University of North Carolina Health Sciences Library: A Gateway to Knowledge and Innovation

The University of North Carolina (UNC) Health Sciences Library (HSL) stands as a vital resource for students, faculty, healthcare professionals, and the public, offering a wealth of information and support to advance healthcare knowledge and practice. Through its extensive collections, innovative services, and dedicated staff, the HSL plays a crucial role in fostering education, research, and patient care across North Carolina and beyond.

Comprehensive Collections

The Health Sciences Library collections include materials in allied health, dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and public health in all formats -- journals, monographs, and audiovisuals, with extensive electronic access. Resources include both current and historical materials, and the library provides access to a wide range of supporting indexes and abstracts.

Diverse Formats and Broad Scope

The HSL boasts a diverse collection encompassing a wide range of formats, including journals, monographs, audiovisual materials, and extensive electronic resources. This comprehensive approach ensures that users can access information in the format that best suits their needs and learning styles. The library's collections span various disciplines within the health sciences, including allied health, dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and public health, reflecting the interconnected nature of healthcare.

Historical Resources

The North Carolina History of Health Digital Collection, part of the Medical Heritage Library, is a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries that promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. Its goal is to provide the means by which readers and scholars across a multitude of disciplines can examine the interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and strengthen understanding of the world in which we live.

African American Health Resources

The Health Sciences Library holds many contemporary works that support the study of medicine and other health professions from an African American perspective, such as Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations and Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health. The collections also have materials on issues of social activism, environmental justice, and public health. A growing collection of videos addressing African American health includes titles such as Now is Our Time, which pertains to African American women's health. In Medical Science Presents: Black Achievements in Medicine and Science, and Tuskegee. The library houses community diagnosis papers and projects from the School of Public Health, Department of Health Behavior and Health Education. A significant number of the papers and projects are related to African American health in North Carolina communities. Many University theses and dissertations also address issues of African American health, such as the involvement of African American churches in promoting health; while many are available at the Health Sciences Library, others are at the North Carolina Collection in Wilson Library on campus. The Health Sciences Library history collection has some scarce African American materials such as journals, programs, and transactions of meetings of African American health professional societies, particularly for the Old North State Medical Society, the National Dental Association, and the National Pharmaceutical Association. In 2002, the HSL was included in a three-year NIH Center of Excellence Grant to add minority health materials to the collection. This grant has facilitated addition of many new materials on African American Health including books on consumer health, mental health, cultural competency, barriers to health, and health careers.

Accessible Services

Reference services are available in person, by phone and electronically, and consultation appointments are encouraged. Use of historical materials may require an appointment. The library is open daily except for New Year's Day, July 4th, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day.

Expert Assistance

Reference services are available in person, by phone and electronically, and consultation appointments are encouraged. The library staff's expertise in database searches and suggestions are invaluable. Librarians have also been helpful in expanding searches beyond initial requests. The library was highly responsive and able to pull research on expected rates of particular complications after procedures.

Health & Wellness Portal

The Health & Wellness Portal is designed for members of the general public who are looking to find trustworthy health information online. The health portal includes free access to health information, news, journal articles, eBooks, videos, health resources in Spanish, and more. It allows North Carolina residents to freely and easily search premium content from top health and medical journals and books. Additionally, trustworthy web resources have been hand-selected by health science librarians at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. New content includes an information resources page for health content written in Spanish. Other featured content includes free access to health related eBooks available from EBSCOhost and MyiLibrary. Hundreds of eBook titles are available on a variety of health topics including diet, fitness, and illnesses.

Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (LitMed)

The Literature, Arts and Medicine Database (LitMed) is a collection of literature, fine art, visual art and performing art annotations created as a dynamic, comprehensive resource for scholars, educators, students, patients, and others interested in medical humanities. It was created by faculty of the New York University School of Medicine in 1993.

Impact on Healthcare Practice

The AHEC library network touches every county in North Carolina. Health care providers across North Carolina can request literature searches from their AHEC librarians.

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Improving Patient Outcomes

The library service allows quick and easy access to most recent literature. This is crucial in reviewing new genetic diagnoses of which little is known about other than what is published in sometimes as little as one or two scientific articles. This helps guide patient care and provide vital information for families in understanding their loved one's diagnosis and future. The articles provided by the AHEC research staff have been valuable in helping colleagues achieve credibility for novel therapeutic in treating nearly moribund patients at the onset of the pandemic viral disorder known as COVID-19. This was esp relevant when there were NO therapies other than supportive ICU care. The AHEC articles requested led to a team of pre-clinical researchers half-way around the world who were willing and able to incorporate novel therapeutic concepts into their own molecular and immunological experiments to document what was observed clinically. The unique experimental discoveries provided credence for therapeutic concepts given consistently positive clinical outcomes. The support I receive from AHEC library services for my literature searches and article requests is outstanding. The monthly lit searches i get from library staff help keep me up to date with trends for nurse retention; also, being able to request articles is an amazing time saver, and has helped tremendously with preparing presentations and articles for publication.

Informing Clinical Decision-Making

The library services offer numerous benefits that can help to improve the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of clinical work. Access to high-quality resources and the librarian's expertise guide users to the best resources for their topics, refine search terms, and assist with literature reviews. The library was highly responsive and able to pull research on expected rates of particular complications after procedures. This freed the clinical team up to pull case information and data. Robert Shapiro was highly helpful in a time-sensitive situation. The library is invaluable in supporting clinical work. The AHEC librarians are instrumental in journal and literature searches. Nursing staff can access information by going to the AHEC Digital Library and looking in journals for current information, or they can ask for a literature search or do it themselves.

Supporting Research and Innovation

The library staff is better at finding supporting information than we ever could be, and we are able to proceed with writing, assured that we have sufficient current information to support our projects well. Many of the resources I am able to locate for my research in both basic science and clinical medicine are not open access and provide only abstract information. Having AHEC Library services helps to educate me and expand my own knowledge base so I may in turn disseminate new and better ideas for novel therapeutics based on sound science.

Testimonials of Appreciation

Feedback to library staff - they are ALWAYS professional and responsive. It's hard to imagine practicing medicine or writing any sort of review or research paper without them. They are critical to literature searches about specific patient or research topics. There is so much information available these days. It's extremely time consuming to locate and harness this valuable information. Utilizing medical librarians has allowed me to focus on my role in creating and maintaining care quality. I am capable at finding information but definitely not efficient and likely not comprehensive in my searches. One instance where they helped has to do with the fact that teenage women have been experiencing often severe pain during a specific procedure, this has been occurring nationwide. They helped pull the articles that guide the standard of care, so that we could review the articles and the quality of the research, and based on them, we are beginning our own study protocol that we believe will help our patients, and hopefully the teenage female population as a whole. Northwest AHEC has been a major factor in the library services at Wilkes Regional Medical Center. The AHEC librarian helped me decide which books to use and to get our first library established. I just have to say that the Northwest AHEC librarians are wonderful!

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