Papers in Moonlight D: Part I

I spent my time in Moonlight D for both days of papers. Many interesting thoughts, ideas, and anecdotes were shared.

Session I:

Several librarians from Georgia Regents University discussed their endeavor to develop an evaluation tool for measuring the effectiveness of embedded librarianship programs and initiatives. What really struck me was the results of their survey of health sciences librarians; a good majority of librarians consider themselves to be embedded in some form or another but not very many are assessing these efforts. There is a great need for an assessment tool. I look forward to hearing more on this topic in the future.

Lin Wu did a qualitative review of her library's Ask-A-Librarian email service, analyzing and coding each question received through the service in a single year. She shared several graphs depicted the most commonly requests and the least common requests from each major library user groups (faculty, students, clinicians, etc.). Most patrons used the email service to request (specific) articles. I was impressed by the wealth of data she gathered using this method and would like to consider doing something similar with my library's reference statistics.

Cindy Yu and Jessica Whipple from the University of Southern Mississippi present their grant-funded work to identify the information needs of public health professionals in Mississippi. After surveying working professionals within the state and inviting current students to discuss their needs in focus groups, they created a LibGuide of fantastic resources and Dr. Yu developed a public health informatics course.

Clista Clanton from the University of South Alabama Biomedical Library described a collaborative project that has enabled her institution's health professionals students to engage in hands-on interactive learning with one another. This interprofessional education program has evolved into a student-run clinic at a Mobile homeless shelter - a collaborative organization that includes future nurses, PAs, social workers, speech pathologists, and etc. Such cool and rewarding work!