 I said, welcome everybody. Thank you for joining our session titled The San Diego Health Information Partnership. My name's Eric Mitchell. I'm the University Library at UC San Diego. And I know it's a little awkward to present, sitting down, but we're using my laptop. We've got one of our panelists remotely, so hopefully you'll just enjoy a more casual presentation setting. I'm joined today by my colleague Misty Jones, who's the director of the Public Library at the San Diego Public Library. And we have online with us at the final four, not the final four, what do you call the last? National Championship. Scott Walter, who is the dean of libraries at San Diego State University. And so after our talk today, Scott, you're heading, I think, over to some arena somewhere. I'm heading to the energy arena. Go Aztecs. Go Aztecs. So we've got maybe, you know, kind of 15 minutes. We'd like to talk with you about the work we've been doing over the last couple years and update you on where we're going. But really, also we've planned to reserve about half our time today just to engage in some conversation. If this is a compelling topic, we'd love to hear what you're thinking about it or how you're working with, I'll say, community organizations, but really our partnership is about working across libraries in a region to address issues that are impactful to the community. All right, so let me start by handing things actually over to Scott. And so Scott, I'll drive the slides. Hopefully you can see them and I'll let you take it away. And Ken, thank you, Eric. And thanks to everyone for indulging me on this Zoom panel. As background on the San Diego Circuit, as Eric said, we're a collaboration of six academic and public libraries in San Diego County, established in 1997 with the initial goal of forming a union catalog and supporting resource sharing by all residents of San Diego County and collaborating on disaster relief planning. The reciprocal resource sharing program remains in effect. And every year we see thousands of titles requested across our academic and public library network. Circuit is governed by the directors of the member libraries and more recently we started looking beyond our resource sharing and some of our more traditional consortial activities to ask what else we could collaborate on that would have an impact across the public and academic library spheres in the county. Our informal mission statement is we support healthy communities by enhancing information access and learning for all library users. We'll discuss a little bit later in our talk. Each of us sees unique value in this collaboration, a collaboration that has grown in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The project that we're updating you on today is one of our collaborative efforts. Next slide, please. While resource sharing isn't our roots, we actually work together in a number of different ways. For example, each year the University of San Diego and San Diego public host a Black History Month event. And San Diego State and San Diego public have worked together for years around our shared interests in children's literature. So in addition to the circuit-wide collaborations, we also have a number of library-to-library collaborations among our members. The more expansive view toward county-wide collaboration that we're discussing today has also opened up new opportunities for these bilateral or trilateral collaborative efforts, as in our current discussions at San Diego State to determine how we might collaborate or build on the collaboration between the SDSU School of Social Work and San Diego Public Library to see how we might bring some of those initiatives back from the public library to our campus. Our largest collaboration currently, however, and the one we wanna talk with you about today is our collaboration around health information. Next slide, please. I'll introduce this collaboration in the next few slides. So before I do, I wanna give a shout out to the advisory team who is leading this work. The team includes representatives from each of our libraries and they've worked diligently over the last two years. They want to highlight their work as we describe the elements of the program. Two members of that team, Margaret Henderson from SDSU and Tricia Lancy from California University of San Marcos, entities, an academic and public library partnership at 1.30 p.m. tomorrow, Eastern time as part of the National Library of Medicine's Health Misinformation Symposium. So if you'd like to get even more information about the frontline work of this collaboration, that is another opportunity. That's tomorrow, 1.30 Eastern National Library of Medicine Health Misinformation Symposium. Next slide. Our collaboration employs the Collective Impact Model as a way to structure our work. Collective Impact is an approach to community organizing and collaboration that grew from work at Stanford and other institutions around 2011. As an approach, Collective Impact has five key aspects. Building a common agenda around a shared vision, identify and tracking shared measurements of success, working together to identify and pursue mutually reinforcing activities. And this is an important element of Collective Impact as it enables partners to pursue efforts that are meaningful to their own organizations while also working in concert with one another toward the larger collective goal. Collective Impact also benefits from regular communication across partners and to ensure that the overhead of this coordination doesn't undermine a team's work. Collective Impact also often includes some sort of backbone support, an individual or small team who helps to coordinate and track the shared work. We discussed the Collective Impact Model 2022 CNI recorded video on this project. So we won't discuss it in more detail here, but we are certainly happy to discuss it in more in Q&A if there's interest. Next slide, please. As I mentioned earlier, circuit directors explored paths in addition to resource sharing. And as we were doing that, we were looking for a common agenda, something that we could work on together that was mutually beneficial and consistent with all of our missions. Inspiration came to us when San Diego County identified health misinformation as a public health