Library and Information Science Commons^™

Open Access Challenge, Amy Dailey, Janelle Wertzberger

Open Access Week at Gettysburg College

This class activity is designed to help health sciences students understand challenges to accessing public health information in a variety of settings. The exercise was created for students in Prof. Dailey’s Global Health class (HS 322) at Gettysburg College in Fall 2015.

The activity, as well as notes for instructors considering using this exercise, are both shared here.

Think Inside The Blocks: Health Literacy Outreach To Disadvantaged People In Their Own Environment, Nancy Patterson

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

This bilingual (Spanish/English) poster highlights six creative health literacy outreach projects that have proven to be successful in increasing participation in health-related events in their communities and in boosting health literacy in the process.

For example, in Georgetown, South Carolina, a beauty salon owner, concerned about her clients’ frequent frustration with trying to decipher medical information, partners with her local public library and is grant funded to provide a Wellness Workstation in her salon. Years later, her clients research health information between services using the workstation, evening health literacy classes are regularly conducted for community members and continued funding has …

Health Literacy 101: Increasing Literacy Reduces Health Disparities, Nancy Patterson

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), health disparities are “preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities to achieve optimal health that are experienced by socially disadvantaged populations”. The American Medical Association (AMA) has identified literacy as the number one social determinant of an individual’s health, above education, income and race.

Learn about health literacy as a tool in the fight against health disparities from this poster as well as methods of effective health communication between health information providers and information seekers. Self-advocacy, plain language cultural competence, and the teach-back technique are …

Collecting And Acquiring In Earnest (The 14th Annual Health Sciences Lively Lunch), Wendy Bahnsen, Yumin Jiang, Ramune K. Kubilius, Emma O'Hagan, Andrea Twiss-Brooks

Charleston Library Conference

In this year's sponsored but no holds barred lunch, host Wendy Bahnsen (substituting for colleague Nicole Gallo) offered a brief greeting, and Ramune Kubilius provided the traditional “year in review” synopsis of developments since the last Charleston Conference. Panelists then shared insights and led discussion on earnest attempts to meet users’ information needs and satisfy administrations’ budget and other expectations. No matter how information has become repackaged, two formats remain important in health sciences communication: books and journals (articles). Speakers focused on library experiments with these formats. Is PDA a solution? Bahnsen contributed highlights and findings from a survey by …