 Okay, well welcome to the Encompass Live online session for Wednesday, March 18th. This is our weekly online event that we use to highlight different services and activities that are going on in the Nebraska library world. We're happy today to have with us Terry Hartman, who is the head of education at McGuggan Library of Medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, talking about Go Local Nebraska and CHERS, both our services that you can use to help your patrons get access to good health information. So I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Terry and let her share information with you today. Thank you very much. Hey, Terry. I first became aware of CHERS back in 1992. I came for a tour of the McGuggan Library of Medicine. And that was the thing I came away with was, oh my gosh, this is such a wonderful program for the state. I was able to come to McGuggan Library of Medicine in 1999 and start working. And I've been promoting CHERS ever since. In 2006, I had a personal health crisis and they were able to help me through CHERS. So now I've been on both sides of the fence with both promoting as well as a user of consumer health information. And I really wanted to share this great benefit to all Nebraskans through this medium. And I appreciate the opportunity. Health information is on everyone's mind. The Pew Internet and American Life Project has estimated that between 75 and 80 percent of all internet users have searched for health information. And you all probably know that yourselves through personal experience, most everybody's looking up something along the means of health. The University of Nebraska Medical Center's McGuggan Library recognizes trend in the early 80s. CHERS is actually 25 years old in 2010. Based to the work that was done back in the early 80s when they partnered with the Nebraska Library Commission, health information has been delivered to all Nebraskans for 24 years at no charge. The Consumer Health Information Resource Service, which is what CHERS stands for, and understand it's information resource, which is really great. It's a resource for your library. Also provides educational and consultational services to non-health science librarians in the state, enabling all librarians to better deliver first line reference service to their communities. In 2006, the Go Local Nebraska was added as a service, which arranges and connects Nebraska contact information for health facilities, organizations, and providers to health topics at the National Medline Plus site. This directory allows anyone in the world to search for Nebraska Health Service, and we always say that. Anybody can search for Nebraska Health Service, so if you have a patron that possibly is an older family member or maybe a young family member new to the state, their family caregivers can actually look the information up no matter where they live and say, oh, mom, just got diagnosed with diabetes. There is a diabetes support group for her in Nebraska, and they're actually in California. The links mentioned or shown in this presentation will be included in the Nebraska Library Commission's delicious account for your later reference, so don't worry about trying to write down the links because some of them get pretty long. You will be able to get to them later. The Cheers and Go Local Nebraska are part of every Nebraska Library's collection, just like the Rand McNally Atlas or the Encyclopedia on your website. The network is created so that the McGuggan Library of Medicine is the primary source of expert health information through our librarians here and the biomedical databases here, but the patrons can come either directly to their public library, their local library. It could be also a state college library, or they can come directly to us. So this network would not exist without all the libraries across the state. And I know that you can say yes with your interactive tools. If you could let me know if you've ever done a Cheers request from the McGuggan Library, either for your patrons, for your library, excellent, got one. We've done several hundred searches, so we know that the benefit exists across the state, but the key is that it does work through the local libraries. Cheers fits into consumers' health planning in this fashion. I've got a little diagram here showing kind of a continuum. And if the person has just received a diagnosis or a new treatment plan, they have questions. They can contact Cheers directly or go to their public library and request a search. The information they receive back either by mail or by email is no fee. There's no fee involved. They can look at the information, but then the key is they need to discuss that with their health professional. Only the health professionals can interpret the information and decide if that is appropriate for that person's care. We do have occasional contacts where somebody will call up and say, I have a cough. And I imagine public libraries also, you get calls up and saying, I've got an aching foot. What do I do? Really, librarians don't need to diagnose, a person really shouldn't want that. But they can come to the library or go through the cheers process after they go to the health professional and get the actual diagnosis or receive a new treatment plan. And they can continue to use this service, possibly if you have somebody that comes up to your reference desk that has a chronic condition, something like Marfan syndrome or diabetes, and they're coming up on their annual checkup. Maybe they want to know what the newest research is on their condition. And they can request a cheers search, and the information would be sent to them, and they'd be able to take it in with their