crisis. San Diego County's supervisor, Nathan Fletcher, led this effort and the topic resonated with our libraries as each of us had been seeing health information issues play out during the pandemic. Of course, the U.S. Surgeon General was also focused and we found that as we explored what we could do together, there was already a wealth of approaches and strategies available to us. Working on this effort together was also mutually beneficial. For example, the public libraries were seeing a need to distribute credible health information and saw this as an opportunity to be responsive to their community and to community leaders and to more effectively tap subject expertise available among academic health science librarians. The academic libraries were each in the midst of responding to the challenges of the pandemic as well. And we're looking for ways in which we could reach out to our community to promote credible health information as part of the expertise that we could provide to the community from our campuses. This issue was clearly bigger than any of our libraries could tackle on its own and it aligned well with our focus as a consortium on community action and outreach. And leadership at each of our universities was eager to demonstrate the value of academic research in guiding local solutions to issues of broad social concern. Now I'm gonna hand things back to Eric now to talk about the details of the partnership. All right, thanks so much, Scott. So I'm gonna run through the next few slides, somewhat quickly, but I'm glad to, again, slow down in Q&A if there's interest. In our CNI update last year, we talked about project goals and kind of the other work we're doing. And so we'll just hit that at a high level. Maybe the one thing I'll call out here is that we really focused on an inclusive kind of participatory design process with that steering team you saw the last few slides early on which helped build out our collective impact model because one of the big questions we had is, well, how can a library contribute to this countywide effort? And so if you see on the far right of your screen, I actually can't read you to do this because they're both too small for me. Hopefully you can read them. But there are four goals that the county set out or four techniques they said they wanted to use to address health misinformation. And so using a logic model, we were able to kind of work backwards from that to think about specific actions that libraries could take and the resources we had to put into them. And so what did all this work look like? So first we did something that libraries are great at. We built a health information guide and you might recognize live guides here. And so the team worked together to kind of compile credible information curated and make it available to the resource or to the community as a whole. Second, we developed and held events on health information. We had a staff education event where we trained librarians and how to provide health information or health related reference. And we held a community event focused on reproductive rights featuring the authors of Shout your abortion. This author of the community event was amazing, our public library colleagues, and this Steve and Oscar brought their expertise in holding this event and got community partners to show up. I think if there's interest, I will note that this is one of the most politicized things that we undertook in this activity. It was a little surprising to us so we'd be glad to reflect on that or it would love to hear if you found yourself in similar territory after holding some sort of health or otherwise community information event. The team also received the network of the National Library of Medicine grant funding to create an online public education campaign titled Avoid Health Misinformation with 12, or excuse me, 1210 multilingual fact sheets as well as videos. We have created a toolkit for a social media campaign and actually each of our libraries right now is running that social media campaign. And the last note I have here is if you have interest in running something about health information through your social media channels on your libraries, we'd love to talk to you and see if the toolkit we've developed includes messaging and graphics and all sorts of stuff would be of interest. And then finally, this is something hopefully that launched yesterday. Today's the second, the third? Today's the third. So three days ago. We are having bus stop advertisements located around San Diego in communities that the public libraries obviously serve where we feel like this message would be beneficial. And so it'll be interesting to see what uptick looks like on that after we're doing a one month campaign on that. All the bus ads have QR codes on them that point folks back to our information resources. All right, so that was a whirlwind tour of our work. I'm now gonna give it back to Misty to talk about where we're going. All right, so our project team recently reported back to the circuit directors that the goals that were articulated at the beginning of the effort have all been achieved. So we have promoted health information. We supported the county campaign, created collaborative outreach efforts to help all San Diegans be more familiar with how to evaluate credible health information. And through this, we've learned a lot about how to work across our libraries. So just an example of the few lessons that we've learned for truly community wide issues like this, each library saw different and overlapping value. So for example, my library got a lot of political capital from being responsive to the goals of our elected officials. And we are very glad to build on the expertise of the medical librarians in, from our academic libraries. And I understand that Eric that from Eric the ease of which the public libraries engage with the broader San Diego community would have been a big lift for his library. And we've all reflected on the more holistic community engagement that arose through the collaborative effort. So for example, our health information team regularly keeps in touch with Health and Human Services and other agencies. And in fact, we are regularly invited to be present at their events and we're working to build on that relationship and