One Institution's Experience in Transforming the Health Sciences Library of the Future

Abstract

Recognizing a need to be more relevant to its constituents, and aligned with institutional priorities, the Taubman Health Sciences Library redefined its mission, roles, and space. This transformation facilitated innovative, team-based collaborations within the health sciences community and the addition of new roles and responsibilities in academic and clinical engagement, research and informatics, enabling technologies, community outreach, and global health. Library space is being redesigned, and a branch library dedicated to interdisciplinary partnerships has been established. Information gained from this experience will be useful to other libraries faced with budget, resource, and staffing challenges and will offer practical ideas for becoming more integrated into the academic, research, and clinical work of the health sciences enterprise.

Creating a library holding group: an approach to large system integration

“…After reviewing the sites, the library holding group created space-planning documents that called for reducing physical storage space in favor of more public, collaboration-focused learning spaces that would accommodate two library staff members. This practice is consistent with the current direction in use of space [6,7].…”

Research Support in Health Sciences Libraries: A Scoping Review

“…Some titles clearly delineated the job's area of focus, such as director for research data management (30), emerging technologies librarian (31), or Institutional Review Board (IRB) librarian (32). Other titles were more general and did not necessarily share the same primary responsibilities as others with the same title at other institutions, such as informationist (26,27,(33)(34)(35)(36)(37). In total, the 27 reports in this group presented 28 unique job titles, which are listed in Table 2 of the supplementary files.…”

“…Depending on the specific implementation, a library's systematic review service could be provided by a single information professional (37,40,41) or by a coordinated team (28,42,43). In some instances, support consisted of a single main service, such as providing instruction on systematic reviews and their methods (33,44,45). In other instances, libraries introduced an array of services, including training, developing search strategies, running searches, managing search results, obtaining full-text reports, and providing methods write-ups (25,43,(46)(47)(48)(49)(50)(51).…”

“…"(38) Li et al (64) reported providing in-depth data analysis for researchers. Others' services included support and hosting of institutional repositories to store and share researchers' data (30,65), enabling access to datasets and creating data catalogues (66,67), and having dedicated librarians for data management projects (33).…”

Combining resources, combining forces: regionalizing hospital library services in a large statewide health system

“…Yet a literature scan conducted in 2014 revealed no articles describing such transformation processes in hospital libraries. While lacking in descriptive studies of the centralization of health system libraries, the literature did provide some examples of integrating specific services [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. The review of literature reinforced the authors' belief that sharing the PH&S experience would be useful to other health system libraries working to improve and expand services, while facing staffing and budgetary challenges.…”