East Brunswick Public Library

2 Jean Walling Civic Center, East Brunswick, New Jersey  08816

Phone: 732-390-6764 / http://ebpl.org 

Got a health question?  Ask a Librarian. 

Just for the Health of It!

Mary Ellen Firestone, Library Director

East Brunswick Public Library, Jan 2010

     The East Brunswick Public Library has a new consumer health initiative called “Just for the Health of It!”  Thanks to a generous “Senior Spaces” contract with INFOLINK, the library now offers a dedicated health space, a specially designed health interface computer and a custom research form for medical requests.    The initiative was designed to meet the growing need for simplified and quality health information by baby boomers and their elders and is dedicated to supporting a wide-range of age groups, literacy levels, technical abilities, language and cultural backgrounds.  

      The Just for the Health of It initiative grew out of an observed shift in reference patterns over the past few years. As more people of every age group became proficient searching on the Internet, librarians needed to shift reference from the “ready reference” types of questions to the more complicated, in-depth research questions.  As Information Specialists, librarians needed to market our ability to guide users past google searches and into more specialized websites and databases.  One type of reference question stood out:  East Brunswick librarians spotted an upward trend in the number of health-related questions that we received, many from seniors who desired concise and understandable information or new immigrants in search of medical information, sometimes in their native language.  Not a day would go by that librarians didn’t receive questions from customers in desperate need of easy-to-understand, layman’s explanations of a diagnosis.  It wasn’t uncommon for customers to drop by the Information Desk on their way home from the doctor’s office and ask a librarian for a simple but thorough explanation of their diagnosis.    We saw an opportunity to transform the East Brunswick Public Library into “the place” for the best health information around by providing top quality medical book collections, a dedicated health portal, and a custom medical research service.   

      Concern for good health is universal and our new health initiative is built around the premise that comprehensive health information should be multilayered and provide universal access to information regardless of age, educational levels, sexual orientation, cultural differences or language barriers.  Using information gleaned from a telephone survey conducted as part of the “Senior Spaces” contract and the generous assistance of a local doctor, the new “pulled out” health collection includes six headings that deliberately avoid medical jargon and embrace a lifestyle:   Healthful Aging; Staying Fit; Living with Diabetes; Your Cancer Toolkit; Heart Health, and Emotional Wellness. 

      The library decided to move some newer books from our general collection and add many circulating and reference books newly purchased with INFOLINK contract money for health conditions and diseases identified as the most prevalent in our consulting doctor’s practice. We broadened the scope of our book collections with recommendations from the Health Sciences Library Association of New Jersey (HSLANJ).  The librarians at the MD Anderson Cancer Institute in Houston, Texas, were also enormously helpful in their recommendation of the best cancer resources, including the books about the latest therapies, healthful diets while going through treatment, and consumer magazines for those currently dealing with cancer.  In addition, they recommended top quality websites for cancer treatments, drugs, clinical trials, and explanations of lab tests that are used by the MD Anderson Cancer Center’s own library. A new health computer with access to licensed databases and links to only the most authoritative Internet sources was added to the space and a custom research service for those customers not comfortable with performing their own research was offered by a Medical Search Request Form available online and in paper form by the new computer.

      The unique feature of the Just for the Health of It section is that the health computer offers links to quality medical information in other languages through Medline and other specialized websites.  East Brunswick is rich in cultural diversity, and giving our new neighbors access to health information in their native language is critical and oftentimes the only way to communicate the information.    The language portals we made available include Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Farsi, Gujarati, Russian, Korean, Punjabi, Tagalong, Portuguese, Urdu, and Ukrainian.  We recently purchased a consumer health magazine written entirely in Russian that is comparable to the English magazine Prevention, and have ordered two other consumer health magazines being delivered directly from mainland China for our Chinese-speaking neighbors.  In addition, the library recently signed a license for access to the Well-Connected Database, a quality database of reports on the most common health conditions that are edited by physicians at Harvard Medical School.   We are very excited about a newly discovered audio health database called Healthy Roads Media which provides health information that you can Hear, Read, or Watch depending on your visual impairment, reading ability, or inability to speak English.    Healthy Roads Media has articles available in English, as well as Arabic, Farsi, Korean, Russian, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and other languages.

      Healthful Aging; Staying Fit; Living with Diabetes; Your Cancer Toolkit; Heart Health, and Emotional Wellness:  each collection is organized by Dewey number, yet the collections are holistic in their approach.  For example, the Mayo Clinic’s Essential Diabetes textbook sits alongside the What Do I Eat Now?  A Step-by-Step Guide for Eating Right with Type 2 Diabetes.   Our Healthful Aging category includes the most current medical books dealing with memory loss, macular degeneration, bone loss, foot problems, and thyroid to name a few, alongside positive and upbeat books about preserving memory and staying young and healthy.  Heart Health includes cholesterol, high blood pressure, and strokes, along with the latest cookbooks for heart-healthy, low sodium, and low cholesterol diets.

      Several steps were taken to prepare the staff for the new initiative.  Karen Parry (Photo above), the Manager of Information Services began by reaching out to several area hospitals to share with them our intention of marketing the library’s consumer health initiative and brainstorming with them on local and national resources.  Karen also reached out to the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, who were delighted to hear that we would provide consumer health information in multiple languages.  East Brunswick Public Library is one of the few public libraries accepted into the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM) for the Middle Atlantic Region by virtue of the fact that we are providing customized medical research for consumers who needed to overcome language barriers or special needs.  This new alliance will afford us access to the most current medical research through Pub Med on Docline, a higher level database that will supplement the resources available to the general public.  Finally, we conducted a staff training to set the parameters of what is appropriate for librarians to answer and what must be referred back to a doctor.  The quiet launch of our new service has been wildly successful with over 100 in-depth questions answered to date.  We are still in the process of rolling out the service and are confident that it is a niche that was just waiting to be filled.

Testimonials from our customers (used with permission):

Bill Mancuso states:  I think the new health library collection is a great innovation, very cutting-edge.  The Library is always looking for ways that they can improve what they do for East Brunswick residents.  I appreciate your enthusiasm and being so helpful and efficient in locating macular degeneration information.   I have done other research on my own, but you have found some helpful & useful layman-oriented information.  I do not have children in the East Brunswick school system.  The Library is the main place where I get a return on my taxes.  Feel free to forward this to the Mayor.

Marni Cohen states:   Since the first call to Karen asking for help researching ways to overcome migraines, something which has afflicted me for decades, she has identified information which I found difficult, if not impossible, to locate on my own.   Karen has not stopped helping to locate even more ideas and/or possible answers. She is an invaluable resource for our community and I feel honored to have been one of the first recipients of her skills at medical research.   Thank you Karen!