Outreach Evaluation Resource Center

Quarterly Report: November 2006 - January 2007

Executive summary

The OERC staff, Susan Barnes and Cindy Olney, spent the lion's share of this quarter on facilitating the selection of emergency preparedness as the focus for national collaboration and the subsequent organization of a two-day NN/LM National Emergency Preparedness Project planning meeting to be held in Los Angeles. In addition, Susan Barnes began to put in place a model for expanding evaluation teaching capacity in the regions through the popular workshop on using evaluation for library advocacy, "Measuring Your Impact," and Cindy Olney continued to develop the new evaluation workshop series. The two Evaluation Liaisons teleconferences featured sharing of regional activities, experiences at the American Evaluation Association meeting, and the decision to use Learning Circles to build each other's evaluation knowledge and skills. Web site maintenance and OERC Blog use continued, while the OERC adopted the Emergency Preparedness page of the NN/LM StaffWiki for use by the NN/LM National Emergency Preparedness Project. The OERC continued to distribute its publications. Cindy Olney and Susan Barnes compiled measurable objectives, indicators, and targets to be used in evaluating the OERC. OERC consultation clients came from three regions (PNR, PSR, and MAR) and the NTCC (see table 1, below, for details).

Classes and consultations

Date	Responsible Staff (Last Name)	Class/Consultation Topic	Location (city, state) of Class or Last Name of Consult Recipient
11/2/2006	Barnes, Olney	Consult: OERC support for RMLs' evaluation plans	Evaluation Liaisons, NNO, Portland, OR
11/7/2006	Barnes, Olney	Consult: Core group teleconference for national collaboration planning	Core group, NNO, national
11/15/2006	Barnes, Olney	Consult: Core group teleconference for national collaboration planning	Core group, NNO, national
11/28/2006	Barnes, Olney	Consult: Evaluation Liaisons' teleconference	Evaluation Liaisons, NNO, national
11/29/2006	Barnes	Consult: PNR program planning	Cathy Burroughs, PNR, Seattle, WA
11/29/2006	Barnes, Olney	Consult: Core group teleconference for national collaboration planning	Core group, NNO, national
11/30/2006	Barnes, Olney	Consult: OERC support for proposal writing workshop	Heidi Sandstrom, PSR, Los Angeles, CA
12/7/2006	Barnes	Consult: PNR network members' survey	Cathy Burroughs, PNR, Seattle, WA
12/12/2006	Barnes, Olney	Train: NN/LM National Emergency Preparedness Project	RML Dirs and ADs, NNO, Bethesda, MD
12/13/2006	Barnes, Olney	Consult: Assessment of NTCC and MEDLARS Management training	Sharon Brown, NTCC, Bethesda, MD
12/18/2006	Barnes, Olney	Train: Teaching the "Measuring Your Impact" workshop	Evaluation Liaisons, NNO, national
1/23/2007	Barnes, Olney	Consult: Evaluation Liaisons' teleconference	Evaluation Liaisons, NNO, national
1/26/2007	Barnes, Olney	Consult: MAR network member survey	Sue Hunter, MAR, New York, NY
1/29/2007	Barnes, Olney	Consult: Evaluation teaching in PSR	Heidi Sandstrom, PSR, Los Angeles, CA
1/30/2007	Barnes	Consult: MAR network member survey	Sue Hunter, MAR, New York, NY

Web site

Performed basic maintenance and updating. Communicated via the OERC Blog (see "Publications" section, below) and via the NN/LM StaffWiki (see "Cross-regional collaboration" section, below)

Dissemination of effective practices

The OERC distributed 19 sets of "Planning and Evaluating Health Information Outreach" and 11 copies of "Measuring the Difference." Susan Barnes' continued participation in the TC4C Effective Practices committee included a teleconference about upcoming work by the committee and work on a bibliography of publications about effective practices for health information outreach.

Subcontractor update

Not applicable. The OERC has no subcontracts at present.

Other staff activities-this section is organized according to OERC's goals for the 2006-2011 contract

1. Develop awareness, skill, and capacity in use of evaluation methods.

   Training: Susan Barnes received a request from LAUC-SF regarding providing the "Measuring Your Impact" class in the Bay Area. Susan and Cindy Olney held followup discussions with Heidi Sandstrom about offering evaluation classes in the NN/LM Pacific Southwest Region and whether the "Measuring Your Impact" class could eventually be taught by PSR staff. Susan Barnes led a conference call of "Measuring Your Impact" instructors to agree on some basics to be shared between classes, and initiated work with Dale Prince of NN/LM SEA and Ros Lett of the Georgia Health Science Libraries Association on offering the "Measuring Your Impact" workshop in March, 2007 in Georgia. This contact was a result of Susan's August 30 Breeze presentation about evaluation to hospital librarians in NN/LM SEA.

   Cindy Olney restarted work on creating the new OERC workshop series based on what was learned from the pilot workshops in January and February, 2006.

2. Develop mechanisms to disseminate and use evaluation findings to help NLM and the NN/LM document and demonstrate their accomplishments.

   Publications: The OERC Blog was used for communication about the national collaboration effort and about Evaluation Liaison activities (including brief summaries of American Evaluation Association activities).

3. Strengthen and build an evaluation culture throughout NN/LM.

   Evaluation liaisons: The fifth Evaluation Liaisons' teleconference featured the ideas of "Learning Circles" as a way of teaching ourselves to be better evaluators (the group decided to begin holding these in early 2007), and using the popular "Measuring Your Impact" library advocacy class to build capacity for evaluation teaching in the NN/LM regions (with the model that prospective instructors would attend the class and an experienced instructor would then co-teach the class with the new instructor). Those who attended the American Evaluation Association meeting shared their experiences. In the sixth Evaluation Liaisons teleconference, liaisons provided updates about their activities and Cindy Olney led a discussion about beginning the Learning Circles in February with the topic of Logic Models.

   Evaluation of the OERC: Cindy and Susan compiled measurable objectives, indicators, and targets to be used in evaluating the OERC.

4. Provide consultation and direction in implementing evaluation systems, structures, and resources to help the NN/LM's efficacy and efficiency.

   Consultations: Consultations are listed in Table 1, above.

5. Enhance and refine use of community-based approaches to planning.

   Cross-regional collaboration: The OERC continued to facilitate this process, with NN/LM regional staff participating in a rating of possible areas for national collaboration via a SurveyMonkey "dot-vote." The top five possibilities were:

   1. Emergency preparedness
   2. Conduct a national marketing campaign for the NN/LM
   3. Multilingual resource collaboration
   4. Public health outreach-continue and broaden.
   5. Health literacy for school-aged children (K or 6-12)

   The eight Associate Directors and Angela Ruffin rated these top five for their potential and then discussed the top three in depth. The group reached consensus on emergency preparedness as the focus for national collaboration and agreed on the concept of a "Core Group" to move the national collaboration forward. This group comprises the 8 ADs plus Angela Ruffin with Susan Barnes and Cindy Olney as facilitators. The OERC established the rmlcollab email discussion list for communication about the NN/LM National Emergency Preparedness project; adapted the existing brief Emergency Preparedness page on the NN/LM StaffWiki for use by this project; gave a presentation at RML Directors' Mid-Year Meeting about the project; and organized the NN/LM National Emergency Preparedness project planning meeting to be held on February 1 and 2, hosted by NN/LM PSR and UCLA Biomedical Library.

   Medical Library Association: Susan Barnes provided consultation to Jean Shipman regarding an initial logic model for the NLM-funded MLA Health Information Literacy research project.