A note from Library Director Gretchen Arnold, about a new series: "Building the Library of the Future". Look for a new installment in this series weekly, as Gretchen describes the Library's work in the areas of education, research, patient care, and also discusses its collaborations and partnerships, space improvements, and metrics. Please enjoy this introduction to the series.
I would like to take this opportunity to share with you some of the work done by our staff to create a modern and forward-facing library for the UVA Health System. We still maintain most of the traditional services of a library which are important core services, but we are also focusing our energies and expertise on building a new type of library that can harness emerging technologies in health care information. Libraries have always been about knowledge, and today knowledge creation, preservation, and distribution comes in many formats, including data. The Health Sciences Library is following the lead of the National Library of Medicine. Recently, the director of the National Library of Medicine, Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN PhD, said that NLM “is not your mother’s library” and the same could be said for the Health Sciences Library.
The Library recognizes that its three greatest assets are its people, its resources and collections, and its space. All are critically important to our user population. It is our responsibility to ensure that all of these assets are leveraged to bring the greatest value to the missions of the UVA Health System. What will follow in the coming weeks is not an exhaustive list of what the Library does, but a selected discussion of some of the new ways of thinking about what a library can do to help our students, clinicians, and researchers utilize the best health information. This has been, and will continue to be, a journey and we can only make educated guesses about new technologies and ways of thinking. We hope that you will join us and, more importantly, help us create a new future for our Library.
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.