Every day the Woodruff Health Sciences Center (WHSC) Library’s librarians and informationists work with students, faculty, and staff at the WHSC’s schools and divisions on locating, selecting, managing, and using information for teaching and learning, patient care, and research projects. They also engage in other work supporting the missions and goals of these units in the WHSC, such as developing collections of journals and books, evaluating databases, and teaching.
In the context of their work, librarians and informationists also collaborate on research and innovations, including projects directly related to services provided through the library, as well as collaborations related to the work of faculty and researchers in other departments and divisions. The Emory Libraries encourage librarians to engage in scholarly endeavors to advance the profession, with a goal toward creating publications in various formats, such as conference papers and posters, as well as journal articles.
In 2018, eight Emory health sciences librarians and informationists engaged in a writing group to increase our engagement in academic writing. The measures of success for the group were to have 3-4 article manuscripts submitted to publishers within 4 weeks of completing the 24-week group. Two participants, Hannah Rutledge and Kim Powell, each submitted a manuscript within the 4-week period. Two other participants, Amy Allison and Sandra Franklin, submitted another manuscript within 12 weeks of completing the group.
- Powell KR. Searching by grant number: comparison of funding acknowledgments in NIH RePORTER, PubMed, and Web of Science. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 107(2), 2019. DOI: 10.5195/jmla.2019.554
- Rutledge H. Diving into data: Analyzing information requests to understand information needs at a pediatric hospital. Journal of Hospital Librarianship, 18(4), 2018. DOI: 10.1080/15323269.2018.1509190.
- Allison A, Bryan B, Franklin S, Schick L. Academic health sciences libraries and affiliated hospitals: continuing the conversation about licensing electronic resources. In review with the publisher
Funded by a mini-grant from the LITS Libraries, the group provided each participant with two books on academic writing and supplied refreshments at the bi-weekly meetings. Each meeting explored an aspect of writing a journal article where participants shared lessons learned, updated individual progress, and discussed insights and challenges stemming from writing assignments. Next steps include opening a 2019 writing group to librarians at other Emory libraries.