Lister Hill Letter
Newsletter of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at UAB

January/February 1999

Lister Hill Library Engaged in Nationwide Internet Awareness Pilot Project

The Lister Hill Library has been involved in an exciting nationwide pilot project sponsored by the National Library of Medicine to "increase public awareness of and access to health information via the Internet."  Over 39 public library systems in nine states joined with "support" (medical) libraries in those states to participate in the project (titled Medical Questions? Medline Has Answers), designed to evaluate how well the Internet can help meet the health information needs of the general public.  The focus of this initiative is PubMed, NLM's user-friendly web interface to Medline (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/), and MedlinePlus, a new consumer health website produced by NLM (http://medlineplus.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/).  Renowned heart surgeon Michael DeBakey praised the project, saying, "Good information is the best medicine. Not only health professionals, but also consumers, should have the most recent medical information at their fingertips."  Certainly there is public enthusiasm for such information.  Since Medline was made available free on the Internet last year via PubMed, the number of Medline searches has greatly proliferated from 7 million per year to 120 million.  Approximately one-third of those searches are performed by consumers.

Lister Hill's part in this venture is to train the local public librarians in the Birmingham and Jefferson County Public Library systems in the use of PubMed as a consumer health information resource and to help promote PubMed and MedlinePlus.   As such, LHL recently completed a series of four PubMed classes at the Birmingham Public Library, drawing a total of 44 public librarians and staff members from throughout the county.  Phase II of the project will be devoted to publicizing these NLM web resources.  A series of seven public demonstrations will be held, beginning with one at Lister Hill Library on December 12th.  These promotional demonstrations will also be held at UAB Medwise in February and at the downtown Birmingham Public Library and several branches through spring 1999.

Related to both Lister Hill's and the public library systems' participation in this project is a separate local initiative to establish a cooperative consumer health library network with LHL and the Jefferson County public libraries as partners.  Based on a model system in Connecticut that has been successful for many years, this network would focus on cooperative collection development, training by LHL in medical reference skills and resources for the public libraries as well as referral and backup reference service, web resources, promotion of the services/resources available, and involvement of local health professionals and agencies.  At present, the UAB Medical School Development Office is coordinating a search for start-up grant funding to be used primarily for collection development.  The first meeting of the network advisory committee, consisting of representatives from the libraries as well as local health professionals and health agency administrators, will be held in January.  For more information on this project as well as the NLM pilot project, contact Kay Hogan at 934-2230 or .