Education and Clinical Librarian Lamar Soutter Library, UMass Chan Medical School Worcester, Massachusetts
Background: The Justice Community Opioid Initiative Network (JCOIN) Learning Experiences to Advance Practice (LEAP) program is a NIDA-funded education and mentorship program aimed at providing training and skill development for new researchers interested in conducting ethical, rigorous, and collaborative research at the intersection of health and criminal justice. The addition of the LEAP Personal Librarian was intended to provide program participants, most of whom are not clinicians, with research support from a trained medical librarian as much of their research is within the health arena and many of them have limited experience using medical databases and resources.
Description: Program participants - including a jail superintendent, sociologists, attorneys, social workers, etc. - are working to build an evidence base for opioid-related problems that are interdisciplinary in nature, but for which health is an overarching theme.The first cohort was surveyed to assess which research needs the program should prioritize, offering insight as to where the library should focus its goals. With that feedback in mind, we selected four prongs for library support: instruction, resource development, reference services, and collection access. Over the past 1.5 years the librarian has: provided PubMed training sessions to program Scholars via Zoom; developed short learning modules for the program’s learning management system, including topics such as data visualization, developing an NIH Biosketch, and designing scientific posters; supported two scoping reviews; offered in-depth reference services; and provided access to library collections and interlibrary loan services.
Conclusion: Participants have been eager to engage with the librarian, with 101 individual reference interactions having been logged since the addition of the personal librarian role. Feedback thus far has been positive, and indicates the existence of a wider market for medical librarians’ specialized skills. Currently, participants are surveyed at the conclusion of the program; however, that survey does not include questions related to the librarian support component of the program. As such, our next step is a formal evaluation of the service and we expect to measure outcomes related to each of the four prongs of support, including: utility of the short learning modules and instruction sessions, satisfaction with reference services, and ease of access to the library collection.