Assessing the Health Information Needs of Unaffiliated Health Professionals and Using Training on Openly Available Search Tools and Resources to Provide Solutions to Their Information Access Challenges and Barriers

Abstract

This article will describe a year-long (2010–11) joint project between Columbia University Medical Center's Health Sciences Library and the Institute for Family Health (IFH), a network of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) serving disadvantaged populations in New York State. This National Institutes of Health-funded pilot project aimed to (a) determine the medical literature and training needs of IFH personnel, (b) develop generic licensing agreements with publishers that would enable a health sciences library to provide access to electronic resources for FQHC personnel, and (c) develop reference/education services for IFH personnel. How the reference and education aims were met will be described and discussed here as the lessons learned from this project may be useful to librarians considering doing instructional outreach to unaffiliated health professionals working at FQHCs nationwide.

KEYWORDS:

• Barriers to access
• Federally Qualified Health Centers
• FQHC
• free resources
• health information needs
• library training
• open access resources
• unaffiliated health professionals

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This manuscript is based on a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association, Seattle, WA, May 22, 2012. Michael Koehn led the part of the pilot project (not reported on in this article) that attempted to develop generic licensing agreements with publishers that would enable a health sciences library to provide access to electronic resources for Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) personnel. Jennifer Rutner, formerly Assessment and Planning Librarian at the Columbia University Libraries, provided assistance with SurveyMonkey.

Notes

Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/wmrs.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Konstantina Matsoukas

Konstantina Matsoukas, MLIS ([email protected]) is former Head of Reference and Education Coordinator, Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library, Columbia University Medical Center, 701 West 168th Street, New York, NY 10032.