Public Health Outreach Forum: lessons learned.

Abstract

The accompanying article in this report, “Public Health Outreach Forum: Report,” describes the planning process and the program that constituted a forum held at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) on April 4 to 5, 2001. The forum brought together health sciences librarians who had been funded from 1998 to 2001 to conduct information outreach to the public health workforce, along with selected public health professionals. There were twenty-seven such projects represented at the forum: twenty-one of these were funded by NLM through the Partners in Information Access to Public Health Professionals, the remainder were funded through other mechanisms by the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM). The cost of each project, on average, was slightly less than $50,000. The forum was planned to provide a structured format in which to share experiences of reaching out to the public health community from a health-sciences-library base. The underlying intent was to elucidate the collective knowledge and experience gained from this work, which could not be gained from any one project alone. NLM and the Forum Steering Committee were particularly interested in what lessons could be learned from the body of work already done that could be applied toward future outreach efforts. The forum was not intended as a way to evaluate the individual projects. Most of the projects were complete or near completion at the time of the forum. The projects had provided different services, in different settings, to diverse audiences—from training emergency medical system personnel in Alaska about accessing information resources to exhibiting NLM and other resources for school nurses in Pennsylvania—so there was no attempt to compare them according to some a priori metric, which did not exist.

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