Academic Libraries (Paper Session)

I had a great time listening to the "Academic Libraries" paper session this afternoon! I hope to implement some of what I learned at my library.

To start, Kathy Davies and Lindsay Blake of Georgia Regents University spoke about the role they played in creating a database of health sciences instruments (DREAM) and in locating instruments that measure medical student milestones for the Transformation in Medical Education initiative (TIME). It was really interesting to learn about the work that goes into a project like this one, particularly the amount of searching and taxonomy development it involved!

Next, the librarians at Georgia Regents University described their embedded librarianship program - a hot topic among us academic health sciences librarians these days. I really liked how they stressed that each liaison librarian tailored his or her approach in order to better meet needs of the department - no two embedded librarian models are exactly the same.

Rick Fought illustrated how a collection development policy can be used to as a tool to demonstrate a library's value. His library, the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Library, surveyed their faculty and, as a result, built up their collection of books and e-books. It had never occurred to me to market a collection development policy to health sciences faculty, but after the presentation I think it'd something I ought to look into to.

Gregg Stevens, the Health Sciences Librarian at the Ghazvini Center for Healthcare Education at Tallahassee Community College, wrapped up the session with a fun presentation on the use of iPads in allied health information literacy education. I really liked how Gregg partnered with the EMS and Pharmacy Tech faculty at his college to come up with classroom activities that utilized NN/LM mobile resources and, consequently, the iPads. More importantly, these assignments were based on real-life situations the students might someday encounter on the job, so that the students leave with knowledge of how to use reliable mobile technology resources on the job.

If you would like to learn more about these and other papers presented at the 2013 SC/MLA Annual Meeting, please check out the complete paper abstracts available on the official meeting website.