Librarians without Borders® HINARI Internet Resources Train the Trainers Workshop Bosnia and Herzegovina: May 14-17, 2018
From May 14-17, 2018, the Hinari/Internet Resources ‘Train the Trainers’ Workshop was conducted at the Hollywood Hotel, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The trainer was Lenny Rhine, Librarians Without Borders/Medical Library Association (USA). The workshop was coordinated by Mirza Muminovic, WHO Kyrgyzstan Country Office with the day to day arrangements managed by Dzan Ahmed, University of Sarajevo Medical School. All the local elements (venue, internet access and downloading of Zotero software, breaks and lunches, etc.) were smoothly handled by Dzan and the hotel staff. (Mirza – thanks for the long-distance planning while you relocated; Dzan – thanks for your dedication to making this a successful workshop.)
Sixteen individuals attended the workshop. Four of the participants were practicing physicians (emergency medicine, neurology, public health, epidemiology) along with two pharmacy professors, two participants from accrediting agencies plus one medical student. Equally important was the group of seven health information professionals that attended the workshop.
In the four-day workshop, the objectives were for the participants to learn the skills for accessing/utilizing HINARI and related Internet resources effectively and efficiently. Equally important was for the participants to master how to promote these resources and train the various groups at their institutions. This is especially critical in a Group B country where each institution is required to pay $1500 annually and some of the participants need to advocate for the payment within their institutions.
The modules covered included searching skills, HINARI portal and Summon search tool (for country specific HINARI journals and e-books searches), HINARI/PubMed (website, filters, history and advanced search), MY NCBI accounts, evidence-based medicine & e-books resources, Zotero reference management software – very well received – plus authorship skills material (How to read and write a scientific paper, Copyright and Plagiarism, Web-bibliography of publishing resources including the AuthorAid and Elsevier Researcher websites).
Besides the Hinari resources, the workshop also included tools for identifying useful health-related information on the Internet (non-governmental and intergovernmental agencies, Openi images database, Google custom searches, a thesis and several open access directories and e-book sources).
With four days for instruction, all the modules’ material was presented in detail and there also was ample time to complete the important hands-on activities. Most of the participants arrived with good to very good information literacy skills and were able to build on this base. Since this was a relatively small group, the trainer was able to learn about the specific information needs of the participants and encourage them to focus on this when completing searches in the various databases and search engines. Also, the group displayed a positive, collegial, interactive style that could be observed by the group’s interaction, questions asked and during several group activities.
At the end of the workshop, the participants completed a post-workshop survey. 94-100% of the participants ‘agreed’ that the workshop was well organized, had relevant material with useful ‘hands-on’ exercises, that the trainer was knowledgeable/organized, the instructor was an effective presenter and responsive to questions and that the workshop resulted in their obtaining useful knowledge and skills. Ditto for the responses to the Overall Grade of the workshop (94% ranked it a 5 of 5). According to the participants, major strengths of the workshop included Demos/Hands on, Information Gained, Support Material and Networking.
Per the ‘length was appropriate for course content’ question, 15 (94%) replied ‘agree’ and one individual (6%) noted ‘somewhat agree’. This is, by far, the highest ranking from over 70 workshops. This grade is due to the sufficient time and pace of the workshop, plus the participants’ pre-workshop skill level and their dedication to and interest in the course’s material.
Overall, all the participants gained skills and knowledge about the Hinari and Internet resources plus the authorship tools that comprised the workshop’s material. For some participants, each module contained new information and tools. For others, there were three of four new concepts each day. One participant with significant teaching responsibilities, noted that what was most helpful to her was learning the sequence that the information literacy skills should be taught.