An analysis of reference services usage at a regional academic health sciences library

摘要

The University of Illinois Crawford Library of the Health Sciences at Rockford (CLHS-R) has been serving University of Illinois College of Medicine faculty, students, and staff and the area community since 1972. CLHS-R is a regional academic health sciences library for the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The mission of the UIC University Library includes “ensuring that faculty, students and other users have access to a broad and diversified range of scholarly resources” and “engaging in outreach to the community” [ 1 ]. In keeping with this mission, CLHS-R welcomes members of the community into the library and provides borrowing privileges to Illinois residents with proper identification. The collection at CLHS-R primarily focuses on the curriculum and research needs of the faculty, students, and staff from the colleges of medicine, nursing, and public health. The secondary focus of the collection is on consumer health. At CLHS-R, the consumer health collection has been pulled from the regular collection and resides in a quiet reading area in the back of the library that offers privacy. Providing health information to consumers is a common practice among academic health sciences libraries [ 2 , 3 ].