ones so that there is a wealth of information currently available to the users. Plus the language of education in Papua New Guinea is English and this facilitates the use of the Hinari resources.

This workshop's participants came from three teaching institutions – the Lutheran School of Nursing,  (LSON), Lae School of Nursing (LSN) and Divine Word University (DWU).  The 1st two institutions recently had obtained Internet access and the one lecturer from the LSN and five faculty plus two librarians from the LSON were extremely pleased with and receptive to this timely training  (the teachable moment). The introduction/use of the resources will impact positively on the lecturers’ access to current teaching information (including the free graphics from Open I) plus the students’ information needs. One of the goals is to incorporate ‘information literacy’ skills into the curricula at the two institutions.

The six librarians and one lecturer from the DWU came with very good skills relating to the use of the Internet and databases as a source of current information. This is due to the Internet access at their institution plus the use of several commercial information databases. For the librarians, the goal was to enhance their knowledge so that their information literacy instructional skills increased and the use of Hinari and other Internet resources would increase. Often, there was a side discussion about teaching strategies and also how to adapt the training modules from the workshop. 

The modules covered were searching skills and evaluation of health sites on the Internet, the Hinari portal including ‘access problems and solutions’, Hinari/PubMed (website, filters, history and advanced search), the alternate Summon search tool for Hinari, evidence-based medicine (invaluable for all three institutions), e-book and Internet resources for health information, WHO resources particularly IRIS plus a discussion of Hinari and Research4Life training material, a brief overview of the authorship skills material (How to read and write a scientific paper, plagiarism, web-bibliography, Zotero reference management software). Additionally, the CINAHL (Nursing and Allied Health database) was discussed although the hands-on activities were not completed.

We also focused on the Hinari marketing module and had all the participants complete the Marketing checklist (spreadsheet). This is a tool for developing a detailed marketing plan for each institution.   Also completed was the ‘workshop scenario’ group project.  For the marketing module, the DWU group produced an excellent and detailed plan that will be implemented. This is a reflection of the knowledge base of the group of librarians from that institution.

At the end of the workshop, the participants completed post-workshop surveys (attached). Note – a few participants were unable to complete the survey so the number (11) does not reflect the total number of participants (17). Almost all the participants ‘agreed’ that the workshop was well organized, had relevant material with useful ‘hands-on’ exercises, that the trainers were knowledgeable/organized, effective presenters and responsive to questions and that the workshop resulted in their obtaining useful knowledge and skills. According to the participants, ‘major strengths’ of the workshop included Demos/Hands on, Information Gained and Support Material. 

For the ‘length was appropriate for course content’ question.  Ten individuals replied ‘agree’ and ‘somewhat agree’ and one noted ‘somewhat disagree’. For a group with two distinct groups (librarians and lecturers) with somewhat different skill levels, these definitely were positive numbers.

After six months, we plan to distribute a follow-up outcomes survey as this will be an indicator of the actual activities by the participants. 

The workshop itself started slowly and the momentum of the group grew during the 2nd and 3rd days. What was unique about this group was the positive attitude and steady effort of the participants especially when completing the hands-on exercises. It also was a group that gave the instructor lots of positive non-verbal communication and were appreciative of the training. The only drawback was that the desktop computers were spread throughout the Library resulting in lots of movement by the instructor when checking the hands-on activities.

Future plans to complete the country-wide Hinari rollout are to conduct training for all the Nursing Training Colleges in the country and also a workshop in Port Moresby including National Department of Health (NDOH) staff. A previous training was conducted in POM in 2010 and there have been significant changes/updates to the Hinari program and related training material plus there are different individuals to train.

Also conducted were two-1/2 courses for research staff affiliated with the NDOH and information staff of the organization.  The first  workshop had an overview of Hinari, Hinari/PubMed and resources on the Internet.  The second course became a discussion of how the Department’s staff could benefit from a more complete distance learning course. Currently, the Hinari resources are underutilized at the NDOH and the discussion focused on how many of the staff could benefit from more knowledge and how we could implement this via a distance learning course.

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