Content and Design Features of Academic Health Sciences Libraries' Home Pages.

The goal of this content analysis was to identify commonly used content and design features of academic health sciences library home pages. After developing a checklist, data were collected from 135 academic health sciences library home pages. The core components of these library home pages included a contact phone number, a contact email address, an Ask-a-Librarian feature, the physical address listed, a feedback/suggestions link, subject guides, a discovery tool or database-specific search box, multimedia, social media, a site search option, a responsive web design, and a copyright year or update date.

Outreach to Improve Patient Education at South Carolina Free Medical Clinics.

The University of South Carolina (USC) School of Medicine (SOM) librarians have partnered with eight free medical clinics in South Carolina to enhance patient education efforts. During these outreach projects, project librarians purchased and installed computers, projectors, screens, LCD monitors, and touch-screen information kiosks equipment in each clinic, conducted MedlinePlus training sessions with clinic staff, and added links to MedlinePlus on the patient education area of the clinics' websites. As a result, the free medical clinics incorporated MedlinePlus into their patient education classes or use the self-playing tutorials in patient waiting rooms.

Topics and features of academic medical library tutorials.

In a 2007 study, librarians at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Library examined freely available online tutorials on academic medical library Web sites. The team identified tutorial topics, determined common design features, and assessed elements of active learning in library-created tutorials; the team also generated a list of third-party tutorials to which medical libraries link. This article updates the earlier study, describing changes and trends in tutorial content and design on medical libraries' Web sites; the project team plans to continue to track trends in tutorial development by repeating this study annually.