Abstract
Background: Building on a decade of successful nursing and hybrid medical programs, a private university funded a new regional health sciences campus in a metropolitan area several states away. This endeavor aligns with trends such as international branch campuses (and libraries) and consolidating hospital and academic libraries into digital libraries and learning commons. While the central University Libraries has a history of supporting programs at a distance through hybrid pathways, both the Libraries’ values and accreditation standards required a library facility and comprehensive access to staff on the new campus. The Libraries hired a librarian to launch and staff the new space and liaise to counterparts several states away.
Description: This poster presents the solo librarian’s experience with planning, implementing, and adapting a new space and existing library resources and services to serve the needs of students, faculty, and staff based on the regional campus, in addition to a new community of local clinical faculty and residents through a new education alliance. This poster will discuss the process of developing partnerships, service models, marketing and outreach, as well as creating efficient procedures between the libraries on the central and regional campuses. Incidentally, this poster will touch on the experience of an early-career reference and instruction librarian new to medical and allied health librarianship while cross-training, networking, and simultaneously launching the satellite.
Conclusion: This poster will demonstrate the process and lessons learned through materials and visuals of the first ten months of the satellite library. The aim is to share processes, findings, and reflections with other solo librarians as well as other libraries that may need to undertake similar ventures inside and outside of their regions. Future projects will include reviewing informal and formal feedback from students at the end of the current academic year as part of existing data collection for program accreditations as well as the design of a comprehensive study of the satellite library’s efficacy through student perceptions of library support to include future programs that are matriculating on a scaffolded basis.