 Building resilience to health misinformation in local communities, a public and academic libraries partnership in San Diego County, California. Our objective is to mitigate health misinformation and build resilience to it in the local communities of San Diego County, California, and our project is a collaboration of public and academic libraries in the county. Our strategy is to share reliable health information and support health information literacy. We use a multi-pronged approach that includes information sharing, training and events, strategic partnerships and community engagement. Our collaboration is through San Diego Circuit. Circuit is a consortium of two public and four academic libraries in San Diego County. Our association serves academic users and the general public of over 3.3 million people. Circuit has historically focused on an interlibrary loan service among members. Additionally, our libraries regularly collaborate on strategic information initiatives. In 2021, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors declared health misinformation a public health crisis. This declaration acknowledged the negative impact of misinformation on health awareness and choices during the COVID-19 pandemic. San Diego County has launched a campaign to counteract health misinformation and build our community's resilience to it. The campaign includes a strategy that aligns with the Surgeon General's recommendations for the problem. Public libraries will support the county's campaign by developing health information programs and building community resilience to health misinformation. This effort directly aligns with the public service mission of our academic institutions and public libraries. In the early stages of our work, we found that many university, regional government and community groups share our focus on promoting health information literacy. We recently kicked off the project work in January 2022. Therefore, this project briefing will describe our preliminary work, specifically our planning process and our style of collaboration. Let's look at some background details on health misinformation. Misinformation is false or misleading information contradicting the best available evidence. People may unintentionally share misinformation. Therefore, it is different from disinformation, where people intentionally spread false information to deceive others. For examples of health misinformation, the CDC has outlined common myths and rumors about COVID-19 vaccines, which they disprove with facts. The CDC has another webpage that counters health myths about cholesterol. Health misinformation poses significant risks. It may cause confusion, so mistrust, harm people's health, and undermine public health efforts in society. Therefore, the Surgeon General has declared that limiting the spread of health misinformation is a moral and civic imperative that will require a whole of society effort. There are global, national and regional efforts to mitigate health misinformation. The WHO, CDC, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and the Surgeon General have launched campaigns to counteract health misinformation. The Office of the Surgeon General has developed a community toolkit of particular note. It provides tools for the general public to, quote, understand, identify, and stop misinformation, and help others do the same. At our regional level, the San Diego County government developed a webpage to help citizens evaluate COVID-19 information. The county also hosts COVID-19 public health misinformation panels. They are online meetings for county residents to engage with health experts on questions about COVID-19 and health misinformation. How we designed our initiatives. We used an inclusive participatory process to design work for broad impact, to coordinate our different expertise and resources, and align our partner libraries' missions and services. We relied on an advisory team of nine librarians to design and plan our health information initiatives. Our team includes representation from all six libraries in San Diego circuit. Here's our process. First we analyzed recommendations for mitigating health misinformation. Focusing on guidance from San Diego County and the Surgeon General, we identified four action areas that resonated with library work. They include information sharing, educational services, community engagement, and strategic partnerships. Next, we brainstormed health information initiatives for each action area. We generated ideas at individual and team levels to surface our different perspectives and organizational values. We strived to accommodate these differences in our planning. Afterwards, we prioritized high impact initiatives that have a high ease of doing. We conducted multiple rounds of scoring and voting on their proposed projects. An essential element was graphing our ratings on a two by two matrix of impact scores versus ease of doing scores to focus on those projects in the top right hand corner. Next, we collaboratively drafted project plans for each priority. Finally, we presented our project plans to the library directors of all circuit organizations for review, revision, and approval. We checked for mutually beneficial and complementary work across our different organizations throughout our design process. Consequently, each library has the necessary resources, expertise, and mission alignment to succeed in this work. Our planning resulted in eight prioritized initiatives to carry out in 2022. We will present these initiatives in a logic model. A logic model can show the relationships among our library resources, activities, and intended outputs. The model can illustrate how this work supports the impact areas of the county's campaign against health misinformation. Here's the logic model. First, we identified the requisite resources to develop health information literacy in local communities. The resources include staffing and partners who will contribute to the activities, funding for programs and services, technology for web publishing and communications, organizational support to prioritize health information literacy, and community networks for public engagement. Through these resources, we can conduct activities that build community resilience to health misinformation. Specifically, there are eight initiatives. Promote health information sources, build health reference skills, and a referral guide for library workers. Develop a library network for collaborative health information work. Conduct instruction and events to support health information literacy. Engage public officials to collaborate on health information initiatives. Engage community advocates to promote library services and programs. Invite health experts to work with libraries on misinformation mitigation and train health workers on health information literacy support with the public. We categorized our initiatives between A-type and B-type. The first four initiatives, the A-type, represent high impact and high ease of doing initiatives. Our advisory team of circuit librarians will lead this work. The B-type initiatives are high impact, but