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Opportunities for eLearning in a New Medical Library
From left to right: Carol Warren, Nadine Dexter,
Barbara Shearer, Suzanne Nagy and Emiko Weeks -
the team at the Medical Library, Florida State
University College of Medicine, celebrate the
groundbreaking for their new College of Medicine
building.
It's rare to see a brand new medical school established, but Florida State University's College of Medicine enrolled its first class in 2001 and it has been a wonderful experience so far. We're fortunate to be starting fresh in a virtual environment, and so we're able to experiment with different approaches to supporting the curriculum.
One reason to go electronic for the resources students and faculty depend on is that after the first two years of basic science courses taken at the college's campus in Tallahassee, all our students move on for their third and fourth years of clinical rotations at physicians’ clinics, HMOs and chronic care facilities in Tallahassee, Pensacola, Orlando and other planned locations. With the distributed set of students doing clerkships around the state it's useless to have clinical textbooks sitting on the shelf in one central library - hence the dependence on Web-based resources.
For me, eLearning means providing students with a variety of ways to learn at a distance, and library e-resources are an integral part of this learning process. I'm really big on tying specific library curriculum resources into learning objectives. The collection is here to support the curriculum, period.
I’ve come to believe that a true virtual library must be available where users need it, when they need it, and in as seamless a manner as possible.
Working closely with the Medical Informatics department as part of a team under the Office of Medical Education has shaken me out of my assumptions about what a virtual library should be. For instance, the typical concurrent user model may mean students lose the "moment for learning" if the limit has been reached. I’ve been working with vendors including Scott FitzSimons from Elsevier’s Institutional Electronic Sales to extend availability of MD Consult and its medical textbooks and journals beyond the traditional concurrent license model, to the wider community at Florida State University’s College of Medicine.