visit. This is the newest research. Does any of it apply to my condition or my treatment? Generally, this improves the relationship between the health care professional and the patient. It makes it a more informed and focused episode for the patient to go through because we don't have much time to talk with the health care professional. The cheers information can include the clinical trials or articles from research journals. We also print out or copy an email website information. We have, I believe, over 900 cheers books that can be interlibrary loaned at no fee to your library. I believe that the commission reimburses that fee if you go through OCLC. And I do have a link to our book collection so you can take a look at and search it. And then also the Go Local Nebraska directory listings. These include support groups, health facilities, health care providers, and organizations. So this is all useful information to whatever their topic is they're looking at. The information is delivered at no fee to Nebraskans. I keep saying that because this is a unique service. As far as I know, we are the only place in the United States that does this. I'm willing to be disproved, but I haven't found another state that serves everybody in the state. We also serve anybody that was treated at the Nebraska Medical Center. So that actually gets us around the world. The Go Local Nebraska was added in 2006. This is created by hand by expert librarians right here at McGuggan Library, as well as some input from public librarians across the state. It is connected to topics in MedlinePlus.gov. The statewide directory includes information that's arranged by city, county, and subject. And I'm going to take you through one search that we have for one of the towns that's on here because I understand Crawford Library is on here. So I wanted to show how do I get to, and I apologize for the hesitation here. If I go to MedlinePlus, hopefully you all are going to be able to see this and stretch it out. And if I'm looking up information on diabetes in MedlinePlus, I'm going to scroll down the page a little bit. Over on the right, there's the Go Local box, and I'm going to select Nebraska as the location right here, and click Go. And the Go Local Nebraska comes up with services for diabetes. It's already in that area, and I wish, oh, I really wish somebody could tell me what county Crawford is in. I apologize. You can go by counties. You can also go by the larger cities. I think it's in Dawes County. Ah, thank you so much. And then you can search for all of Nebraska. There's 1,672 resources in Nebraska that serve diabetes topics. I'm going to go back up the hill, head for Dawes, and it says there's 46 resources in Dawes County that deal with diabetes. The cool thing is we did link to all the libraries, so a person can go click on the library and say where can I go for more information, and there's Crawford Public and Shadron Public, and the hours are here. They also have the location and map and directions, so a person that's new to the county or somebody that's traveling in, they'd be able to find the map and directions to your facility. I'm going to click back. Other things that are here in the county, there's an Indian Health Services Clinic, the hospital is listed, I'm going to click on the hospital, and it says Shadron Community Hospital and Health Services. So that's the closest hospital that is in the area that's working, it talks about diabetic education. So a person would be able to contact them, say okay, where do I need to go? The endocrinologist is also in Shadron Community Hospital. There are home health services. Here's the Indian Health Services, I'm going to go back twice, and there are counselors and therapists. There are three clinics, I'm going to click there. They'd be able to find out who would be able to work with them if they have a, maybe they're thinking about moving to Dallas County and they have somebody in their family that's got diabetes. They want to make sure that their care is going to be covered. This is one of the things that you could use, go local Nebraska to actually talk to your economic development folks in your county to say thanks to libraries, which you are the key to your county, thanks to the library's work, this resource is available and people are able to see what our county has for health care services, the level of your economic development folks, your mayor, the people that make the policy decisions. Understand that this was created by libraries and that this is something useful to people that are considering moving in, maybe all your real estate folks, you want to invite them in for a bagels and coffee morning and show them that this exists. I know that I've moved several times across the United States. I have a child with a medical condition and I always made sure that he was going to be served. So think about that when you're looking at this kind of resource. I'm going to go away from this window, I hope, and go back to the PowerPoint. One of the other things that we are supposed to do with the cheers, it's not just to serve all the Nebraskans with health care information, which is wonderful. One of the other tenets of this project is that we serve educational support of non-health science librarians in Nebraska. In recent years, we've covered the state with in-person classes on health reference interview techniques, possibly you saw us at one of your annual meetings, possibly we dropped in and delivered promotional items in your library. We did a canvassing of the state one time. I'm going to show you our travel log if I can get back to it. Here it is. This is our travel log of the state and it's available on the consumer health