... News Flash. February 3, 2005:  FSU College of Medicine receives full accreditation from LCME! ...

Spotlight on Florida State University College of Medicine Medical Library:

1. Creation of the newest College of Medicine.

2. Creating a Medical Library in the Post-Web Environment.

3. Creating a Library Website for a Distributed Campus.

4. Informatics in the Curriculum.

1. Creation of the Newest College of Medicine.

The Florida State University College of Medicine (FSUCOM) was created in June 2000 by the State of Florida legislature. Building upon the FSU Program in Medical Sciences, a first-year medical school program begun in 1971, the college's educational program is designed to train physicians to provide health care for medically underserved populations in rural and inner-city areas and to address the needs of the growing geriatric population in the state.

The FSUCOM is a distributed, community-based medical school with the basic science component taught on the FSU campus in Tallahassee. Clinical training takes place on the front lines of the health-care delivery system throughout the state.

The emphasis is on ambulatory care settings such as physicians' clinics, HMOs, and chronic care facilities in rural, urban and suburban areas. Regional medical school campuses have been established in Orlando, Pensacola, Sarasota and Tallahassee, and are planned for Ft. Myers and Jacksonville.
 
More about the regional campuses.

From the College's beginning, educational competencies and learning objectives, course syllabi, and the medical informatics curriculum, have been well-documented and presented for ease of access via the Office of Medical Education website at:   http://med.fsu.edu/education/

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2. Creating a Medical Library in the Post-Web Environment.

The College of Medicine Medical Library physical facility opened March 25, 2002, with a collection of nearly 5,000 print books and 218 print journal subscriptions. But of course, this is only part of the picture! From very early in our history, the development of a digital library has been central to all aspects of planning for staffing, services, facilities and selection of knowledge-based resources. In fact, the provision of "an on-line library of academic and medical resources for students, faculty, and community preceptors" is included in the statute creating the College of Medicine.

Timing has played a critical role in our success toward reaching our goal of providing 90% of our resources in digital format. Advances in the delivery of web-based e-journals, e-books and clinical decision tools, coupled with subscription of several major e-journal packages by the FSU University Libraries, have resulted in providing access as of December 2004 to over 2.3 million full text articles via PubMed, 2,400 relevant e-journal subscriptions, hundreds of core clinical e-books and a number of web-based and pda-delivered clinical decision tools.

Though we had no history or infrastructure to change or adapt as we developed the library, we provide most of the same core functions and seek to meet the same user needs as other similar academic medical libraries. The allocation of resources and the way we achieve our goals may differ, however. Some areas within the College of Medicine that make us unique are a fully integrated medical informatics curriculum, large 4,000+ square-foot student community areas for every 30 students, a required laptop and PDA for each student, and a strong technology infrastructure designed from the beginning to support students and faculty wherever they are located. Organizationally, we report to the Office of Medical Education and are peers with the other department members who deliver faculty development and medical informatics programming. We are included in and benefit from the overall information technology plan for the College of Medicine. And finally, our users are members of the wider FSU community and therefore benefit greatly from a fine electronic collection of bioscience resources in place as part of the FSU University Libraries collection. These factors have helped make us successful and focussed on developing and making accessible a quality electronic collection.

One of our early efforts was to identify quickly the key resources required to meet educational objectives of the curriculum. Since no core journal list existed that was specific to a community-based academic medical library, we developed one. The project yielded 449 journal titles based on a number of quality filters and comparison of actual journal holdings of 18 established community-based medical school libraries. Published in the July 2003 issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association,
(Shearer BS, Nagy SP.   Developing an academic medical library core journal collection in the (almost) post-print era: the Florida State University College of Medicine Medical Library experience.   J Med Libr Assoc. 2003 Jul;91(3):292-302.)
the core journal list has been adopted by the COM Medical Library as a benchmark for future collection development activities.  Since the publication of the core list, we have received a number of requests for the full list by other academic and hospital medical libraries as a way to either develop new collections or weed current collections. A spreadsheet with all 4225 unique journal titles and including filtering criteria is available upon request from Barbara Shearer.

In the three or so years of our library's existence, we have moved 3 times - from a small learning resource room to a trailer (where we were fondly called the "trailer librarians"), to a lovely library in temporary College of Medicine quarters, to a new library located within the first phase of a $60 million COM location at the FSU campus. When all phases are completed over the next 15 months, the 300,000 square-foot complex will include an education and administration building, and will feature a 300-seat auditorium.

