Scholarly Snippets: A Collaborative Research Series Between Six College of Osteopathic Medicine Libraries

This blog post has multiple authors in addition to Joanne Mullenbach: Katie Hoskins, Kyle D. Robinson-California Health Sciences University; Molly Montgomery-Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine; Abbey Griffith-Kansas City University; Meghan DiRito, Jackie Werner-Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine; Lisa A. Ennis, Nicole Mitchell-Alabama College of Osteopathic Medicine; Kelli Hines-Western University of Health Sciences; Megan De Armond-Touro University

INTRODUCTION

Scholarly Snippets is a collaborative research series started by six colleges of osteopathic medicine libraries. The goal of this project is to enhance the research footprint and provide support for researchers and librarians within osteopathic medical schools across the country. Each 30-minute session features topics aimed at advancing research and scholarship. Throughout the course of this series, our project has expanded beyond the original six osteopathic medical libraries to include additional medical librarians.

ORIGINS OF THE PROJECT

In the spring of 2020, leaders from the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine (AACOM) expressed a critical need for AACOM to enhance its research footprint. In January of 2021, Joanne Muellenbach, the Health Sciences Library Director for California Health Sciences University, sent emails to other osteopathic medical college library directors to garner interest in starting up a research and scholarship web-series. Librarians from five additional osteopathic medical college libraries expressed interest and began meeting to plan sessions in February of 2021. The first Scholarly Snippets session took place in March of 2021. Since then, Scholarly Snippets has hosted two sessions per month, with the exception of the month of July.

Scholarly Snippets began with librarians from six osteopathic medical libraries: California Health Sciences University, Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine, Kansas City University, Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, Alabama College of Osteopathic Medicine, and Western University of Health Sciences. The project has expanded to include presenters from Touro University and the University of Nevada Reno School of Medicine.

SESSIONS

Scholarly Snippets has hosted 28 sessions since March 2021. Throughout these sessions, 620 attendees have joined the live sessions and our YouTube channel has accumulated 1,338 views and has 82 subscribers. We began our own YouTube channel to provide access to the sessions to those that weren’t able to attend live, and to improve our access and outreach to our communities. This has increased our impact and provided additional data on what topics are of the highest interest to our communities.

Session attendance has increased. We had 133 attendees in the academic year 2020-2021. In the academic year 2021-2022, we had a total of 487 attendees. We had 166 attendees from August to December 2021 and 321 attendees from January to June 2022.

We ask attendees to fill out a post session survey. We have had a total of 273 survey responses. We originally only asked if an attendee was faculty, staff, student, resident or other. We added “librarian” as a category in April 2022. Since then, we learned that the majority of the attendees who fill out the post session survey are librarians. Our survey shows that as of June 22, 2022, 17% are faculty, 2% are staff, 4% are students, 0% are residents, 3% identify as “other”, and 74% are librarians.

CONCLUSION

This project started with a goal to improve and support scholarly output within our institutional communities, aiming to provide information on topics related to research and scholarly work. Data from the post-session surveys show the majority of attendees are librarians, with faculty, staff, and students making up less than 20% of overall attendees. Given the data from the sessions, our project has become more of a Train the Trainer resource. This has led us to reevaluate our project goals to better meet the needs of our audience in the future.

We’ve learned over the past year that collectively, we know more than we think we do. The multi-institutional collaboration allows us to rely on the expertise of others within our field to provide a wide range of topics for these sessions. We’ve also learned that the short 30 minute format is appreciated by our attendees as shorter sessions are more focused on a specific topic without overwhelming our audience.

Scholarly Snippets sessions will return in August of 2022 with 10 new webinars. You can see a full list of future sessions and sign up here.