Communicating with medical library users during COVID-19

Abstract

Background: The Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library serves a community of over 22,000 individuals primarily from the Yale Schools of Medicine, Public Health, and Nursing and the Yale New Haven Hospital. Though they are geographically close to one another, reaching these disparate populations can be a challenge. Having a clear and thorough communication plan has proved invaluable in transcending communication chasms, especially in recent times of crisis.Case Presentation: This article describes the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library’s methods for communicating and promoting its remote resources and services in response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). It details our communication strategies and messages leading up to, and after, the Yale campus was closed and specifies how we pivoted from reaching users inside the library to reaching our audiences remotely.Conclusions: Our communication plan has provided the foundation for all of our messaging, be it print or digital media. In recent moments of crisis, it has been especially helpful for planning and executing large scale messaging. Similarly, knowing whom to contact around our organization to promote our message in different and broader ways has been extremely beneficial. This article has been approved for the Medical Library Association’s Independent Reading Program.

Except for my commute, everything is the same: the shared lived experience of health sciences libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…The longitudinal, multisite nature of this study and the focus on using library staff as a lens for interpretation is unique. Other literature on the impact of COVID-19 on North American academic health sciences libraries has generally focused on case studies of libraries [ 6 – 13 ], descriptions of particular COVID-19-specific resources or services developed [ 14 – 17 ], or captured data at one time [ 18 , 19 ]. Similar themes, however, emerged from this study and from others, which may point to the robustness of the results.…”

Gestão Da Comunicação Nas Organizações: Uma Análise Da Produção Científica No Período De 2012 a 2021

“…Tal fato pode ser notado na diversidade de organizações focos de estudos científicos na área da gestão da comunicação entre elas instituições públicas (Madsen & Schmeltz, 2022;Nugraha et al, 2019), religiosas (Hodøl, 2021;Valero, 2020), não governamentais (Fuller & La Sala, 2021;Hue, 2017); militares, paramilitares e de defesa (Molnár, Takács & Urbanovics, 2021;Williams, 2018); além de universidades (Elken, Stensaker & Dedze, 2018;Fähnrich, Vogelgesang & Scharkow, 2020;Thelma et al, 2020;Trillos-Pacheco & Cuello Lazcano, 2020), bibliotecas (Haugh, 2021;O'Neill & Kelley, 2021); e museus (Fernández, Alarcón & Valcarcel, 2020), entre outras.…”

Just in time: integrating library services for literature searches in a hospital library setting

“…All NSLHD Libraries remained open during the pandemic delivering access onsite whilst simultaneously rapidly expanding service delivery offsite and for staff no longer located in their usual place of work. The messaging across the district has been clear and proactive (Haugh, 2021) resulting in a substantial increase of visits to both the NSLHD's 5 Libraries and offsite access via Springboard.…”