College health professionals and academic librarians: collaboration for student health.

UNLABELLED

College health professionals must find new ways of educating students on finding and evaluating consumer health information, specifically in the online environment. Librarians are trained as information professionals; however, librarians at general academic libraries are not taking a lead role in providing consumer health information.

OBJECTIVE

The authors' purpose in this research was to determine the health information resource needs of college and university students and provide a model for collaboration between college health professionals and academic librarians.

PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS

The authors compared data from a national survey on college health (N = 54,111) with their own results from a survey of general academic librarians (N = 17) to create recommendations for synching students' reported health information needs with librarians' resources.

RESULTS

Although the Internet was students' second most-often consulted health information source, they ranked the believability of online health information above only television. In the librarian survey, although 12 respondents indicated that health information provision is a library's responsibility, the majority (n = 11) believed their library's consumer health outreach to be passive.

CONCLUSIONS

The authors offer recommendations for partnerships between college healthcare professionals and academic librarians to better provide this information to students.