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.”
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News for
the week of Jan 9 –
