Three Health Sciences Library (HSL) librarians and Lori Leibold, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Allied Health Sciences, successfully earned funding for a National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Library of Medicine (NLM) Administrative Supplement.
Dr. Leibold is principal investigator of the parent grant from the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) titled, “Susceptibility to and release from masking in infancy and childhood,” which addresses the maturation of children’s hearing across childhood.
The two-year NIH/NLM award will supply nearly $50,000 in salary support for informationist services provided by HSL librarians Barrie Hayes, MSLS, bioinformatics and translational science librarian; Kate McGraw, MA, MLS, liaison to the School of Dentistry and assistant department head of user services; and Barbara Rochen Renner, PhD, library services evaluation specialist and liaison for the Department of Allied Health Sciences.
Each HSL librarian will serve as an informationist in support of a specific aim of Leibold’s project, such as streamlining the way the research team manages literature; helping disseminate results of their research with providers, research participants, and potential participants; analyzing and recommending data management plans and systems; and creating an efficient way to make a collection of audio cues available to other researchers in the field.
HSL informationists will partner with Leibold’s research team to conduct a systematic review of the hearing development literature to consolidate what is known about the time course of auditory development, to identify gaps in the research, and to prioritize areas for further research.
“Having an informationist’s help to scope this systematic review to include visual development research, where answers to developmental time course questions are better understood, will help advance the aims of this project,” Leibold states in the application.
Because the data and network of research collaborators on this grant has grown since its inception, infrastructure for managing and archiving a variety of data formats is increasingly necessary. HSL librarians have knowledge of campus data management tools, data needs assessment, and best practices for data and literature management that will improve the research team’s efficiency and effectiveness in accessing, archiving, and sharing research data and literature.
An HSL team will design prototypes and build a plan for optimized web, multimedia, and print-based outreach of the research findings to a general audience of families and caregivers of subjects and to prospective subjects. They will also explore avenues to publicize the unique benefit informationists and librarians can provide to research teams.
“This project is an opportunity for the HSL to explore how our librarians can impact the research process and meet a variety of needs for research teams using our expertise in information and data management,” said Interim Director of the HSL Jim Curtis. “This type of engagement is integral to meeting our goal of fostering collaboration between the library and health sciences research teams across campus.”
Serving in this role addresses the library’s strategic goal to actively support the research lifecycle, ensuring researchers’ success from problem identification to dissemination of results, which is part of its joint strategic plan with the University Library.