Building the Library of the Future- Part 2

Welcome to the second installment of the series, " Building the Library of the Future",  from Library Director Gretchen Arnold. This series provides information about the Library's work, with each installment focusing on a different aspect of that work. Last week's installment offered an introduction to the series; this week's installment focuses on the Library's work with education. Future installments will focus on research, patient care, and also discuss the Library's collaborations and partnerships, space improvements, and metrics.
 

Education

Support of the educational mission of the Health System is core to the Library's work.  The Library has dedicated personnel to support the teaching of medical, nursing and graduate students in the biosciences.  Our work includes classroom and individual teaching and consultations with students.  Every student in the School of Medicine and the School of Nursing has multiple interactions with their library liaison throughout their entire education.  In addition, we work with other groups such as graduate medical education and other individuals in training in the Health System. In fiscal year 2016/17over 2,300 learners were reached through our teaching efforts.

We offer a wide range of workshops through our open enrollment program and we also offer many workshops through the School of Medicine Faculty Development Program.  Some of the more innovative topics include Altmetrics, Digital Identity, Introduction to Virtual Reality and iMovie Basics.  We customize our sessions to specific groups and we will focus in on specific target needs as well.  Over 850 participants came to our workshops in the last fiscal year.

Today healthcare is a data driven industry but not everyone has the background and expertise in data science.  Recently, NIH Director Francis Collins, MD PhD, announced his support for the National Library of Medicine to be “the epicenter for biomedical data science, not just at NIH but across the biomedical enterprise”.  The Health Sciences Library is devoting resources to this new frontier as well by collaborating with colleagues in the University Libraries, Public Health Sciences and other research and data experts to offer a range of data workshops covering topics such as data manipulation, visualization, data cleaning, Python, R, SAS, and basic data research design.  These workshops and subsequent consultations will continue to expand and grow.