About The Health Sciences Library

Mission:

The University of Washington Health Sciences Libraries are dedicated to improving health by connecting people to knowledge to advance education, research, and health care.

In pursuit of this goal, as the premier health sciences library in the Pacific Northwest, we support and collaborate with:

• Students, faculty, staff, researchers and clinicians throughout the Health Sciences Center and the University, wherever they are physically located.
• Health professionals and the citizens of the state of Washington, and the Pacific Northwest Region.
• Libraries, health professionals, and researchers through our participation in local, regional, national and international networks.

To fulfill our mission, we:

• Educate and assist users to identify, manage, and evaluate information.
• Provide on-site and remote access to information resources of all formats.
• Offer a shared physical/virtual learning commons in support of life-long learning.
• Conduct and promote research.

The Libraries are committed to excellence, innovation, and service.

Link to Statistical Summary

Narrative Summary: Brief Description for Grants

The mission of the Health Sciences Library (HSL) is to connect faculty, staff and students to knowledge in the health sciences, supporting teaching, research and patient care. The HSL staff strives to integrate this knowledge at the point of use for clinicians, researchers, administrators, instructors and students within a distributed multi-state educational environment.

To achieve this vision, HSL partners with health sciences departments and programs and external organizations, delivering services from three facilities: the Health Sciences Library and Social Work Research Commons on the main campus, and Harborview Medical Center. HSL supports six schools: Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Public Health, and Social Work. A primary user population of over 25,000 students and faculty are located both on campus and at clinical sites through the five-state WWAMI (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Idaho) region. Serving this large geographic area requires us to focus our efforts on providing web-based knowledge resources regardless of physical location of the user. The HSL contracts with the National Library of Medicine to be the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Pacific Northwest Region, connecting health professions across the region to information services.

Library services are increasingly focused on information management education in its broadest sense. Each health sciences department or program has an assigned subject librarian (or liaison) who is responsible for coordinating services to that program area, including development and presentation of targeted instructional sessions, individual information management consultation, collection development, and web page linkages. Each liaison presents library orientations and tours; for FY 2009-2010 a total of 185 education sessions were held, attended by a total of 3,530 individuals.

HSL staff includes 27 FTE professionals and 15 FTE classified staff and student assistants, including 12 FTE funded by grants and contracts for special projects. Knowledge resources include 5,940 current print journal subscriptions; 408,675 book titles, which includes all textbooks and media; 940 electronic journals; and 283 databases available via the web. All online content is made available through the Health Sciences Library website which includes links to all the UW Libraries’ electronic resources. While rich in historical depth, the HSL focuses on digital provision of information and is particularly strong in clinical reference (i.e., drug information, evidence-based sources). Linkage to the online article is standard in core databases such as PubMed. The Health Sciences database includes links to an additional array of filtered no-cost, high quality resources. Documents not available online may be requested for fast delivery. The HSL is a national leader in the delivery of documents via the web.  Resources in the health sciences as well as the extensive collection of the entire University Libraries in relevant areas such as computing, engineering, public policy, technology and business are available to all users. In addition, strengths in social, psychology, ethics, law and other disciplines are backed by a two-state network of university libraries, the Orbis-Cascade Alliance.

Curriculum support services include a full-service computing lab composed of 70 PCs in 3 classrooms, a library teaching lab, and 105 drop-in stations for independent student learning in an area referred to as the Learning Commons. In addition, the Learning Commons has Smartboards, VCRs and other AV equipment. Wireless access is available throughout the library as well as approximately 45 public PCs for research, study, and email access.  Several group study rooms are available, and the HSL offers a Reserves collection and anatomical models with a mediated e-reserves system for instructors.

Librarians lead or participate in several information and education system research and developed projects and are active participants in national and international professional associations such as AMIA, MLA and AAHSL.