Abstract
In line with its institution's commitment to keep new student orientation/welcome events “green,” Columbia University's Health Sciences Library (HSL) applied for a National Network of Libraries of Medicine Middle Atlantic Region (NN/LM MAR) Small Projects AwardCitation 1 in Spring/Summer 2009 to explore paperless modes of outreach. This article describes the project that resulted from this funding, whose purpose was to determine whether customized 1 GB USB flash drives are a good vehicle for distributing library promotional materials to incoming medical and dental students. This project gave HSL librarians the opportunity to connect with students in a way that had not been done before and to consider how these new students use/view the information the library produces.
Acknowledgments
This article was based on a poster presented by the authors at the Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association in Washington, D.C., May 25, 2010. This project was funded by the National Library of Medicine under NLM Contract N01-LM-6-3501 with New York University Medical Center.