Revolutions Under Way: Capture the Moment

Monday, May 21

Section Program 10:30-12:00

Susan Lessick from University of California-Irvine welcomes the audience to the NPC-sponsored-session, Revolutions Under Way: Capture the Moment. The session will highlight how five speaker groups extended the reach and visibility of their libraries by redefining their services and bringing the library to their users.

The first presentation is In Librarians We Trust: Building a Partnership with Practitioners for the Benefit of Patients. Angela Dixon, Mary Beth Klofas, Marilyn Rosen, and Julia Sollenberger are librarians at the Edward G. Miner Library, University of Rochester. Marilyn Rosen introduces the topic by reading a comment from the parent of a patient who never knew that the hospital had a library, let alone a library that could offer information to patients and their families. Mary Beth Klofas starts the presentation with the statistic that only ¼ of health information seekers consistently check Internet sources and currency (Pew Report, October 2006). Miner Librarians created a task force with a physician, a nurse, a social worker, and an administrator to implement an information prescription. Librarians also created standardized information packets on physician-identified topics. Resources used to create the topics: CLIC on Health, Genetics Home Reference, Medline Plus, Miner Library Patient Education Collection, and NORD. The successful pilot program lasted from June-December 2006 and averaged five requests per month during this time period.

Denise Hersey of Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University was next with her presentation Bringing the Mountain to Mohammed: Having a Librarian in the Operating Room Area. Hersey’s project began when an anesthesiologist in a focus group mentioned off-handedly that he wished their was a librarian in the OR area. So, Hersey jumped at the chance and set up regular “office” hours in the anesthesia workroom in the operating suite. She uses the computer and internet access in the work room and averaged 51 questions (mostly one-on-one) in 2.5 months. Most of the questions involved literature searching, RefWorks & EndNote, and PDA resources.

Hersey’s partnership with the anesthesia department has given her multiple opportunities. She built an information portal for the department and introduced them to Blackboard for their journal club; 19 courses are up and running. Hersey is now one of the gang and has even been asked to write an article for Current Opinion in Anesthesiology about the partnership.

Patrick McCarthy, the director of the Medical School Library at Saint Louis University, is the presenter for the next program, mostly developed by Donghua Tao entitled A New Liaison Outreach Program: Mobile Reference Services to the School of Public Health. The School of Public Health is located at a greater distance from the library than most departments on campus, and a mobile reference service program was implemented to better serve the faculty and students, focusing on literature search and reference instruction, identifying resources with full-text and customized information support. Overall reference transactions went up 28% as a result of this program; School of Public Health reference transactions went up 110%.

Cristina Pope, the director of the library at SUNY Upstate Medical University was next with her presentation entitled Books to Bedside, a unique cooperation between the medical library at SUNY and the Onondaga County Public Library System. As health science libraries generally have little to no general reading material, this cooperation brings general reading material to patients, their families, and clinicians. All public library books can be picked up or dropped off at the medical center library. This partnership has faced unique challenges, including a relatively small book cart that is too big to fit into patient rooms. A new Golisano Children’s Hospital is being built (2009) and will have a family resource center that will coordinate general reading and entertainment for children and their families in the hospital.

The final program for the session is Weill Cornell Medical College Librarian’s Millenials Find Treasure in the Library! helen-ann brown introduced the program and Patricia Mongelia detailed 2006’s medical school orientation. Using the seven core traits of the Millenial generation (special, sheltered, confident, achieving, team oriented, conventional, pressured) the librarians designed a treasure hunt complete with rhyming clues and a treasure map to highlight locations and services in the library. Students divided into teams to complete the hunt; each member of the winning team received a flash drive. The winning team finished in 17 minutes.

Posted for Andrea Griffith