Tag Archives: literature review

Automating systematic reviews #anzreg2018

Automating systematic reviews with library systems: Are Primo and Alma APIs a pain reliever?
Peta Hopkins, Bond University

Systematic (literature) reviews especially in medical field – one example retrieved 40,000+ abstracts, screened to 1,356 full-text, and included 207 in the final review.

Were asked for process to reduce time involved down to two weeks. Developing toolset of elements to automate processes. Esp find/download full-text from subscriptions, batch-request from interloans.

Primo APIs to find/download? Not really (because actually it’s the Alma uResolver and even that can’t pull full-text).
Alma APIs to submit interloan requests? This has worked well – 95% success rate.

Old system searched Primo, clicked interloan link, tick copyright boxes, submit
Now upload Endnote file into system, click link to submit requests to Library, tick copyright boxes, submit (in bulk)

Dev wanted better documentation on APIs (eg encoding format); more helpful error messages; and in future want a way to find full-text and download.

Repositories at https://github.com/CREBP

And I thought we did a literature review

When we were preparing the case for our “Library on Location” trial, and again when we were writing up our results for the conference paper, we did a literature review – both journals and blogs. I thought we’d been pretty much as thorough as the variable terminology people assign to the concept allowed.

But I just saw a tweet linking to Theoretical Job Description for the Librarian with a Laptop, which links back to where the blogger first had the idea, which in turn links to someone else with the same idea.

(This last one is a really really great idea for implementing it at an academic library with maximum success.)

It’s not uncommon for me to see the occasional new one, but for some reason this hit me with a “Argh, we librarians really like reinventing the wheel, don’t we?” At one point I was vaguely thinking of doing a survey of libraries who’d done this kind of thing in order to write up a journal article about success factors, but stuff happened. Suddenly I’m all fired up again and just have to work out how to pull myself back from impending overcommitment…

In the meantime, my collection of links about libraries that have done outreach by taking books and/or laptops outside the library to meet users in popular locations is at my “onlocation” tag on Diigo.

Library on Location trials

Via a link from iLibrarian I just discovered another library trying out the roving librarian model.

This reminds me I need to work on our report from our second trial (which went even better than the first trial, and we’ve got some great statistics).

I’m also steadily working on tidying up my list of libraries roving beyond the library walls. If anyone knows any more examples I could add to the list, please let me know!