FEATURE
Librarian Training Rhine started doing training workshops
Passing on the knowledge
Lenny Rhine teaches researchers in developing countries how to use the wealth of free resources made available through the Research4Life programmes. Siân Harris found out about some of his latest activities
met many librarians, medical professionals and researchers. Rhine’s purpose in these travels is to train people in developing countries to be
L 22 Research Information AUG/SEP 2011
enny Rhine is a well-travelled man. Since taking early retirement from his position as a medical librarian at the University of Florida he has visited countries on most continents and
able to make the best use of the materials available to them through the Research4Life (R4L) programmes – HINARI for health information, AGORA for agriculture and OARE for environmental resources. Through these programmes, publishers make subscription resources available for free or at low cost to researchers in the world’s poorest countries.
in the developing world in 1997, alongside his day job. He was initially training about health information on the internet but this evolved into Research4Life training as the first of these programmes, HINARI, was launched in 2002. His work is funded by a grant from Elsevier via the Medical Libraries Association’s ‘Libraries Without Borders’ programme. Since that time he has also been developing and updating training materials to help Research4Life programme users to navigate unfamiliar publisher websites. This is no small task. There are around 150 publishers involved in the three programmes – providing online access to more than 8,000 peer-reviewed scientific journals, books, and databases. In addition, there is a wealth of open-access journals and other free resources available online. Publishers frequently redesign their web interfaces and constantly add new content. Much of Rhine’s time is spent in monitoring publishers’ sites and updating training material accordingly. The main training material is updated three times a year. Rhine also hears about changes between updates. For example, he described one time that PubMed told him it was planning to change its interface. ‘I got a heads-up on this when I was in a hotel in Mongolia so I did the training course saying “it doesn’t look like this now but it will do next week”.’ The training materials are available in several languages so all updates are translated.
Encouraging use Promotion of what’s available in the programmes is another vital part of what Rhine does. ‘One of my key frustrations is that I don’t think the training materials are used enough. We also found that a lot of material other than journals is underused, for example resources like the Cochrane library,’ he said. ‘Increasingly publishers are opening up e-books to HINARI and there are now many open-access e-books.’ The availability of such resources – and therefore training to make people aware that they are available – is important. ‘When I’m in the field people say that journals are great but that they really need text books and evidence-based materials,’ Rhine explained. He and others have also recently begun
doing training courses in industrialised countries to reach people in those countries from R4L-eligible institutions. The aim is to
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