AAHSL Spotlight on the University of Washington Health Sciences Libraries

The University of Washington Health Sciences Libraries (HSL) is dedicated to improving health by connecting people to knowledge to advance education, research and healthcare. HSL professionals provide information at the point of need to our many patrons, including clinicians, researchers, administrators, instructors and students. We serve over 20,000 students and faculty on campus and at various clinical sites. HSL is uniquely positioned as an information center covering a five-state region, WWAMI (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho). HSL partners with other schools, departments, programs, clinics, and medical centers to deliver services at three sites: UW Health Sciences Center (HSLIC), Harborview Medical Center (K.K. Sherwood Library) and the main campus (Social Work Library). HSL has also been home to the Pacific Northwest Region, National Network of Libraries of Medicine since 1968.

HSL is committed to educating and informing a wider population about health issues through research and development of a variety of innovative programs, including several popular websites: HealthLinks is our heavily accessed web portal that organizes resources and tools for our diverse user population; MyHealth, a patient toolkit that connects consumers with high quality resources on the top-ten health topics; Ethnomed, is a resource that provides information about cultural beliefs, medical issues and other related issues pertinent to the health care of recent immigrants; and the Public Health Digital Library, a web portal developed in conjunction with the Public Health-Seattle & King County. In addition, a current research project in collaboration with the UW Center for Public Health Informatics is exploring the application of a content management system to support public health practitioners. A prototype is available at myph.org. Long-term research and development of public access knowledgebases in the biology of aging has resulted in two comprehensive knowledgebases: Caloric Restriction in Aging and Biomarkers in Alzheimer Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment. Both are freely available at: http://www.telemakus.net.

To promote HSL services, we recently implemented the Ask Us campaign, a marketing plan to put the Libraries front and center by making user-contact easier than ever. Users can now reach us through multiple channels: Chat/IM, email, phone, or face-to-face contact. We are working with other parts of the UW campus to ensure seamless information access and delivery for bioscience researchers, instructors and learners, wherever they are and whatever program they are affiliated with. We are engaged in looking forward to what impacts e-science will have on biomedical researchers and how we can contribute toward managing knowledge and data resources. HSL is always seeking new ways to better support our changing user community.