The Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876 by a
Quaker merchant in Baltimore, has a long history as a leader in teaching and
research. The Schools of Medicine and Public Health are internationally
famous for making enormous contributions to medicine and healthcare. At the
Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (JHMI), the emphasis is on teaching,
research and patient care. Hopkins is a world-renowned leader in each of
these areas. In recent years, Johns Hopkins has won more federal research
and development funding than any other university. The School of Medicine is
the largest recipient of National Institute of Health research grants to
medical schools. The schools of Medicine, Public Health and Nursing share a
campus with another premiere institution, the Johns Hopkins Hospital. In
addition to the several schools in the Baltimore area, Hopkins has academic
facilities in China, Singapore and Italy. The JHMI provides a wonderful
atmosphere for both education and collaboration with the best and the
brightest of physicians and scientists. Other university divisions include
eminent scholars and highly-ranked departments. The university is divided
geographically into the East Baltimore campus (including the Schools of
Medicine, Nursing and Public Health plus the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the
Kennedy Krieger Institute) and the Homewood campus (with most of the
remaining divisions) located about three miles away. The Applied Physics
Laboratory, a research and development center, is located in Scaggsville,
MD, about 25 miles away.
William H. Welch Medical Library
The library provides the JHMI and their affiliates with
information services that advance research, teaching and patient care. A
robust liaison program serves the JHMI community through the development and
promotion of close working relationships between Welch librarians and their
assigned academic/clinical units. Through collaboration and needs
assessments, liaison librarians are able to initiate unique information
products and services. In recent years, liaisons engaged in a
successful project with the Bloomberg School of Public Health building a
Population Digital Library for the Hopkins Population Center (HPC) faculty
associates. The project transformed the HPC’s information core, once
consisting of a print collection and traditional library services, to a new
service model based on a digital collection supported by librarians with
subject expertise. An information suite was opened offering space for
collaboration and training for the faculty associates. A touchscreen
advertises seminars and other services, and designated librarians drop in
for eight hours a week of information and reference activity. In addition,
service is offered via phone, email, document delivery, and scheduled
in-person appointments.
The library’s educational program is designed around
tools and technologies for biomedical communication. Classes are offered on
basic computing applications, computer networking, resources for PDAs,
presentation skills, searching online databases, scientific writing, and
writing a successful grant application. Library staff offer instruction and
consulting services tailored to meet individual or departmental needs.
The Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives is the official
archival repository for the JHMI. Founded in 1978, the archives’ holdings
include personal papers, documents, and artifacts ranging from the mid-19th
century to the present.
Division of Health Sciences Informatics (DHSI)
DHSI is an interdisciplinary, academic division in the
School of Medicine that brings together a wide range of resources and
expertise in health sciences information management, communication and
technology. The division seeks to advance the development and use of
information technology for decision-making, research, health care delivery,
and individual academic growth, and to increase the awareness of these
resources throughout the JHMI. Current research areas in the division
include medical informatics, genome informatics, information management,
consumer health informatics, computer-based documentation systems for
point-of-care, informatics and evidence-based medicine, biomedical editing
and communication, and electronic publishing. The current director of the
division is Nancy K. Roderer, who arrived at Hopkins in 2000. The division
is separate from but closely coordinated with the Welch Library which is
also directed by Ms. Roderer.
The Welch Library and the DHSI are thoroughly
integrated into the organizational and committee structure within the East
Baltimore and Homewood campuses. A robust liaison service works closely with
various departments at the JHMI, designing virtual libraries in their
specialties, teaching to support their programs, and engaging in some
research projects. The Welch Library also works closely with other Johns
Hopkins libraries to facilitate access to needed materials by all Hopkins
faculty, students, and staff. The libraries have a shared catalog. Staff
from all libraries work together on a number of shared initiatives.
·
We serve all faculty, staff and students affiliated with the
JHMI institutions.
·
We work with the many other information units at JHMI,
including the Johns Hopkins Medicine Center for Information Services, the
Office of Academic Computing, Chesney Medical Archives, Basic Science
Computing, Public Information and Information Technology@Johns Hopkins (IT@JH),
as well as information units throughout Johns Hopkins.
