Academic Library Outreach Research Articles

In Review: Academic library outreach: Beyond the campus walls

In Review: Academic library outreach: Beyond the campus walls

Review of Academic Library Outreach: Beyond the Campus Walls

Review of Academic Library Outreach: Beyond the Campus Walls

Taking the Pulse of Health Information Seeking

When planning the purchase, management, delivery, and evaluation of electronic resources in a health sciences setting, it is useful to consider the broader landscape of how users seek and understand health information. To that end, the author examined reports that provide useful insights related to information-seeking behavior and health literacy. This column summarizes salient points of some Pew Research Center and Institute of Medicine publications and makes suggestions for incorporating some of these ideas into academic health center and hospital library operations and outreach efforts.

Urban Academic Library Outreach to Secondary School Students and Teachers

The Mervyn H. Sterne Library at the University of Alabama at Birmingham is located in an urban area and therefore receives traffic from the community, particularly area schools. We encourage visits from these schools in order to promote information literacy, higher education, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and we recognize the importance of the library in the development of responsible citizenship, education, and culture. Since we encourage students to develop research skills before they attend college, we collaborate with area secondary schools on projects, papers, and activities by providing research instruction and support both at the schools and in the library. This article explains the need for University collaboration, how Sterne Library integrates itself into the schools through classroom instruction and teacher workshops, and how we organize and conduct the instruction while promoting the Alabama Virtual Library, a group of online databases available to all students, teachers, and citizens of the State of Alabama.

Academic Library Outreach Through Faculty Partnerships and Web-Based Research Aids

Summary Electronic library services and myriad online resources are shifting the roles and workloads of academic reference librarians. Reallocation of staffing through a differentiated reference desk service model provides time to author curriculum-centered online research guides and tutorials, bibliographies, and webliographies. The expanding electronic information environment also opens new opportunities for teaching partnerships with university faculty. This article showcases a librarian's collaborative work with a history professor, noting student benefits/reactions and implications for future collaboration.