collaboration. And our community, my community engagement library and at San Diego Public Library, Oscar Gettemeyer has reflected several times on the power of just being able to work across our libraries for greater impact. So where do we go from here? So the team proposed several different new project ideas, which we are considering. This was so successful that we didn't want to just end it. So we want to build on our success. We included many of those in the previous slide but we're encouraging the team to evaluate their work and to bring back to us a concept around a broader effort titled information issues for social impact. Our vision is using collective impact to extend this collaboration so that we can build a pipeline of collaboration and community outreach across our libraries. So the image on the screen is one of the bus ad image and you can see that we're promoting it in both Spanish and English, which is really important for our community. The image as we're working on building a sustainable model for this approach, we're thinking about the role of funding, project leadership, group participation and other elements. And as I conclude, I'll just add one, one additional observation that emerged from our discussion that this has so much value to us because each of our organizations gets to translate our success to both our internal and our external stakeholders. So for UCSD, it's about the collective impact framing. For SDSU, they have the president's big ideas, research issues that focus on social concern at SDSU. And then for San Diego Public Library, we have an equity focus in the city of San Diego and it's also about access to information for our patrons. So this type of initiative is successful in part because it helps each library demonstrate to our senior leadership, to our stakeholders, to our elected officials, that we are making a contribution to the larger vision of the city, the county, the organization, while also establishing a meaningful cross-organizational collaboration that is often an unrealized aspirational goal of each organization independently. So thank you, and we're happy to answer questions or would love to hear from you all. Yeah, thank you. As we open it up here, I'm curious, Scott, if you have any observations you'd like to add in. No, I think you guys did a great job and Misty really summed it up that this is a great example of that collective impact that can also then come back and have an impact locally. Each of our institutions is very different. We have overlapping but distinct stakeholders and we have leadership that has distinct goals and aspirations for our institutions and for our libraries. And we've been able to come together through this process to meet both those local goals and those collective goals. Thank you. All right, so questions or observations? Yeah, Todd. Yeah, hi, Todd, can you see a light? Thank you, I'd love to presentation. I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about how it started, did this amount of health misinformation, is that something you guys picked or is it a challenging job to you, or are you carrying too much? We actually picked this. So we did it in response. We were looking for, I think we've been talking for a couple of years about how could we work together to create a project that really would have kind of county-wide implications and a county-wide impact. And as Scott mentioned, one of our county commissioners, Nathan Fletcher, declared health misinformation as a crisis in San Diego. And so it was kind of perfect. It almost handed to us on a platter. So it was perfect because we had expertise in different ways and knew that we would be able to come together to address this. And by coming together, really, like we said, have a holistic approach. Oh, now it's on. Okay. Thanks. My name is Josh. I'm from the University of Maryland College Park. So it sounds like you had buy-in from the highest levels with your goals. Unfortunately, I think there are many jurisdictions today where you'll find that perhaps there wouldn't be buy-in from the highest levels for things like combating misinformation. And so I'm just wondering, or things that might be more controversial. So Eric, you alluded to the abortion question. So I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts about how this might play out other places where the situation might not be so fruitful on the ground. Yeah, I mean, I'll maybe provide a first half of an answer. I think the reproductive rights area is where we see that playing out intensely in libraries, right? There's a lot of legislation that is beginning to govern what educators and librarians can do. And so we are very fortunate to live in California, to work in California. And I think having, this kind of relates to the answer Misty was giving a moment ago, taking some inspiration from an elected official or for something that has a little bit more, something behind it, I think gave us a lot of wind. And I wanted, you know, so Misty, Scott and I are only, we're three of the seven directors that are part of circuit. So the Jen Fabiates, Sam Marcos, Miguel Acosta, it was the county library and Sandy, you're so great. We have two public library systems. And so everybody I think saw that and kind of came around it. The reproductive rights event, what was surprising there, maybe I could hand it over to Misty to comment more if you're comfortable, is there was a group of people showed up with a plan to shape that conversation in a way that we didn't anticipate. So that was part one. Following the event, what we found was that conservative news media engaged in what appeared to be a coordinated effort to kind of draw us into a broader negative conversation. And so that really, that was one of those cases where I think all of us became more risk aware. So immediately I started communicating with my campus to say, hey, this is a new cycle that could be growing. We had to get some counsel on actually how to approach that. And so maybe that would be my one observation for libraries in places where they don't feel like they have that full support is to do their like work and find supporters. All right, so Misty, what would you add in there? Yeah, I think that's, and what was beneficial because in a public library setting, we are going