·
We collaborate with a wide array of departments on library and
information activities, including participation in various grant projects.
Library administration and staff work regularly with
our own library committees to ensure that Welch provides what is needed at
the JHMI efficiently and cost-effectively.
The Welch Medical Library would host a librarian to
work on a project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s
Interdepartmental Program in Applied Public Health with Program Chair, Dr.
Lynn R. Goldman. Dr. Goldman’s program, as described in the introduction,
centers on lasting partnerships with the public health practice community.
Additionally, the IPAPH works directly with public health leaders to engage
in discussions on the best practices for improving public health
partnerships between academia and the practice community.
In 2005-2006, the Johns Hopkins Division of Health
Science Informatics and Welch Medical Library conducted an exploration of
the information needs and use of front-line public health workers in two
county health departments in the State of Maryland: Anne Arundel and
Wicomico. The goal of this study was to better understand the
information needs of public health practitioners and the library resources
and services needed to meet those needs. Specifically, for a period of one
year we offered information training based on the National Library of
Medicine’s Public Health Training Manual, access to the electronic resources
of a major academic health science library through an individually tailored
web portal, MyWelch, and consulting services of a professional librarian
with public health expertise to Wicomico and Anne Arundel Health Departments
in the State of Maryland. Data on information needs and use derived from web
logs, shadowing and self-report of the public health practitioners.
The project data show that usage of licensed
information resources and services is infrequent but broad-ranging, with a
few users registering at the high end of the usage range, and, that some
resources are being more used than others. Our self-reported and shadowing
data also suggest that even one use of one article or journal can have a
significant impact on policy decisions and that frequency data does not
necessarily capture all value in use of the literature. And, our shadowing
data suggest that time and competing responsibilities often constrain or
intervene in the use of resources for evidence based decision-making. These
findings suggest, moreover, that an informationist or power user model may
be more appropriate than attempting to train all practitioners to integrate
searching into their workflow.
The Welch team presented its project findings at the
most recent meeting of the American Public Health Association along with
others reporting on the importance of information services to public health
practice. Dr. Lynn Goldman attended the session and approached the team
expressing strong interest in extending training and information services
offered to a wider range of public health practice through her Program and
its affiliates.
Building on this interest, we propose here a Sewell
Fellowship project to extend training and expert reference services to the
broader public health practice community served by BSPH IPAPH and in
the process capture the questions typically posed by that community to build
a knowledge base linking questions with the resources best suited to answer
them. The project would be guided by Welch Library mentor, Kate Oliver, and
the Program’s Chair, Dr. Lynn R. Goldman. Project-based training and
services would be designed to address findings of our 2005-6 study; that is,
to ameliorate time constraint issues and effectively address information
access issues experienced by public health practitioners through training
and expert information services.
The knowledge base would help inform the selection of
evidence-based resources and better tailor them to meet these identified
information needs. The project would address the organization of the
knowledge areas. Our study suggests that a knowledge organization designed
around domain areas or types of inquiry consistent with public health
practice, its presenting issues and problems, and the disciplines that
contribute expertise to their resolution might be effective. In other words
the knowledge base would reflect the context of public health practitioner
questions.
The knowledge base could have a number of uses. One
might develop training organized around the framework of problems posed and
presented in the knowledgebase. Another application could be the development
of an information portal for public health practice; it could be developed
and organized around the knowledge base of questions, their context and the
best resources for addressing them.
Questions for the knowledge base could be gathered in a number of ways.
They could be solicited in the course of training. The sessions could be
structured to elicit typical questions encountered by participants in their
work, and then applied to the resources under discussion in the training
module.
A second approach to gathering questions could to use the planned
shadowing sessions. Our project in 2005-6 demonstrated the value of
shadowing for training, reference services and data elucidation. Shadowing
of project participants would offer opportunities to observe, respond to and
record questions to add to the knowledge base – capturing not only the
question but the context for that question.
