Opportunities for discussion and reflection are essential for transformational learning to occur, enabling understanding of other perspectives. Incorporating student-submitted social media examples heightened student interest and engagement. The social media environment is continually changing, so curricular approaches should remain adaptable to ensure timeliness and relevance. Including online professionalism curricula focused on implications and best practices helps medical students develop an awareness of their electronic professional identities.

Librarians provide instruction to medical students as part of a core course in the medical school curriculum. Instruction was provided, in part, through didactic sessions covering professional-level medical information resources, PubMed search skills, psychosocial information, and evidence-based medicine. Librarians redesigned instructional sessions with the goals of increasing student engagement and minimizing the lecture format, maximizing the number of students receiving feedback on their search and evaluation skills, and permitting students to see a variety of possible responses as well as engage in peer- and self-evaluation. Librarians integrated the use of a blog and an audience response system (ARS) into the instruction to help accomplish these goals.

Since fall 2009, reference librarians at The George Washington University's Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library have been embedded in online classes through Blackboard within the School of Nursing and School of Medicine and Health Sciences. The authors sought to determine the types of questions asked of the librarian, with the goal of informing future interactions with distance education classes to help develop a standard "protocol" for working with this population of students. Eighty-two questions were categorized and qualitatively analyzed. The findings have prompted librarians to explore tools such as Elluminate Live!, a tool that allows librarians to provide synchronous instruction within the Blackboard environment.

This article addresses the planning, creation, content, and implementation of an online educational module on electronic health records. Development of this module required close collaboration among multiple departments, and the module was immediately integrated into the second year medical student curriculum upon completion.

Reference librarians, specifically those working in academic health sciences environments, have expanded their roles and taken on new and unique responsibilities. While librarians at The George Washington University's Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library continue to provide traditional reference services, they have gone beyond their comfort zone in many cases to become involved in activities that are outside of the librarian's established role. This article describes the current roles of Himmelfarb's reference librarians, as well as the way these librarians prepared for these roles and addressed the associated challenges.