Strategic Vision

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NYU Health Sciences Libraries Strategic Plan

2010–2013

The vision of NYU Langone Medical Center is to be a world-class patient-centered integrated academic medical center.

The NYU Health Sciences Libraries share and participate in this vision by providing seamless and ubiquitous access to relevant information resources, education in the discovery and application of the best evidence for patient-care and administrative decisions, and the creation of a variety of information services and tools to enhance the goals and programs of the medical center. The dawn of the second decade of the twenty-first century brings great opportunities to libraries in adapting and creating new technologies and roles to accomplish this vision while retaining the culture of a leading academic and research institution. Existing library partnerships with the College of Dentistry and new partnerships with the College of Nursing offer unique opportunities to create an integrated health sciences knowledge community that will strengthen the research and educational base of the NYULMC enterprise within the New York University system.  

In the next three years, strategies to achieve this library vision and plan will include the following goals and objectives.

To enhance the quality and safety of patient care, the library will work to ensure that the best evidence for treating patients is integrated into daily patient care decisions of all health care providers. The library will:

• Provide clinical librarian programs to demonstrate and teach how to rapidly find and choose the best evidence in support of patient-care decisions, not only for residency education, but for all health care providers at the medical center.
• Work to ensure that all of its electronic clinical support information is delivered to the clinical desktop effortlessly with no barriers, and to integrate best evidence resources search capability into the electronic medical record for point-of-care decisions. This will be done through the establishment of infobuttons and the creation and application of federated searching tools.
• Provide search and information support in outcomes research, comparative heath studies, compliance, and benchmarking initiatives to hospital administration to make sure they are aware of and efficiently using the publicly available evidence for administrative decision making.
• Maintain and enhance the patient handout distribution system with new library technologies.

To increase patient satisfaction the library will collaborate with Nursing and other departments to: 

• Provide the highest-quality and most appropriate patient information to patients and their families by maintaining professionally staffed information centers to respond to patient and family requests according to their general and health literacy abilities.
• Create informative consumer websites and work to integrate the best information into the electronic medical record and into the patient portal information for informed patient action.
• Market aggressively the information prescription program of the consumer health libraries to hospital staff and physicians at NYULMC sites and in faculty practice facilities.
• Present outreach programs to the community on searching the internet for appropriate health information and making personal health decisions.

To support the curriculum for the 21st Century (C21), the library will work with students, faculty, and the Department of Educational Informatics to: 

• Provide information resources in all formats that best support and encourage self-directed and group learning, not only from the broad base of topics covered by the curriculum, but also those ancillary to it, and to make access to those resources as effortless and electronically integrated as possible.
• Integrate required information resources and assignments directly into the ALEX system through creative use of new information systems and technologies.
• Establish a librarian liaison within each course and clerkship in ALEX to facilitate both instructor effectiveness and student learning through individualized consulting using new communications technologies, such as chat reference, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 technologies, as they develop.
• Advise faculty on copyright and intellectual property concerns in the development of ALEX teaching modules.
• Work with faculty to discover, acquire, and make easily available the most appropriate teaching resources from both commercial providers and those developed by other institutions and professional societies for teaching.
• Educate students in the competent management of knowledge-based medical information and the finding and critical assessment of the best evidence for efficient and effective patient-care decisions through formal course presentations within the curriculum, and through individual consultation with students as requested.
• Partner with the teaching faculty through active participation on curriculum committees and task forces to ensure close alignment between library programs and services and the teaching goals of C21.
• Develop services and resources for preserving and data mining the curriculum as represented by ALEX content using existing and developing library standards and systems.

To support the advancement of academic scholarship, biomedical research, and increased research productivity at the medical center, the library will: 

• Collect the breadth of biomedical and related literature in electronic format, and where necessary in print, and make it seamlessly available to researchers wherever they are located.
• Provide rapid access to information not available within the library’s collections or in storage through innovative use of technology and state-of-the-art library systems.
• In partnership with faculty and NYULMC research-support offices, assess newly developing types of research support and discovery products for appropriateness to the NYU environment and cost effectiveness, and possibly acquire them.
• Participate in the NYU CTSI, especially in developing methods for increasing multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research activities on campus and within the university as a whole. Such activities include enhancement of the library’s Faculty Bibliography to provide appropriate ontologies for Find-a-Researcher and other uses.
• Educate new and developing scientists in the efficient use of traditional research support services such as PubMed, Entrez, BLAST, Endnote, and RefWorks or other bibliographic management software, and monitor the wide proliferation of new bibliographic and research support products to advise individual faculty on the most useful and appropriate tools for their work.
• Continue to participate on each IRB to ensure that appropriate review of the literature applies to requested protocols for human subjects; participate on the IACUC to ensure appropriate compliance for literature searching for animal experimentation.
• Provide support services for new concepts in information in support of research and e-science, such as geographical information systems and basic science research data repositories.
• Provide the institution with support and information on faculty publishing trends and educate faculty on bibliographic metrics and their uses and possible misuse in the academic environment.
• Develop a research consultation support program to have librarians observe and work within the lab and attend research/lab meetings to determine where their knowledge of information tools and products can enhance the efficiency of the lab group.
• Advise the research community on scholarly publication compliance mandates, copyright, and open access issues through class offerings, Web site guides, and online tutorials.

To provide a common place to all members of the NYULMC community that is conducive to learning, research, and the development of a culture of learning for all staff, the library will: 

• Ensure a safe, comfortable, and scholarly environment with well-functioning and appropriate technology available on a twenty-four-hour basis.
• Work to secure funding to implement a plan for a library facility that conforms to twenty-first century expectations for all its users.
• Continue a program in support of the integration of literature and the arts into the life of the medical center through exhibits and support of the Literature and Arts Database project.
• Preserve and curate the accumulated collection of knowledge about the development of the medical, biological, and clinical sciences, and advances in health administration, public health, and the health professions that is represented in the existing print and archival collections of the library.
• Enhance its role as the historical and cultural repository of NYULMC through the completion of the online faculty and alumni databases and use digital-library technologies to increase the online presence of the archives to increase familiarity with our history.
• Continue working with the Office of Alumni Affairs and the Friends of the Library to enhance and integrate the Alumni Digital Library into Alumni and ALEX online efforts.

To recruit and develop a diverse staff that is at the forefront of librarianship and that is dedicated to extreme service to the community it serves, the library will: 

• Create an atmosphere of respect and collegiality for all staff in all locations.
• Continue to prioritize attendance at professional meetings, classes, and conferences that add to the knowledge base of the staff as a whole, as well as the attending staff member.
• Foster an environment and provide the necessary tools to keep the library in the forefront of medical librarianship, especially in regard to the development of cutting-edge technologies and creative programs which address the challenges and issues of health sciences librarianship through research and achievement of outside funding.
• Guide the library faculty in their academic work and commitments toward a successful tenure process.
• Continue the dynamic management of the library through the use of teams to respond to new and complex challenges from institutional needs, library and publication technologies, mandates, and budget challenges.
• Practice evidence-based decision making to ensure that best practices in librarianship are applied to the current issues in management of the NYU Health Sciences Libraries.