Congratulations to NNLM Region 5 Funding Recipients!

Posted by Kristi Torp on November 4th, 2022 Posted in: Funding, News from NNLM Region 5

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We are thrilled to congratulate seven organizations selected for competitive funding awards from NNLM Region 5 to improve access to health information, increase engagement with research and data, and promote awareness and use of NLM resources in local communities.

Continue reading to learn more about their exciting projects now underway between May 1, 2022 – April 30, 2023.

Technology Improvement Award Recipient

The Lake Washington Institute of Technology (Kirkland, WA) was funded for their Educating Dental Health Students Through Simulation, Active Learning, and Virtual Modalities project. This project will increase active learning for dental students by creating a library of high-quality hand skills videos that will be utilized in a computer lab for simulation training and hand skills assessments. The materials will be available for downloading and viewing for future cohorts and interested public through Open Educational Resources via the college library.

Outreach and Engagement Award Recipients

California State University, Chico was awarded funding for their project, Rural Access to Health Information: Training Community Health Navigators in Northern California to Expand Access to Virtual Health Information Tools. The project seeks to improve access to medical information for rural communities in Northern California by training health navigators (from Home Visitors and Help Me Grow) on Medline Plus and other reliable, vetted health information resources. Trainings will be in English and Spanish and will include individual pre-work, in-person group training, and follow up virtual check-ins, coaching, and evaluation.

San Francisco State University was funded to address the public health challenge of racism within the context of dental care in their project Challenging Racism Within the Context of Dental Care Through Ethnic and Local Media and With Libraries as Safe, Neutral Spaces for Reaching Medically Underserved Populations. The project aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of utilizing public libraries as alternative, neutral spaces for underserved racial and ethnic minority prospective patients: (1) to acquire new information about existing local dental care services, (2) to navigate and gain access to these services, and (3) to share their dental health experiences. Up to seven dental health fairs at San Francisco System public libraries in medically underrepresented areas will bring together prospective patients, libraries, and university students to create stronger trust and understanding between these groups to further alleviate health disparities. Prospective patients will receive dental health materials developed by pre-health/dental students.

The University of California, San Diego was funded to spearhead a consortium of six prominent public and academic libraries in San Diego County to develop the project Building Resilience to Health Misinformation in San Diego County, California Communities: An Online Outreach Toolkit for Library Workers. This project will develop an online outreach toolkit to help library workers mitigate health misinformation and engage community members for improved health information literacy. The toolkit, available in English and Spanish, will focus on raising awareness of health misinformation and teaching techniques for evaluating health claims, finding reliable sources, and responding to misinformation ethically.

Data Engagement Award Recipients

The University of California, San Francisco was funded to create the Data Journalism Course in a Box: The COVID Tracking Project Archives. The project will create a reusable course module for data journalism faculty that will be available under a permissive open-source license. The course will use data from the COVID Tracking Project (CTP), a volunteer, citizen run organization that tracked the first year of the COVID pandemic and has some of the most clean and well-documented datasets on the pandemic.  Utilizing these datasets, metadata, annotations, and editorial content describing the methods and theories of the CTP, the course will help journalism students and public health communicators learn methodologies of data collection, communication and transparency in community-science projects.

The University of Hawai’i at Manoa (UHM) Library was funded for their project Mālama i ka ‘ikepili Caring for Data: Supporting Hawai’i’s Research Data Needs through a Library Data Services Program.  The UHM Library will develop a biomedical data management and data sharing course optimized for Hawai’i researchers and students. The funding will allow UHM to conduct a data needs assessment, develop the asynchronous online course, and organize a live symposium as its culmination in Spring 2023. This project will lay the foundation for data services in the University of Hawaii Medical Library going forward.

San Diego State University was awarded funding for their Training Health Sciences Students to Find Data for Local and Global Research and Service Project which aims to help future health and social sciences professionals learn how to find and use data to help their communities. Participants will attend workshops to learn how to find government and other open sources of data and learn citation management and data analysis and visualization. The workshops will also cover ethics, social justice, health disparities, and the value of open science.

We are delighted to support these seven wonderful projects, and also wish to thank each and every applicant who submitted a proposal for 2022 funding opportunities offered by Region 5!

If you are interested in applying for a future award, stay tuned for more funding opportunities!  We have just released a pre-announcement about an upcoming funding cycle for projects planned to occur between May 1, 2023 – April 30, 2024. If you have any questions or have ideas about projects you would like to propose for funding, please contact Emily Hamstra, Region 5 Assistant Director (ehamstra@uw.edu).