page. I'm going to go there in a minute and I'll show you how I got to it. But each one of these dots is a link and we covered every one of these cities, libraries. Hopefully we saw you or we dropped off the bag at your county hall, city hall, because maybe your library was closed that day. But we have pictures of all the libraries and we have our experience if we saw you, what you were doing. And it's just, we came away with a huge respect of what the libraries are doing in Nebraska. I'm very honored to be a Nebraska librarian now. And it was real special for me to go out and see the level of service each community does. And it's really great to be able to be your health information back room because your community libraries are paying attention to so many topics in each city. If we can take care of the healthcare information area for you, that's a great mission for us to do. Let me see. I think we had, we did see Crawford. So here's Crawford Library. We visited you in April of 2006. There's a homepage library. I was the one that got to see that one. That was great. And we talked about the cheers was already up and promoted. And then we went to the next visit. We had a great time traveling today. I would love to turn this into a big coffee table book and be able to show the state policymakers what kind of a service we have in the state of Nebraska. Our other promotional materials are the Year of Cheers. It's an email newsletter. I say it's irregular. The goal is to have it monthly. Sometimes it's bimonthly. I think once or twice it's been in three months. But it's a one page, easy to read, lightweight newsletter. And we do have the back issues saved off of the consumer health page. I'm going to go to the consumer health page and show you where these resources live. And we have a brand new consumer health page today. Looks really great. And maybe this one isn't live yet. It says the Development Center. This is what it's going to look like. I have, I'm going to go to the consumer health. This is our library's homepage, consumer health. We're naturally, like all of y'all, are working on new versions of our web pages. So we've got two or three different versions. I apologize, I took you to the development one, but it looks, it's looking really good. This is what we currently have. Here's the cheers request form. But people can call. That includes you all. Libraries have faxed. They have called. You can email and the information is there. There's toll free number, the brochures, the link to go look on Nebraska directly. And then a couple of other resources. There is a Nebraska resource and referral system. You can search Medline Plus directly from this page, which is a great service. For librarians, this is the information for y'all. The cheers newsletters. And we go back. I think we've started our fifth year, fifth edition because we started in 2005. So I think this is the fifth edition that we've been working on now. So the current one is February 2009. They tend to get published the last of the month. And information that are on them, I'm going to pull one up, see if it works out, and we'll pull up January's. And see if, I don't know if I can get to this site, if you're okay. Here's Highlight Health in your community. Talking about February being Wise Health Consumer Month. There are links on the left side. Going to cheers, go local Nebraska. Usually if there's something new, we'll put it over here. This is just another link to go local Nebraska. And then here's the cheers book list. These are books that you can interlibrary alone for your community for free. Again, you need to go through the OCLC process. And they get reimbursed, the cost gets reimbursed from the library commission. I used to run the bulletin boards at a library. That was my very first job. So I always try and put in what's going to be coming up in the next month. I know that you all have very little space. So you may not be highlighting health every month. But hopefully we give you a little bit of information for it. And then this is the link to the calendar so you can find out more information. There's more contact information. Has our contact information. The Ask Us, our toll free number. And it's best viewed online because it gets pretty small print. But you can print it out. It's just one sheet. We know that you're busy. We try not interfere with your day. Like I said, we respect the fact that you keep track of so many topics in your community. We just want to be the health information backdoor for you. We also have a go local blog. Information is on there. And I do have a link to that as well. Going into the benefits of what CHEERS has. It frees your patrons to concentrate on their health during the hard times. And remember that you too can use the CHEERS. Yes, you are an information expert. And I know that you can make Google dance. But I can speak from hard personal experience. That one is your personal or a family health topic. We are sometimes too close to the subject. Just ask for search to be done so you can concentrate on the hard part of healing. Don't stay up all night Googling. My colleagues here did searches for me. Like I said, they saved me from seeing how many people died with my kind of cancer. The bad stories, I was able to concentrate on the treatment when I went through it. And the support was amazing. After I got better, yes, I Google like a mad dog now. So I do look up my own information occasionally. But when something comes up, it's a stressful treatment issue. I go right back to CHEERS service. It's really, really good. The fact that CHEERS sends focused information. It improves the visits and experiences with health care professionals. I know I've heard