HLSP Committee

Karla Block, Minnesota Go Local Project Director, provided an overview of the beginning and development of their Go Local project. Minnesota is similar to NYS in that it is large (87 counties) and has a rural area similar to NYS. They received NLM funding and began the project in April 2006. They had an original launch date of December 2006; it was postponed to April 2007; and a final actual launch date of July 2007. They began the project with a Project Manager and 4 hourly staff who had health sciences library backgrounds. In developing the database, they concentrated on NLM established priorities that included hospitals, nursing homes, and public health clinics.

The original plan called on regions to submit data but that model did not work. Instead they had people in the regions discover existing lists and/or create lists which were then sent to the project team to input and approve. The lists were formatted in an Excel spreadsheet that provided for a skeleton record.

In terms of staffing, they found that a dedicated/focused project manager was a necessity. In addition, staff needed to work a minimum of 5 hours a week to retain skills acquired during training. Although the use of volunteers has worked out in other states, this practice did not work out well with the Minnesota project. They had a positive experience with library school students who were doing practicums that required 120 hours of time to a project. 211 agencies in Minnesota were very cooperative. However they found that the 211 data required considerable checking and additional information for Go Local inclusion.

In terms of the developing the database, they followed the established NLM priorities. NLM recommended that they have a minimum of 1,500 records at launch. They had 1,800 records at launch and now have 4,600 records in the database. Karla emphasized that developing the database is a very labor intensive process, that there are a lot of grey areas that need to be addressed, and a lot of decision points.

Some observations:

Promotions. Karla would wait till near launch time to start promoting the project. They started early and had to deal with delayed launch times, a temporary url for their website, and the need to make changes to some promotional material as a result. Karla would use this time to continue to build partnerships and support in the communities.

Sustainability. This is the biggest issue facing Minnesota’s Go Local project. Building and maintaining the database requires a lot of work and effort. There are 3 queues in the NLM database structure: approved records (which the public sees); pending (which needs to be approved); and incomplete (which needs more information). In addition NLM requires an annual audit of all records.

Database recommendations include:

1. making the agency descriptions general rather than very specific and consider that sometimes less is better than more
2. having all style guides, selection criteria ready ahead of time and realizing that there are a lot of decision points when entering agency records
3. centralized data entry with staff assigned to certain categories of agencies
4. having staff work at least 20 hours a week on the database
5. having staff be able to do more than one task so that the work does not become tedious