The use of Web 2.0 tools in the Health Sciences Libraries in Spain: building Libraries without frontiers.

Introduction

In the last few decades the specialized libraries have developed new services and now focus more on expanding, collaborating and disseminating information, in addition to the traditional management of specialized information and classic library services (such as cataloguing, interlibrary loan, bibliographic searches, etc.).

In short, the main objective of today’s Health Sciences libraries is to facilitate the access to medical information, especially to researchers, clinicians and in general health workers. In the last few years 2.0 tools became very useful to achieve this, because they allow libraries to offer new ways and more information services, using the Internet for collaborative and interactive applications.

Objectives

We started looking for the kind of tools that are being used in our field and the amount of biomedical libraries that are using it. In a first approach we found that this information was not collected anywhere. Giving this, we considered as our main objective the development of a National Catalogue of Web 2.0 Resources in Health Sciences libraries in Spain, in order to fill this gap. We expect this catalogue to allow us to monitor the level of Web 2.0 tools used in medical libraries in our country.

Secondary objectives are to determine whether these resources are authored by the institution itself, which means the library, or by an individual librarian, and also to check if there is official support to the use of these tools and if the institution provides policies and guidelines for it.

Methodology

We performed a descriptive study, as it reports on the findings of an online survey. The steps we took were as follows:

Firstly we decided the kind of institutions to be analysed, and to start we based this investigation on all kind of Hospital Libraries (public or private hospital libraries, hospital consortium libraries and university hospital libraries) and also on the major Spanish Regional Virtual Health Libraries found in the Serials Union Catalogue of Spanish Health Sciences Libraries (C17). We excluded medical Libraries from Universities or Public Research Entities (OPIs).

Secondly we made an on line questionnaire to collect information about the Web 2.0 tools used by the selected libraries and sent this questionnaire by e-mail to the persons in charge of these libraries (addresses were obtained from the C17 Serials Union Catalogue of Spanish Health Sciences Libraries mentioned above). Moreover we disseminated the questionnaire among specialized internet forums in the field as Bib-Med.

The questionnaire consisted of 17 questions between multiple choice questions, open questions and closed questions and was launched through the online survey site Encuesta facil (http://www.encuestafacil.com/). Despite the fact that we gave the librarians the possibility to indicate their usage of other tools as for example Netvibes, Slideshare, Youtube or Delicious amongst others, we decided to focus our analyse only on the three most common Web 2.0 tools in our context: blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

Results

A total of 180 libraries were initially selected for the survey, and we received the contribution of 59, which indicates a slightly higher percentage than 30%.

The results show that the use of 2.0 tools by the Spanish hospital libraries and regional virtual libraries taken part of our study is still low and reaches between 28% and 35% depending on the tool. Twitter is the most popular, being used by the 35% of the libraries; Facebook is used by the 28% of the libraries and a total of have almost 34% blogs.

The distribution of the analysed tools regarding the time of its implementation shows that the oldest tool being used is the blog (about the 40% of the blogs are older than two years). The use Facebook is more recently and increased at most in the last year (about a 35% of the profiles are younger than one year). As regards Twitter, which is the tool most used in our context, the accounts were between 1 and 2 years old. Finally, we found that in the last year the use of other tools 2.0 has increased, around 45% of this were younger than one year.

Regarding the authorship of the studied 2.0 tools, results show that the library (meaning the institution) is mostly the author talking about Facebook and the other new tools, whereas blogs and Twitter accounts are managed by the librarian individually.

With regard to the official support of the institution, the survey shows almost the 55% receives this support, but at the same time, 62% of the institutions don’t provide the library with official of the respondents use the web 2.0 tools with, only 17% of the institutions have official guidelines for using them. We found also quite interesting that about 20% of the librarians that were responding to the survey, couldn’t answer either of the questions.

Finally, comparing the type of library, we found that this kind of tools are more recent in the regional virtual libraries –all of them has being used since less than two years–,  than in hospital libraries. The reason could be that in general the virtual libraries are much younger and less well established. We received information from 8 regional virtual libraries and the 2.0 tools used are only 2 blog, 2 Facebook profile and 3 Twitter account. However it is remarkable that in all of them the authorship is attributed to the library as an institution and in more than 80% counts on the official support of the institution.

Conclusions

Web 2.0 tools have begun to be used regularly in Spanish health sciences libraries, albeit normally with a very limited institutional support. The study showed that although participants pointed out that ‘time’ and ‘staff adaptation’ are the major obstacles using web 2.0, new technologies could facilitate information and knowledge sharing when the staffs becomes familiar with it. The institutional official support is quite outstanding but only a few institutions have developed guidelines for the use of these tools, it would be important to do it in order to strengthen this support.

The results show also that there is not a big difference between the usage of the three main studied tools: blogs, Facebook and Twitter, however their implementation has been gradual over time, beginning with blogs and being latest the creation of Facebook profiles.

We should also remark two important limitations on our study: First, due to the small sample size we consider not to have an enough good set of data that allows us extrapolate the results to the Spanish hospital libraries as a whole. Second, it is not really possible to make generalisations about the patterns of Web 2.0 because we worked on a random sampling instead on a convenience sampling. A more large scale study would be needed to reach stronger conclusions. Nevertheless, we can conclude that establishing web 2.0 within an organization requires lots of input, such as human resources technologies, time for its implementation and user training.

In the future, we would like to extend this study to other health libraries from universities or other kinds of research centres in order to obtain a map of 2.0 tool usage in the Spanish health libraries and we will disseminate the results in the library community.