anecdotal reports from health care professionals here at UNMC where somebody will come in with a whole bunch of information. They pulled off the internet. And I have been to that point where if they would have said, stomp water would have cured it, I would have been digging out a stump and pouring water in it. So sometimes the information you find on the internet is not real, not necessarily unbiased. And the librarians here look up the real stuff, the unbiased things. We have a collection, millions of dollars worth of collection that you cannot Google. So for everybody in the state to have free access to that is amazing. It's already been paid for. It's what we usually tell people when we exhibit, you've already paid for this service. It's time to use it. If we get too busy, we won't be going out and talking about it. But currently we are still promoting it. We really want people to take part in it. I have included a link to request to CHEERS services. This is the consumer site. And then they can just, you can also just email us at the ASCA site. Here's a toll free number. I used to be in the military and I knew that there were times I had questions that were the world was too small. So I might not have gone to my local library with them. The cool thing about this service is they can't call us directly. But the better thing about it is this is a service that you offer your community. The next time you have community health fair, I think some folks have requested for like a volunteer fire day. Maybe there's going to be a volunteer fire department, get together a blood drive, something at the nursing home. If you want to request our display, give us an email, drop us a note. We can check it out. We have, they're set up right now for the next three weeks, but we have two displays. So we are able to mail it out to you and there's a FedEx form so you can just mail it back directly. There's no fee for you. And then you'd be able to put your own library materials with it and say this is a service that our library offers the community. The links that we talked about, requesting a CHEERS search, going to the CHEERS consumer health page. The second link, the book list. I'm going to go back to the CHEERS page and show you where you can see the book list. Come on guys. I'm going to go to the library homepage and stretch it out. Click on consumer health and under the library and section, there is a consumer health collection link right here. Click on that and what this does is get you into our Helix catalog and there's 998 titles that are there. I can, this pretty much just gives the whole link, but if I start over to look in the catalog and I go for advanced, no, I go for a simple keyword and type in CHEERS, this gives me the results also so that I, if I wanted to go in and say CHEERS, diabetes for simple keyword, there's 46 titles and the newest one is here, guide to preventing and treating heart disease, essential information for you and your family. And I'm sure that they talk about diabetes in there. There's also your first year with diabetes that came out in 2008 also. So here's 998 titles that are in addition to your great collection. So this is as if you did not have to pay for 998 books. You can interlibrary loan them for your patrons, the same as you interlibrary loan other things. So please remember that this collection is available to you. Other people have used this collection to help develop their own collection. They've used the suggested titles that we send out in the year of CHEERS monthly issues to take a look at their own collection and say, well, this looks like a great book. I think I'll go ahead and purchase it. But realistically all of us are fighting budget issues right now. So you might be able to say, well, I didn't have to purchase it, but I have it anyway. It's available to me. So you can check it out. Tangled. I want to stop the sharing and go back into the PowerPoint. And everything closed down on me. Sorry, guys. I still see the power. Are there any questions on text? Are there any questions from anybody? I don't see any. This is Susan. I don't see any text chat questions. But I do see your PowerPoint again. OK. And if you have any, if you want to ask me a question, Susan, because we talked a little earlier about this that was unusual for you to find out. I hadn't realized that it was something that patrons could do directly. So that's good to know that they can do their own. They can interact directly with you folks. Yeah, the really cool thing is that they can go through their local library, which is great. We love that part. And remember, this is 24 years old. So obviously, we predate the computers that folks have in their house. But if the patron wants to come to you directly, that's wonderful. If they want to do it on their own, that's OK, too. They can contact us. But we really stress the fact that it is a community service. It is locally provided courtesy of your library. The other thing about your library's connection, we would really, really appreciate if every community librarian would look at their listing in Go Local. Like Crawford had 46 listings for diabetes. But if I go into, let me go into Go Local, and I'll show you. I think my problem is I've been closing down windows. Go into AppShare. I'm going to go into the diabetes. But I'm going to start, I'm going to change the topic. Excuse me, I'm going to stretch this out. Here's all topics, all programs and services for Dawes County. But if I type in Crawford, there's so many resources that we can get to from all over. Like we get lists from the state, DHHS. We get information from here. There are, it says 203 services in Crawford. If the Crawford could look at