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Introduction This study investigates the extent to which Ontario hospital librarians and library resources support researchers and describe the librarians' participation in research capacity building within their institutions. Methods A 16-question SurveyMonkey™ web-based survey questionnaire was disseminated via email to 53 potential participants consisted of library directors, managers and solo librarians. Results The response rate was 60%. The number of researchers supported by librarians ranged from 10 or less to 76 or more researchers in the past 10 months. Librarians supported a variety of scholarly research outputs, assisting researchers with journal articles being the most frequently supported activity. The top three library resources used to support researchers were licensed electronic journals, print collections and expert librarian searches. One of the reported ways librarians received training to better assist researchers was via online continuing education. Discussion As others have reported, there was a predominance of support for literature studies including literature reviews and systematic reviews. Surprisingly, some librarians reported that they had all the databases or resources they needed to support research, while an alarming 79 per cent of respondents reported not having access to all the databases and resources they needed. Lack of access to databases or online resources may have a negative effect on the quality of research the librarians provided. Raising the awareness of the role of the librarian in supporting researchers in the hospital setting can inform the health sciences librarians' professional practices and provide evidence of the library's participation in the research capacity building of the organization.

The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of an evaluation instrument using the retrospective pretest design to measure changes in participants' behaviour after library training. This article focuses on the measurement component of training evaluation the process of answering the question of how much change has occurred. Participants, who were from a large, public academic geriatric care centre in Toronto, included administrators, researchers, clinical and other staff, and university students doing field placements at the hospital. Participants attended one of four 1-hour sessions on the topic of Effectively Searching Google and Google Scholar that were held over a 3-month period. Sixty days post training, a self-administered retrospective pretest questionnaire, consisting of 10 searching behaviour statements developed using the learning objectives for the training session, was used to measure the impact of library training on participants' behaviour. Participants were asked to indicate their level of frequency of performing a searching behaviour described in the statement before and after training using a five-point, Likert-type scale ranging from 1, almost never; 2, seldom; 3, about half the time; 4, often; to 5, almost always. Summary baseline statistics are reported for respondents who never or rarely exhibited the behaviour prior to training. For the change measure, we report the simple percentage of respondents who improved. The findings of this study showed the potential of using the retrospective pretest to help librarians document the outcomes of library training. The benefits of gathering data using the retrospective pretest are discussed.

The purpose of this survey was to explore the attitudes of hospital library managers toward the use of library volunteers. During April 2003 a questionnaire was mailed to 89 Ontario hospital library managers. One of the methods used to assess attitudes toward volunteers was to ask respondents to list two main benefits and pitfalls of using volunteers. Benefits of volunteer use identified by respondents included assisting with routine clerical tasks, saving staff time, providing an added value or service, assisting with a heavy workload, contributing to a positive public perception and promoting library service, keeping costs down, optimizing staff time, and doing special projects. Some of the pitfalls of volunteer use identified by respondents included unreliable volunteer attendance and commitment, and excessive training and retraining. The identification of volunteer benefits and pitfalls will help hospital library managers optimize the use of volunteers and implement changes in the way they manage volunteers.