Faculty-librarian partnership: a practical approach at Faculty of Pharmacy – University of Lisbon

Abstract

University libraries have played a key role in scientific research as well as in the support of education-related activities. Their main goal is to provide its users with immediate access to relevant information through updated information sources. Science evolves rapidly and so the daily information needs on health matters are large and require rapid access to the sources. As services to support research, Libraries should create and develop mechanisms that answer positively to these issues. These services should look at users as customers seeking a service - information - and for whom all the efforts will be made to respond at all information needs. So, it's necessary to adjust their services to new needs and kinds of users, more dependent on the use of information technology but not always prepared for the overwhelming information that is discovered on the Web. However, Librarians face a constant struggle to convince students and faculty that information skills are important and needed by all. The argument is that everything is available on the Web. If, with the advances in technology and the increased technology skills of undergraduates, it is easy to find "something" to answer most any question and students can apparently find answers to simple information needs, it’s not more trustful that students are unable to explore deeper concepts or determine if their answers are rigorous. Since students feel successful in answering simple questions, they don't believe they need information literacy instruction (1). At the same time, for technology, funding agencies and competition reasons faculty is forced to reorganize the curriculum in particular content and teaching. Similar pressure is felt by university librarians to rethink their role in higher education. The need of students and faculty for viable information skills is moving librarians into the teaching field (2). In that way, the Library of the Faculty of Pharmacy at University of Lisbon has been, in the last few years, establishing a variety of activities in partnership with the academic colleagues to work more closely with them and to try to integrate information skills into the curriculum. In this paper, we present all the efforts done to find the best way to get our goals and the role of activities that were made during the lasts years, as training sessions, libraries presentations, collaboration with some master’s courses and integration of information skills in the pharmacy degree course, among others.

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