NHS Library Quality Assurance Framework
(LQAF) England
GUIDANCE ON USING THE FORM / a)b)
c) / Use one form for each innovation you wish to report.
Use the Tab key to move through the form.
Press the Enter key in a grey text box to add another line.
Refer to LQAFAppendix 1 Recognising and Rewarding Innovation in NHS Health Library/Knowledge Servicesfor further information.
NHS LIBRARY/KNOWLEDGE SERVICE
LQAF INNOVATION REPORT
1. Details of the Library/Knowledge Service
Name of Service: / University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Libraries
Address of Service: / Education Centre Library, Leicester General Hospital Gwendolen Rd. LE5 4PW
Strategic Health Authority / Click to select from drop-down list:
NHS East Midlands NHS London NHS North East NHS North West NHS South Central NHS South East Coast NHS South West NHS West Midlands NHS Yorkshire and the Humber NHS East of England
- Category of Innovation
GUIDANCE:
The 4 categories of innovation used in the LQAF that you can report against are:
Product Innovation - product innovation concerns a product or service that is new or significantly improved. This includes significant improvements in content, mode of delivery, user friendliness or other functional characteristics.
Process innovation - process innovation concerns a new or significantly improved way of producing or delivering a service or product. This could include significant changes in techniques, equipment and/or software.
Marketing Innovation - marketing innovation is about new marketing methods involving new or significantly improved ways of marketing or promoting a library service or product.
Organisational Innovation - this involves introducing a new or improved way of organizing or managing the library service, including working in partnership with other services, to increase overall performance and productivity.
Click to select category from drop-down list / This report concerns:
Product innovation Process innovation Marketing innovation Organisational innovation
- Rationale for the Innovation
This is where you should describe the innovation in detail, explain why you consider it is innovative and provide evidence to support your assertion.
a. Describe the innovation. / We have been using the OCLC link resolver for the past two years to provide details of journals that the library provides as have all NHS libraries.
We have conducted a project to improve this resource dramatically, this project was called the link everything project. This project was aimed at providing a link to all articles that are indexed in the major healthcare databases (Medline, Embase and Cinahl). This link was to be directed at the library article request page to make the process of requesting articles easier.
This means that almost every articlein the healthcare databases is now signposted as available from the library service when previously it would have had no link or any other information other than an abstract.
This also means our A-Z list of journals better reflects all the journals that the library service has access to and can supply.
b. Explain what makes this different and therefore innovative. / This is a new way of looking at the holdings as the link resolver was meant to be used for physical and electronic holdings for the library service. This project has expanded this to include journals that are not physically held by the library but by other libraries such as the British Library.
This now allows all the users of the databases to find and request articles more easily as we provide a direct link from the article to the article request webpage with clear instruction on how to request the article. Without these links it requires the user to know the library can obtain the article for them and the method of requesting.
This project allows us to better reflect the articles that are available from the library service and has made the process of requesting much easier.
c. What evidence do you have to support this assertion? / The article request links are now visible on all journal articles in three of the major healthcare databases and the vast majority of the articles in the other databases.As the majority of the titles in these databases are already covered in one of the other databases. We will be expanding this in the new year to include the unique titles in these other databases as well. This already includes over 20700 unique titles which now have links with available years that are now more easily available from the library. We have also seen an dramatic increase in article requests in the past month since we launched this project.
The full listing of titles is available from our link resolver
LQAF Innovation Report Template 1