Teaching remains a vital part of the Carpenter Library's mission. Teaching is accomplished in at least three different ways: 1.) teaching by Library staff with no fee, 2.) teaching by a local company for a fee, and 3.) utilization of the Library's classrooms by other departments for instruction in their own programs.
Librarians taught a wide variety of classes in a wide variety of settings--classroom, departments, one-on-one--to 829 faculty, staff, and students. Two new classes were added: Mastering Electronic Journals teaches how to locate, search, browse, and print from the Carpenter Library's collection of 1100+ electronic journals; Web of Science teaches how to search by the bibliographic database keyword, author, institution, journal title, or cited references.
CyberSkills is a local company, contracted by the Library, that has provided training to the Medical Center for the past seven years in a variety of computer software courses. During fiscal year 2001-2002, 425 students participated in 83 classes covering sixteen different courses. Of those 425 participants, 141 were Hospital, 136 were School of Medicine, and 148 were community.
Many Hospital and School of Medicine departments reserve the Library's computer classrooms for their own instructional needs. The two classrooms, located in the Learning Resources Center, provide a total of 20 computers with overhead LCD projectors and whiteboards.
The Library hosted a teleconference on personal digital assistants (PDAs) from the Medical Library Association, highlighting resources as well as applications. Pam Cabe organized the event, which featured the Medical Center's Johannes Boehme as one of the speakers. She also created a Web page of PDA resources that provides links to manufacturers' Web sites, free software sites, and medical resources designed specifically for the PDA user.
The Evidence-Based Medicine Education Center of Excellence Web page went live. Janine Tillettt is responsible for monitoring the EBM journal literature and for adding references to the research section on a monthly basis.
For the fourth year in a row, Carpenter librarians organized the ThinkPad distribution sessions, trained second-year medical students to be the trainers of those sessions, and taught incoming medical students during the first week of orientation. The initial event of the computer training block was the ThinkPad distribution sessions, with nine second-year medical students each leading two 90-minute sessions with six incoming freshmen in each session. The new students were introduced not only to their laptops but also to the network and other technological features of their small-group rooms. The ThinkPad distribution session took place in the room where that student would attend his or her small-group curriculum sessions. Later in the week, librarians introduced the new students to Medline, Micromedex, electronic textbooks, and other databases in four two-hour blocks.
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