Librarians at the University of Florida Health Science Center Libraries have begun to intentionally incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles into teaching during design, implementation, and evaluation. This article uses four case studies to provide an overview of the librarians' approaches to inclusive teaching (1) an annual workshop for Physical Therapy students on the intersection between DEI, health literacy, and patient education; (2) a librarian-taught one-credit course for public health students, which was revised to create a more inviting syllabus and integrate elements of universal design; (3) an annual project for first year medical students highlighting health disparities and community resources; and (4) piloting the application of critical librarianship principles in library standalone sessions on database searching and reference management. Suggestions are provided for other librarians who are interested in developing a culture of inclusive teaching in their own libraries.
Publishing in journals is an important responsibility of academics, researchers and practitioners. It helps us to share information about innovative and effective nursing practice. Evidence-based practice is vital to nursing, and health and social care, but research suggests it is less widespread than it should be. One reason may be that front-line practitioners do not always have the support, time and knowledge to search for and review evidence. To read the full article, choose Open Athens “Institutional Login” and search for “Midlands Partnership”.
"[R]ecently I’ve enjoyed developing our Health and Wellbeing collection, creating some additional resources in the form of wellbeing bags for staff to borrow." This is a short mention in this blogpost - just wondered if it's something we could think about?
LitSense [1] is a unique search system for making sense of the biomedical literature at the sentence level, providing a unified access to over half a billion statements extracted from PubMed and PubMed Central.
Given a query, LitSense finds the best-matching sentences based on overlapping terms as well as semantic similarity via a cutting-edge neural embedding approach.
This paper introduces CORE, a widely used scholarly service, which provides access to the world’s largest collection of open access research publications, acquired from a global network of repositories and journals. CORE was created with the goal of enabling text and data mining of scientific literature and thus supporting scientific discovery, but it is now used in a wide range of use cases within higher education, industry, not-for-profit organisations, as well as by the general public.
Conclusions
Although ChatGPT is reliable and useful for patients to obtain information about rheumatic diseases, it should be kept in mind that it may give false and misleading answers.
To read the full article, choose Open Athens “Institutional Login” and search for “Midlands Partnership”.
Discussion
Libraries should consider buying quick reference and large, heavy textbooks as ebooks and pocket-sized or shorter, single-topic titles, in print format.
This study found that four (flounderer, skimmer, digester and devourer) out of five types emerged as distinct search styles. Insights into engagement helped distinguish online health searcher types in this sample.
Conclusion
The dynamics of the engagement dimension indicate that the online health information search process is multi-dimensional. It is comprised of different levels of cognitive, emotional, and conative responses, further extending the PHE model. Health science librarians and health professionals have a unique opportunity to help individuals better navigate online health search.
The FAC (Focus, Amplify, Compose) rubric for assessing medical students’ question formulation skills normally accompanies our Evidence Based Practice (EBP) training. The combined training and assessment rubric have improved student scores significantly. How much does the rubric itself contribute to improved student scores? This study sought to measure student improvement using the rubric either with or without a linked 25-minute training session. To read the full article, choose Open Athens “Institutional Login” and search for “Midlands Partnership”.
Information professionals have supported medical providers, administrators and decision-makers, and guideline creators in the COVID-19 response. Searching COVID-19 literature presented new challenges, including the volume and heterogeneity of literature and the proliferation of new information sources, and exposed existing issues in metadata and publishing. An expert panel developed best practices, including recommendations, elaborations, and examples, for searching during public health emergencies. To read the full article, choose Open Athens “Institutional Login” and search for “Midlands Partnership”.
The authors reviewed individual applications and conducted trials before selecting three, namely Microsoft Forms, Excel, and Power BI, to work together effectively to input, analyze, and report library statistics. The final data tracking system integrates within Teams for easy sharing within the institution without additional funding.
Conclusion: URL decay in health care management journals has decreased in the last 15 years. Still, URL decay does continue to be a problem. Interestingly, health services policy research journals had a lower rate of decay than practitioner-oriented journals (34.8% vs. 51.7%). Authors, publishers, and librarians should continue to promote the use of digital object identifiers and web archiving and perhaps study and replicate efforts used by health services policy research journals to increase continued URL availability rates.
Case Presentation: Staff at a health sciences library collaborated with faculty to incorporate escape rooms into library instruction in a variety of formats (in-person, hybrid, online) with health professions students from various disciplines (optometry, pharmacy, medicine). The escape rooms described in this paper offered unique experiences for students through active learning.
Discussion: Important considerations when planning escape rooms for health sciences library instruction include deciding on team-based or individual design, calculating potential costs in time and money, deciding on an in-person, hybrid, or online format, and determining whether grades should be assigned. Escape rooms can be an effective strategy for library instruction in the health sciences, working in multiple formats to bring game-based learning to a variety of health professions students.
In 2022, a benchmarking survey was completed to gage learner satisfaction with library services, spaces, and resources across 10 Mayo Clinic Libraries. The discussion for this project began around a previously published survey of what medical students wanted from their library. Librarians were asked if Mayo Clinic Libraries could do a similar survey, as a full survey of the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science had not been done. Overall, the findings were positive and provide a baseline for future surveys.
research collaborations require librarians to make long-term commitments to projects. How can we ensure that these collaborations are successful? Study of research collaborations can assist librarians in determining how to build and maintain research collaborations and avoid or overcome conflicts and barriers. Finding others with similar interests, maintaining communication through multiple channels, and basic project management skills are key to successful research collaborations.
Results: A total of 209 reviews were found and analyzed. Of these, 28% had a librarian co-author, 41% named a librarian in the acknowledgements section, and 78% mentioned the contribution of a librarian within the body of the review. However, mentions of a librarian within the review were often generic (“a librarian”) and in 31% of all reviews analyzed no librarian was specified by name. In 9% of the reviews, there was no reference to a librarian found at all.
Conclusions: Even among this set of reviews, where librarian involvement was specified at the protocol level, librarians’ contributions were often described with minimal, or even no, language in the final published review. Much room for improvement appears to remain in terms of how librarians’ work is documented.
Data from a 2022 survey of library directors, however, indicated that approximately 70% of respondents expressed confidence in the continuance of remote/hybrid work. Additionally, from a very limited sample size, salaries for remote/hybrid positions did not appear to be less than in-person postings. While current employees at many institutions may benefit from flexible scheduling, this study examines whether job postings, which are often the primary information available to applicants, included information about remote and hybrid work options.
Conclusion
SRs are becoming more and more complex to conduct and information specialists and statisticians should routinely be involved right from the start of the SR. This increases the trustworthiness of SRs as the basis for reliable, unbiased and reproducible health policy, and clinical decision making.
Conclusion: Innovations by libraries during the early stages of the pandemic are having a long-term impact on library culture and the delivery of services. Even as libraries returned to in-person services, elements of telecommuting,