The hospital library as provider of consumer health information

The health care environment of the 1990s demands that hospital libraries develop creative strategies for providing consumer health information (CHI). Librarians at the Reuben L. Sharp Health Sciences Library at Cooper Hospital/University Medical Center have developed a multifaceted approach to the problem. Using a combination of institutional resources, private funding, and cooperative arrangements with public libraries, the Sharp Library helps to serve the consumer health information needs of the southern New Jersey community.     

UnCover on the Web: search hints and applications in library environments

Among the huge maze of resources available on the Internet, UnCoverWeb stands out as a valuable tool for medical libraries. This up-to-date, free-access, multidisciplinary database of periodical references is searched through an easy-to-learn graphical user interface that is a welcome improvement over the telnet version. This article reviews the basic and advanced search techniques for UnCoverWeb, as well as providing information on the document delivery functions and table of contents alerting service called Reveal. UnCover's currency is evaluated and compared with other current awareness resources. System deficiencies are discussed, with the conclusion that although UnCoverWeb lacks the sophisticated features of many commercial database search services, it is nonetheless a useful addition to the repertoire of information sources available in a library.     

Build It and They Will Come? Patron Engagement Via Twitter at Historically Black College and University Libraries

This study is a social media analysis on the use of Twitter at Historically Black Colleges and University (HBCU) libraries. While information science researchers have begun examining how libraries use social media, the vast majority of these studies are situated at large flagship research-intensive universities. Additionally, there currently exist deficiencies in research on social media deployment at HBCU libraries. We leverage, the IBM Watson's analytic engine, to systemically examine over 23,000, tweets over an eighteen-month period, around a set of objective measures including propagation of retweets and sentiment to assess follower engagement. The analysis found little evidence of follower engagement with library generated content. However, we observed a substantial volume of library tweets coalesced around institutional boosterism, rather than library related phenomena. This non-library related content represented the vast majority of retweets, but paradoxically was propagated by non-followers. Additionally, tweets relating to institutional boosterism produced the most positive sentiment within the data.