they have low ease of doing. We reserve this work for circuit library directors since it requires higher administrative and collaborative capacity. Here are our intended outputs. They are the products and services we hope to deliver. Outputs include health subject guides, promotional materials, training and community events, a community of practice, and strategic partnerships with public officials, community leaders, and health experts for health information literacy support. Consequently, these outputs could support four impact areas in the county and national recommendations for counteracting health misinformation. The impact areas include disseminate reliable health information to the public, partner on strategic initiatives related to health misinformation, provide educational services about misinformation and health information literacy, and engage community groups through health information support. While there are additional impact areas for building health misinformation resilience, these four areas notably resonate with libraries. We have directly tied our library initiatives to the county's campaign goals. The relationships in our model, indicated by the row organization and the connective threads, show the direct link between our work and the public goals. Overall, this logic model helps us focus on the broader impact and explain our contributions to the county's effort. We commit to these project values in our collaborative work. First, we will work as a unified inclusive group of libraries. We rely on each other's unique expertise, share resources, and achieve collective impact. Secondly, we will conduct sustainable work through focused projects on a one-year timeline. They are more feasible and offer room for flexibility and change. Lastly, we seek to reach a broad range of communities in San Diego County. We support the whole of society effort endorsed by the Surgeon General. We take a phased approach in our work. In the first phase, we will build an online guide of health information sources. This guide will help the general public find reliable information, critically evaluate health information, and use libraries to explore their health questions. Additionally, we will host a training class on health reference skills for library workers serving the general public. The network of the National Library of Medicine will be teaching this class. Additionally, we've met with county public health workers and have begun exploring collaboration opportunities. In subsequent phases, we will build on these foundational elements to develop a community of practice and to forge strategic partnerships for larger-scale work. After reflecting on our design process, we want to highlight a few practices that helped our diverse libraries collaborate on a broad social initiative. The collective impact model encapsulates many of our collaboration techniques. We will review this model and describe how our work reflects its principles. Collective impact is a framework for collaboration, problem-solving, and social innovation. It is a network of community members, organizations, and institutions who advance equity by learning together, aligning, and integrating their actions to achieve population and systems level change. It differs from other collaborations by emphasizing a centralized infrastructure, a dedicated staff, and a structured process that leads to a common agenda, shared measurement, continuous communication, and mutually reinforcing activities among all participants. Five conditions drive collective impact. They include a common agenda, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support organizations. The first condition is a common agenda, which includes a shared vision, a common understanding, and a joint approach to action. In our experience, we quickly noticed that our libraries have a shared mission to help people find reliable information and to engage communities through learning and technology. Additionally, we defined our common agenda based upon recommendations by leading organizations, including the CDC, the Surgeon General, and the National Library of Medicine. Their research and vetting strengthened our confidence to mitigate health misinformation. The second condition is shared measurement systems, an agreement on data collection, measurement, and reporting to monitor outcomes and facilitate learning. Identifying measurement systems was challenging, especially as health misinformation resilience is an emerging space for libraries and our partners have different missions and roles. Furthermore, our work provides intangible benefits that are difficult to quantify and measure, such as information literacy and critical evaluation skills. Currently, we will rely on the traditional measures of participant counts, ad events, and resource use statistics. We need to continue exploring library assessment methods around health misinformation resilience. The third condition is mutually reinforcing activities, whereby stakeholders coordinate their unique strengths and expertise to support and complement one another. In our work, we designed our efforts for mutual benefit and harmony with existing services, roles, and capacity. Additionally, we used a systematic process to plan our initiatives with multiple rounds of voting, scoring, and discussing. This protocol helped us recognize our organizational needs and define our respective contributions. The fourth condition is continuous communication, such as regular meetings. Our advisory team meets monthly. We have pre-work for every meeting, including readings, brainstorming exercises, revisions, and planning. Because of this preparation, we can focus on analysis, decision-making, and project delegation during meetings. The last condition is backbone support organizations, which comprise dedicated staffing and organizations for project management, data management, and work facilitation. In our collaboration, we rely on a project manager to convene monthly meetings, set the agenda, design the pre-work, and coordinate inclusive decision-making and project work exercises. Additionally, our advisory team includes a circuit library director who facilitates regular communication with all library directors on project progress and resource needs. Let's recap our project. Public and academic libraries in the San Diego Consortium are collaborating to support the county's campaign against health misinformation. We use the project design process to ensure our work is mutually beneficial and complementary of our different library expertise and capacity. Our program goal is to build resilience to health misinformation among local communities in San Diego County. Our strategy is to share reliable health information and support health information literacy. We will take a multi-pronged approach that includes information sharing, training and events, strategic partnerships, and community engagement. Our logic model helped us connect our resources, activities, and outputs to the impact areas recommended by the county. Lastly, our collaboration style reflects the conditions within the collective impact model.