to get across the board all different demographics, right? So like we had the event was at the public library and because of that, we did have kind of protesters show up with the very specific intent on disrupting the event. And that was the risk. I think if we had had it at UCSD or SDSU, you can limit, you can manage that attendance, I think, and there's a very different. But for us, it was about being very factual and making sure that everything that we were doing, that we were presenting was backed up with research, was backed up with evidence, was backed up with factual. And that was why for the public library was so important. And so it was so beneficial for us to have a partnership with academic because that gave us credibility. And that gave us more authority because we did have medical libraries and we did have experts in that field that were providing the information. So I think that's, a lot of times when something is more politically charged like that, we have to rely on just providing the facts. And no one can, I mean, unfortunately people can dispute the facts, but you do have the backup for that. Thanks. I saw, I'll observe in my, like coming to San Diego was the first time in my 26 or 27 year career, I began working with public libraries more deliberately. So it's amazing, public libraries do things that academic libraries can't even conceive of on a daily basis. I don't do, is anybody else in the room engaged in a public library or a community library partnership? They're just kind of similar. And so I wonder, could we invite you to reflect on that a little bit if you'd feel comfortable? Maybe add a microphone. So my name is Theresa Nott. I am with Virginia Commonwealth University. I'm an associate dean, but the director of the Health Sciences Library. So this is a lot more in our wheelhouse. Excuse me, my allergies. So we actually have a consumer health library that's a partnership with our hospital and our medical auxiliary. And we use them as the jumping off spot to work with public libraries. We've used grant funding from the network of the National Library of Medicine. We have somebody who's with the RML out of Pittsburgh here. And we've gone out into the community to teach, work with public librarians to make sure that they have the tools they need to assess health information. It's my understanding that one of the highest percentages of questions that come into public libraries are actually health information questions. So it's really important that they see us as a partner, that if they can't handle a question that they can refer to us, whether that's through our Health and Wellness Library or directly to the Health Sciences Library. Wow, thank you. Sure. That's awesome. Other questions or observations? If you're not partnering with your public library, I would invite you to do so. It's beneficial for both parties, I think. We have benefited so much. And just like you said, the questions that we get in libraries were generalists, so public libraries are generalists. And so we don't have, we do get a lot of legal questions. We get a lot of medical questions. We get a lot of things that we do have to refer that we do have to find. And we also rely so heavily on partnerships because especially for us, we're general fund, city general fund, our budget. And so we don't have a lot of budget for programming and initiatives to this extent. So we benefit so much from the partnerships that we have. And they're just continuing, as Scott said, continuing to grow. And I think not only with individual, but as the group. And I'm excited about, we have so many social issues in San Diego that we could tackle. So I'm excited to learn what the team is gonna bring back to propose for the next project. So we're looking at, I think we're leaning more towards like climate justice or environmental justice, which is a, the city has a climate action plan, a very aggressive climate action plan. And so that's something that is going to impact all of us, but particularly just the community that the public library serves. And for us not having that expertise to be able to address a lot of the issues that they're gonna face, that's where we're gonna really benefit from having our academic partners. And maybe I'll use the last minute we have here to kind of provide the academic library perspective from what Misty's saying. You know, early in the pandemic, you were handing out test kits. You were coordinating, I think food events. We did food events. We did vaccination clinics. We did testing clinics. And so this was part of this. I mean, my previous point, public libraries are amazing, but this is why the climate justice issue really, it popped up for several many members of our steering committee and for some directors is because, you know, in Southern California, California in general climate can have a massive destabilizing impact on people's lives. And we have this network. You have 30, some of our branches, 36 branches. The county has like 12. 33. 33. Yeah. And so the just the, you know, in our geographic region, the libraries are very important centers. And so I think part of our vision behind climate justice focus is to, you know, it's not quite resource sharing, but like bringing that resource sharing ethos of more equitable access and kind of a more universal kind of concept around how libraries are serving the community at large. And so it'd be interesting to see how that plays out. Again, if you've worked in that space, we'd love to kind of hear what you're thinking or what your lessons learned are. Cause we're just think early on, as Misty said earlier, our partnership, you know, where Scott said our partnership has been around for 30 some odd years. And I think we've got a good path we're going on here. And I'm excited to see it before. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say 20, what 25 years of just resource sharing. So it's, it's nice to see it move into a next evolution. I saw, I'll look around the room to see if there's a last question or comment. Otherwise Scott, good luck tonight. Yeah, go Aztecs. Thank you. We're, we're, we leave. And I look forward to hearing what, what folks have to say when I touch base with Eric and Misty when we get back home. Thanks to everybody. Thank you everybody. Thank you.