Objectives:

To illustrate our team-based approach to further integrate health sciences liaison services into a new medical education curriculum. Two full-time librarians are assigned to several departments as liaisons; duties for the school of medicine are shared between the two liaisons. Here, we describe several techniques employed to increase the library’s presence for information literacy in the new curriculum.

Methods:

The health sciences liaison librarians assigned to the school of medicine have for the past several years had a marginal role in the medical school curriculum. First-year medical students are required to take a “Scholarship and Research in Medicine” course, focusing on evidence-based practice, taught by a faculty member, with little input from librarians. Librarians have often only been consulted when a student needed to find additional sources for a research project, or a faculty member needed help with citations, etc. The school of medicine will implement a case-based/problem-based/team-based learning (CBL/PBL/TBL) curriculum in 2013, and we are using several methods to increase the library’s presence in the curriculum. Methods employed include appointments to key committees, such as medical education, attendance at departmental faculty meetings, working with curriculum block planning teams, meeting with the research in scholarship course primary faculty, attending lectures and symposia given by faculty and students, creating LibGuides and online tutorials for specific courses and departments within the school of medicine, holding weekly office hours in the school of medicine, and networking through our liaison work with other health sciences departments.

Results:

Coordinated efforts to “infiltrate” the medical school curriculum have produced viable results so far. A library resources orientation with all first-year medical students is scheduled for the fall of 2013. A meeting with the scholarship and research in medicine faculty member resulted in the scheduling of “lunch-n-learn” drop-in sessions for all interested medical students. Our presence at the medical education committee meetings has resulted in our taking the lead in helping develop a humanities resources component in the curriculum, and the librarians have already been scheduled for several course-specific instructional sessions in 2013. We continue to hold weekly office hours at the school of medicine, thereby becoming familiar with many of the medical school faculty and students.

Conclusions:

Although we are not yet fully embedded within the medical curriculum, our collaborative efforts have greatly increased the library presence in the new medical curriculum beginning academic year 2013–2014.