At the 2014 Southern Chapter of the Medical Library Association Meeting, Lindsay Blake, Kathy Davies, Julie K. Gaines, Kim Mears, Peter Shipman, Darra Balance and Maryska Connolly-Brown were awarded third place for best research paper! Papers presentations that qualify as research are scored on a 100 point scale for study design, validity, reliability, presentation, and implications of the research.
Abstract
Objective: The health sciences library of a comprehensive research university implemented embedded librarianship two years ago by placing librarians in the adult and children’s hospitals, in four colleges and on a partnership campus. The embedded librarians have spent the past year reviewing practices and working to create an evaluation tool to assess effectiveness.
Methods: Embedded librarianship has been implemented in the Colleges of Allied Health Sciences, Dental Medicine, Nursing and Medicine as well as the Health System, and a satellite campus. Each librarian’s embedded model is different and based on the approach of the individual librarian and the needs of the areas served. Embedded librarians created a survey to measure the extent of embedded practices in other health science and hospital libraries. Librarians wanted to create a tool which would help evaluate our program with vastly different models from one are to the next and which could also help other institutions do the same.
Results: A preliminary survey was distributed to health science librarians in early 2014 after IRB approval was obtained. Survey information was used to gauge interest in the need for a tool to evaluate embedded practices and form the basis of what evaluation has already been done in other programs. The survey showed a great deal of interest in embedding librarians and the need for a comprehensive way to evaluate program effectiveness. Librarians then worked to build an embedded program evaluation toolkit based on academic health science institutions.
Conclusion: The toolkit consists of various parts with can be used in combinations that fit the embedded program being evaluated. The evaluation toolkit was created to fit with academic health science institutions and will be piloted in the fall of 2014. Later expansion of the toolkit may include hospital specific measures, which will require partnership with hospital librarians.
