by Jennifer Kowalewski

Information gathering is now easier for staff and students at OU-COM.

That’s because they no longer have to trudge their way up Richland Avenue to Alden Library to access resources they’ll likely need again and again. Last quarter Alden’s Health Sciences Library opened its doors “locally” to better serve the college.

“We had the idea it would be nice to be located down there,” says Cheryl Ewing, director of the Health Sciences Library at Alden. “We thought it would add significant value to OU-COM to have a small office there.”

“Our mission is to serve the faculty, staff and students of OU-COM,” Ewing says.

On Oct. 1 the Health Sciences Library launched a satellite office in Irvine 190. The satellite library has a full-time staff that assists students, faculty and staff Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Staffing the Irvine “office” — as it’s called — are Susan Foster-Harper, medical reference and instruction librarian, and Debi Orr, health science reference and community outreach librarian. Joining them soon will be Whitney Winberg, biology librarian.

Orr says the office is here to show staff and student how to use the resources — such as medical databases — that the university subscribes to find more precise and accurate information than one could with a more general, albeit outstanding, Internet search engine such as Google.

An Open House was held last November to showcase what the library has to offer. The librarians were on hand to talk to faculty and students about how the library would work. Until winter break, the textbooks and class material covered in all OU-COM classes were available at the branch. Those were moved back to Alden so that they could be accessed after 5 p.m. and over the weekends.

Foster-Harper says they are equipped with wireless laptops to make it easier for them to show OU-COM employees and students what they can offer.

“We can come to your office to help you with literature searches and using databases,” says Orr. “We can help you with RefWorks, a bibliographical software, and PubMed or MEDLINE, for instance.”

So far though, Orr says, staff and students have been coming to them.

She says they also like to introduce people to untried scientific and medical databases they might find useful in their research or class studies. Ewing adds that the staff can demonstrate My National Center of Biotechnology Information (NCBI), which can run weekly or monthly searches, keeping up-to-date with the latest information, to faculty and students.

According to the American Library Association, Harper-Foster says, Ohio has some of the best resources.

“We offer training classes, in several areas, including evidence-based medicine; we also can offer some assistance with grant writing and proposal searches,” says Orr.

“I think most people can use Google,” Ewing says. “But it’s not truly as useful as some believe. You get a limited amount of information.”

The library subscribes to more medical databases than are available through public Internet search engines.

“I don’t think they know the wonders of our medical databases. Our role as librarians is not only to find the best information, but to instruct how to find it on your own,” says Ewing.

“Google may be a good place to start,” says Orr, “but as medical professionals you will likely need more — and that’s what we’re here for, to show you how to get that more.”