The mission of the Health Sciences Libraries (HSL) is to connect faculty, staff and students to knowledge in the health sciences, supporting teaching, research and patient care. The HSL staff strives to integrate this knowledge at the point of use for clinicians, researchers, administrators, instructors and students within a distributed multi-state educational environment.
To achieve this vision, HSL partners with health sciences departments and programs and external organizations, delivering services from three facilities: the Health Sciences Library and Social Work Library on the main campus, and the K.K. Sherwood Library at Harborview Medical Center. HSL supports six schools: Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Public Health and Community Medicine, and Social Work. A primary user population of over 20,000 students and faculty are located both on campus and at clinical sites through the five-state WWAMI (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Idaho) region. Serving this large geographic area requires we focus our efforts on providing web-based knowledge resources regardless of physical location of the user. The HSL contracts with the National Library of Medicine to be the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Pacific Northwest Region, connecting health professions across the region to information services.
Library services are increasingly focused on information management education in its broadest sense. Each health sciences department or program has an assigned liaison who is responsible for coordinating services to that program area, including development and presentation of targeted instructional sessions, individual information management consultation, collection development, and web page linkages. Each liaison presents library orientations and tours, for FY 2005 - 2006 a total of 276 Education Sessions were held with a grand total of 3,500 attendees.
HSL staff includes 26 FTE professionals and 28 FTE classified staff and student assistants, including 15 FTE funded by grants and contracts for special projects. Knowledge resources include 1,154 current print journal subscriptions, 143,383 book titles, 465 video titles, and 8,653 electronic journals, 655 textbooks, and 230 databases available via the web. All online content is made available through the HealthLinks website (http://healthlinks.washington.edu). While rich in historical depth, the HSL focuses on digital provision of information and is particularly strong in clinical reference (i.e., drug information, evidence-based sources). Linkage to the online article is standard in core databases such as MEDLINE. The HealthLinks database includes links to an additional array of filtered no cost, high quality resources. Documents not available online may be requested for fast delivery. The HSL is a national leader in the delivery of documents via the web. A full list of resources in the health sciences as well as the extensive collection of the entire University Libraries in relevant areas such as computing, engineering, public policy, technology and business is available. In addition, strengths in social, psychology, ethics, law and other disciplines are backed by the statewide network of state university libraries.
Curriculum support services include a full-service computing lab composed of 65 PCs in 3 classrooms, a library teaching lab, and 70 drop-in stations for independent student learning. In addition, the Learning Commons has a Reserves section (offering a mediated e-reserves system for instructors), VCRs and other AV equipment, anatomical models, study rooms and Ethernet laptop ports. In addition, approximately 70 public PC stations are located in the three HSL sites for research, study, and email access.
Librarians lead or participate in several information and education system research and developed projects, including: deep linkages to content in knowledge resources from within the electronic medical record; a primary care system focused on best available evidence called PrimeAnswers; a cultural medicine textbook called EthnoMed; a genetic textbook called GeneReviews; specialized toolkits for molecular biologists and grant seekers; and extraction and visual mapping of research findings from reports of scientific research, the Telemakus project.
Statistical Summary: http://healthlinks.washington.edu/hsl/about/stats0506.html
Last updated: Tuesday, 12-Feb-2008 23:55:02 PST
http://healthlinks.washington.edu/hsl/about/narrative.html