Friday, July 16, 2021

The Librarian Reserve Corps


I've been fascinated with
The Librarian Reserve Corps ever since I first heard about it sometime last year.  It showed the value and solutions Health Science Librarians brought to the pandemic.  It made me proud to be part of this profession!

The Librarian Reserve Corps formed as a volunteer organization in response to the Covid pandemic and the World Health Organization (WHO) needing the expert skills of Librarians to help search, organize, and manage the unprecedented onslaught of new data that was coming out on the topic.

2 recent articles have been published about The Librarian Reserve Corps:

Librarian Reserve Corps: Literature indexing and metadata enhancement (LIME) observations from a year in the field

Jessica Callaway

Journal of Health Information and Libraries Australiasia; April 2021: 2(1); 35-45.


The Librarian Reserve Corps: An Emergency Response.
Callaway J.    Med Ref Serv Q. 2021 Jan-Mar;40(1):90-102. doi: 10.1080/02763869.2021.1873627.PMID: 33625329.  


If you want to learn more, check out the following webinar, and find out how you can get involved and be part of The Librarian Reserve Corps, too!



Evidence-Based Librarianship: Building the Base as We Respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic / Infodemic.  

Webinar for IFLA posted to YouTube on June 11, 2021.  

The Librarian Reserve Corps is an international volunteer network of over 140 medical and public health librarians from 14 countries, working in partnership with the World Health Organization in response to public health emergencies.

The COVID-19 pandemic sparked a dramatic increase in publishing, including the dissemination of scientific research in preprints, press releases and news stories, as well as the creation of new and specialized databases and search portals. This challenged traditional systems and standards for organization and searching.

This webinar will describe the primary initiatives undertaken by the Librarian Reserve Corps to streamline efforts and encourage sharing and collaboration among partners to inform the evidence-base health information response to COVID-19, focusing on the evolution and preliminary results of two key projects

1) A database validation study of specialized COVID-19 literature databases, jointly led with the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technology in Health.

2) The development of best practices for searching during public health emergencies.

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