Qualitative analysis resulted in increased understanding of pandemic information needs and identified best practices for disseminating information during periods of high organizational stress caused by an influx of new cases of an unknown infectious disease.
In response to changing user needs, the library sought ways to meet new challenges and engage users outside of the building. Librarians were removed from the service desk in order to offer support at locations around campus. The service desk in the library was staffed primarily by paraprofessionals with librarians providing support as needed. Targeted staff training was offered, and different scheduling models were used over a period of time. Restructuring the service desk was a complicated endeavor but provided a number of benefits including expansion of services. Along the way, challenges were met and recognized as learning opportunities.
The eJournals Forum aims to provide a professional venue for addressing key issues regarding electronic journals and electronic publishing in health sciences libraries. The importance of having a thorough understanding of journal issues relating to licensing, collection development, and access to archival content cannot be underrated as numerous libraries are confronted with the juxtaposition of steadily rising costs for serials while many budgets are declining. These increased costs coupled with other investments of personnel, processing, resource management, and technology make ensuring reliable access to resources even more critical. The eJournals Forum strives to promote these and other topical discussions while providing practical advice and solutions to a variety of problems and issues at hand.A recent example of how convoluted (and urgent) these issues can be is the collapse of divine/Rowecom/Faxon, which has thrown the collection managers of some institutions into the equivalent of a mid-air refueling act as they attempt to ensure access to needed journals. divine, parent company of RoweCom and its library subscription division Faxon, has been accused in a recent lawsuit of continuing to request and collect payments from institutions for journal subscriptions they did not intend to fill.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.