The FSUCOM Medical Library is soon to be named for a distinguished pediatrician and early and active supporter of the College of Medicine, Charlotte Edwards Maguire. Dr. Maguire received her medical degree in 1944 from the University of Arkansas, where she was the only female in her graduating class. She has dedicated her life to caring for children in need, especially those with disabilities. Dr. Maguire helped create the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, now the Florida Department of Health and Department of Children and Families, and served as Assistant Secretary of Health and Scientific Affairs during the Nixon Administration, just two of many leadership positions she has held throughout her career. We are honored that our library will be named for Dr. Maguire.

Via this AAHSL spotlight opportunity, we hope we have provided useful background information on our library. We have many colleagues to thank for our growth. Members of CONBLS (Consortium of Southern Biomedical Libraries) have been generous with time and resources for our fledgling library during this very exciting electronic era. Perhaps one way we can hope to repay this debt is to help others by providing feedback and data on our experience. If you plan on coming to Tallahassee or anywhere nearby, please let us know and we will give you a tour of our facility and make you welcome!

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3. Creating a Library Website for a Distributed Campus.

The distributed model of the college has affected every decision made for the library, and none so much as the design and implementation of the website. Although we often see the first and second year students and faculty on the main FSU campus in Tallahassee, we seldom have the opportunity for face-to-face interaction with third and fourth year people in the remote campuses. Thus, for them the website IS the library, the one place where the various library functions take place.

We quickly realized that established library practices were only part of the answer, largely because they depend on personal interaction for training and guidance at the time of information need. We turned to the FSU School of Information Studies to help us identify research methods and best practices as we created a newly architectured website tailored specifically to the needs of our very special situation. A poster that describes these events was presented at the Southern Chapter / Medical Library association:   Web development using methods based in current research. By following best practices we have developed an architecture that has proven to be sustainable as we add resources and services.

Through research performed while developing and maintaining the website we have found several practices to be important for providing library service to exclusively online patrons. One of these is procurement via site license rather than by limited simultaneous users. When a group of students in Pensacola is working with an online resource, all of them need to be able to use it at one time. Also, authentication by means of IP recognition, rather than username / password is much preferred. Through extensive negotiation with our vendors, we have been able to get site licenses and IP authentication for nearly all of our resources.

Another important service for online patrons is seamless access to full text from the search tools. We use tools such as PubMed linkout and Ovid openlinks to achieve this. We have also developed an implementation of the ISI vended product, WebFeat, to provide cross-searching of our entire electronic book collection (over 500 titles) with one-click access to full text.

Guidance to new users or to users attempting a new type of research is an important activity of librarians. We are meeting the challenge of accomplishing this online with multiple approaches. First, we have a New-User Orientation in PowerPoint that is available from our main navigation bar. Second, we have pages set up with resources to accomodate the most common medical library user needs:   Clinical Information, Drug Information, Patient Information, Research Resources, and Curriculum Resources.

Further guidance is available in a "Find it Quickly" chart with hot links to the most highly recommended resources for common tasks. For experienced users who know what they want - and want to find it quickly, we have a comprehensive alphabetic list in a scrollbox on our homepage. Our homepage may be viewed at http://med.fsu.edu/library.

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4. Informatics in the Curriculum.

The FSU/COM learning environment is supported through a strong emphasis on technology and the acquisition of informatics competencies integrated in all years of the curriculum. This is done by equipping new students with laptops and PDA's as soon as they arrive for their first semester. Students are provided with student communities and small group rooms where the latest in technology is available, including digital projectors, wireless connectivity, and laser printers. This allows students to access and use library resources 24/7 in small groups or individually.

Students also have access to the Clinical Learning Center which is a state-of-the art teaching and assessment center that provides opportunities for medical students to learn clinical skills in a simulated clinical setting. Six examination rooms and one interview room are equipped with the latest in clinical and audio visual equipment to allow students to learn and practice in a non-threatening environment.

For detailed information on the medical informatics curriculum, visit the medical informatics web pages. There is an outline of the curriculum on this curriculum page.

An excellent PowerPoint presentation developed by Nancy Clark, Director of Medical Informatics Education, provides an overview of the technology, applications, and the facilities of the COM specific to meeting medical informatics objectives:   Creating the 21st Century Medical School: Technology Across the Curriculum

Medical Library professional staff support the medical informatics program in a number of ways. We participate during informatics sessions especially those involving major equipment roll-outs and loading PDA's with e-books and other library resources. In addition, we work closely with students as they construct research strategies and use Endnote for papers, and provide in-person workshops for faculty and staff on the use of library resources.

In early 2004, the FSUCOM Medical Library was awarded an NN/LM Southeastern/Atlantic Region subcontract to deliver PDA technology and training to our affiliated hospital librarians and to evaluate a number of PDA resources. Mid-way through the subcontract period, we have already learned quite a few useful lessons about troubleshooting software from a variety of vendors. Grant for PDA distribution to hospital librarians.