Public libraries have been called the “first responders” to the specialized health information needs of the general public. The challenges inherent in consumer health information (CHI) service are centered around the Patron, the Librarian, the Information Resources, and the Library itself. The pilot study involved interviews with nine individual library workers in eight public libraries in four library systems: the District of Columbia, Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties in Maryland, and Fairfax County in Virginia. Library workers were asked about common consumer health information requests, the nature of their collections, and the role of public libraries in meeting these information needs. The subjects were also presented with a hypothetical scenario, and their responses suggest knowledge gaps. The findings point to the increasing necessity and importance of training and support for public librarians, as well as the importance of understanding where the medical knowledge gaps exist. Public librarians need to commit to formal evaluation of their skill sets and knowledge gaps, in order to identify areas to which libraries can devote limited resources.

Rape is prevalent on American college campuses. Rape survivors often disclose their experience to their peers in hope of receiving support and obtaining justice (i.e., the intended consequences of disclosure). Yet, rape disclosures may also lead to unintended consequences, such as stigma. How peers react to survivors' disclosures of rape greatly influences survivors' recovery and their decision to press charges against their perpetrators. In this article, we explore gender differences in responses to rape disclosures. Using an experimental design ( N = 391), we investigate reactions to stigmatizing (versus nonstigmatizing) rape disclosures. We find that, when controlling for the experimental condition, college men stigmatize the rape survivor more than college women. However, in response to a stigmatizing (versus nonstigmatizing) rape disclosure, college women who have been in college longer, compared with college men, have more stigmatizing reactions toward the person disclosing that information. Their reactions then predict increased social distance between the recipient of the disclosure and rape survivors.

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This is a report on the impact of library workers' personal beliefs on provision of vaccination information. Nine public librarians were interviewed about a hypothetical scenario involving a patron who is concerned about possible vaccination-autism connections. The analysis employed thematic coding. Results suggested that while most participants supported childhood vaccination, tension between their personal views and neutrality impacted their ability to conduct the interaction. The neutrality stance, though consonant with professional guidelines, curtails librarians' ability to provide accurate health information. Outreach and communication between public and health sciences libraries can help librarians provide resources to address health controversies.

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In the era of growing concerns about human-induced climate change and sustainable development, it is important for the schools to prepare students for meaningful engagement with environmental policies that will determine the future of our society. To do this, educators need to face a number of challenges. These include deciding on the science knowledge and skills needed for informed citizenship, identifying teaching practices for fostering such knowledge and skills, and finding ways to implement new practices into the tightly packed existing curriculum. This paper describes two collaborative efforts between the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) and University of Maryland College of Education that attempt to meet these challenges. The focus of both projects is on helping students develop information seeking and evaluation and argumentation skills, and applying them to complex socio-scientific issues that have bearing on students’ daily lives. The first effort involves co-designing an afterschool environmental health club curriculum with an interdisciplinary team of middle school teachers. The second effort is the development and implementation of a week-long school drinking water quality debate activity in a high school environmental science classroom. Both projects center on Tox Town, an NLM web resource that introduces students to environmental health issues in everyday environments. The paper describes successes and challenges of environmental health curriculum development, including teachers’ and researchers’ perception of contextual constraints in the club and classroom setting, tensions inherent in co-design, and students’ experience with socio-scientific argumentation.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. AbstrActThis study investigates the relationship among (1) college major, (2) knowledge used in reasoning about common health beliefs, and (3) judgment about the accuracy of those beliefs. Seventy-four college students, advanced biology and nonscience majors, indicated their agreement or disagreement with commonly believed, but often inaccurate, statements about health and explained their reasoning. The results indicated that while the direct impact of college-level biology coursework on judgment accuracy was minimal, biology major was associated with increased reliance on advanced biological reasoning, which mediated judgment accuracy. However, the overall association of advanced biological reasoning with judgment accuracy was small. The discussion calls for strengthening the science-daily life connection in biology education for majors and nonmajors.

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