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Phase 2 for the Pediatric Family Resource Library

The Lamar Soutter Library was awarded a grant from the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners to create the Pediatric Family Resource Library at UMass Memorial Children's Medical Center in the summer of 2001. The grant officially ended on September 30. Our primary challenge was to deliver information to the families who use the Children's Medical Center; and to a great extent, we met that challenge. From January 2002 to September 30, 2002 the "door count" was 800, 165 library cards were issued and 80 extensive searches were done. 140 book and video titles circulated 222 times.

The Lamar Soutter Library will be able to continue to fund the two parent workers, Ivelisse Ruiz and Nancy Linnehan, until other sources of funding can be obtained. The library will also be staffed by Paul Julian, and Nancy Harger. We now have over 500 books on the shelves and many new books have just been purchased, including a large number on adolescent topics in response to patron feedback.

We are now very pleased to announce that the Pediatric Family Resource Library has received a subcontract from the Regional Medical Library to teach parents how to find and use quality health information on the Internet. The project will provide classes to parents over a one-year period of time. The project will also provide customized classes for parent groups and community agencies that serve children. We will be getting another computer in the library specifically for parents' use, and we will be using the computer lab in the Lamar Soutter Library for the classes.

Many of the children who are cared for at the Children's Medical Center have life-long and complicated health problems. We would like to tap into this population because we believe that this particular group needs better health information services. Parents need to be able to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate health information to support their health-care decision making. Many of these parents have become knowledgeable about how to access the Internet, but they may lack the critical skills necessary to evaluate the quality of health information and thus obtain incorrect information about their child's illness.