The Medical Library Association Librarians Without Borders “E-Library Training Initiative”

Submitted by Lenny Rhine

The initiative:

• was begun by the Medical Library Association in 2007 with the support of the Elsevier Foundation;

• has subsequently received funding from the Elsevier Foundation, allowing the program to continue through 2012; and

• is coordinated by MLA member Lenny Rhine, FMLA, emeritus librarian, University of Florida.

Since 2007:

• Forty-one workshops have been conducted in twenty-three countries about HINARI (www.who.int/ hinari/) and other Research4Life programs (http:// www.research4life.org/).

• Programs have ranged from four-day “train the trainers” workshops to one-day “updates,” author­ship skills courses, and four-hour short courses.

• The courses have been conducted in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) HINARI Access to Research in Health Programme, WHO regional offices, and the Information Training and Outreach Centre for Africa (ITOCA).

• Participants have included information professionals, clinicians and other health professionals, researchers, lecturers, and ministry of health staff members.

 In addition to the workshops:

• Training modules have been updated, and more than twenty new mod­ules have been created, including ones to highlight HINARI resources, information literacy, WHO resources, and authorship skills.

• Numerous training tools and presentations have been developed on topics that include access problems and solutions, the basics of HINARI, “do’s and don’ts,” and a HINARI overview for registered institutions.

• Distance learning short courses have been developed for HINARI and Research4Life Partner programs Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA) and Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE), using Moodle software. The HINARI short course is being trans­lated into several languages. See mla.mrooms.org and moodle.itoca.org.

• For librarians from industrialized countries, a “train the trainers” course has been developed. Participants train visitors and students from HINARI-eligible countries. This course has been taught at the Medical Library Association, European Association of Health Information and Libraries, and International Congress on Medical Librarianship meetings and is available online at mla.mrooms.org

Lenny Rhine

E-Library Training Initiative Coordinator

E-mail: rhinel@ufl.edu