this, Crawford, I apologize, is Crawford, Nebraska. That's not the Crawford Library. OK, yes. The city is, do you know the city, Susan, that Crawford Public Library is? It is Crawford. Oh, OK. This is city name too. OK. I know that there's a couple of libraries that are named after neighboring places or completely different places, so I didn't want to assume. There are some here that say Shadron. So Lincoln, Hebron, Omaha, that's not necessarily the ones. But if they could look through the Crawford, they could also contact us and have us email them a list of just their resources and update it and let us know what's changed. That local community eye is so valuable to a directory like this. We want this as useful as possible at all levels of the state. And the local library like Brains would be very key to that process. I don't live in Crawford, so I can't tell if the clinic just opened down the street or we have a new chiropractor or there's a new support group for lymphoma. So that would be really key if they could let us know. The value of this kind of directory hinges on that. We do get the statewide view. We do have directories that we go through and find the information. But the work that's done on this is to keep it up to date, to keep it relevant. And we now have a much more higher respect for the L pages, folks, because I can't imagine how they keep up with their information. I think Lexington was on also. Yes. So if I go to Lexington and just go through the cities, here's the library. Here's a grief support group. Here's the hospital information. I'm skipping the ones that serve Lexington, but they're not necessarily in Lexington. The National Alliance of Mental Health, mental illness, we have that information because it's a national contact. So we make sure that that is linked across all counties, all cities. Plum Creek Care Center, maybe they've got a new service that's been added that we need to make sure we reflect here. Maybe they've got a children's daycare there now. Just let us know if there's something that changes in your community that we can update this to make it more relevant for your community citizens. And yes, we do know everybody has a lot of things to do, but this would be so much appreciated. And anything else. It's been an honor to work with this. As I said, it's been an honor to see the librarians firsthand to the libraries, to see the key place that they play in their communities across Nebraska, and to know that this service is available. I tried to start it in Missouri. That's where I came from in 92 when I came for my tour. And Missouri said, no, it costs too much. And I said, well, you know, I'm gonna go where they have the right idea. And it was really great that I came up here in 1999. I think I saved my own life because the information that I got from CHEERS made a big difference in me coming back to work and being successful after my cancer treatment. I've been on both sides of it, and I can recommend it as well as saying, you know, as a patient, this really changed my treatment plan, just the information that was given that I was able to discuss with my doctor. So it's a personal, it's a more personal story now for me than saying, as a librarian, you know, to remind consumers that they do need to use the people that are expert searchers to look up their health information. When we were at a recent healthcare fair, somebody came up to me and I was telling about CHEERS. They said, oh, I have a computer at home. And I said, well, I respect that, but I have hammer nails and a saw at home, but I don't necessarily build a chair. I go to the people that are experts in this and to let them know that this was paid for by state money, you've already paid for this, just add it to it. I'm not saying don't search your own information. Folks are gonna do that anyway, but toss in an expert search once in a while and see where that can help out. We have some great testimonials on the promotional items that we send to you about people having their lives changed with the information that was given to them. And if you hear from any of your patrons, please share with us how it's made them, made their healthcare path better. And if you have any testimonies about what this is like to be able to serve your patrons with this type of service, please let us know. We are planning the 25th anniversary next year and we'd like to involve every one of the community librarians in the celebration. So if you have any personal stories, let us know. Well, Terri, I really appreciate you being a guest on Encompass Live. I know this is probably the best information that I've gotten on Shers. I knew about it, but I don't think I've heard a presentation on it. So I appreciate it and I will definitely think about giving it a try myself sometime. Does anybody else have any questions for Terri? Nope, but you are getting applause, Terri. Thank you all. Thank you very much. And I'm sorry we didn't have a large audience, but hopefully since we'll have a recording, other people will log in when it's convenient for them and they'll still get the benefits of the time you've spent with us. So it looks like, do you have a question, Kathy? Nope, okay. And I gave everybody out there a plus for your services that you do for Nebraskans. Thank you for all of your hard work. Well, thank you very much, Terri. If nobody has any questions and you don't have anything you wanna add, Terri, I guess we can sort of officially wrap it up and hopefully people will get in touch with you as they do have questions. Excellent, and yes, we're available. Let us know if you have any questions and let us know if you have good stories. Take care, y'all. Wonderful, thank you very much. Bye-bye.