Uncommon Knowledge

At the southwest corner of the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library, there stands a plane tree.

It’s no ordinary piece of campus greenery. It was grown from a cutting of the tree under which Hippocrates legendarily taught his students about 2,400 years ago in ancient Greece.

Trimmed from a gift to the United States from Greece, the tree arrived in 1971, the same year the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library (EHSL) opened. It is an important symbol for the University of Utah Health community—and a core part of the identity of EHSL, whose logo included a leaf for more than 45 years.

“It means a lot to have this amazing tree on our campus,” said Heidi Greenberg, EHSL’s associate director of operations and logistics. “The tree is a thread that runs through all of health sciences education, to the old tradition when students take the Hippocratic Oath.”

In 2021, EHSL celebrated a major milestone—50 years since its dedication, marking the Eccles family’s first major gift to the U of U. The power of that gift cannot be overstated.

“The Eccles family’s gift elevated the library,” said Catherine Soehner, associate dean for research and director of the Eccles Health Sciences Library. “It demonstrated that the library is a critically important component of health sciences education, research, and clinical work.”

Throughout its history, EHSL’s commitment to innovation has put it ahead of the technological curve. Building on the library’s position of leadership among medical libraries, Soehner and her colleagues work to realize their ambition for the years ahead: becoming the research and education hub of the health sciences at the University of Utah.

FUTURE-FORWARD FROM DAY ONE

EHSL was dedicated on October 4, 1971, as a permanent home for the U of U’s medical collections. Priscilla Mayden was the library’s first director.

“Her desire was to have all of the biomedical materials in one place for the convenience of students, faculty, and practicing physicians,” Soehner said. “That was a major impact of establishing the library.”

Mayden and her staff were committed to leveraging technology to benefit the university community. They embraced emerging advances such as the budding computer revolution by frequently collaborating with faculty.

Early on, EHSL opened a Learning Resource Center where students could use computers to assess their skills and use a simulation to practice patient management. By 1975, the library had moved its catalog of health sciences-related government documents to MEDOC, a computerized index.

Ten Apple IIe computers, early models that preceded the Mac, were installed in the media services department in 1983.

“Getting those computers was a huge deal,” Greenberg said. “It was the librarians’ job to learn how to use them, and then teach everyone else.”

Mayden retired and passed the torch to Wayne Peay in 1984. As EHSL director, Peay continued the momentum for bringing new technologies into medical education, replacing the card catalog with an automated library system that used a novel approach for 1986: connecting to a centralized computer server via telephone.

USHERING LIBRARY SERVICES INTO THE INTERNET AGE

EHSL pushed the state of the art while many in the field chose to remain fixed in place.

By 1994, EHSL became the first medical library in the nation to have its own website, including access to early electronic journals. Two years later, the library developed an online course in navigating the internet, the first of its kind offered for credit in the state of Utah.

“Our predecessors were always on the crest, right before things happened,” Soehner said. “They were on the cutting edge of understanding the internet, even though many people thought they were crazy at the time.”

In 2003, a partnership with the North American Neuro-Ophthalmology Society led to the creation of the Neuro-Ophthalmology Virtual Education Library, an online repository of images, videos and other educational media. The accessibility of these materials has enriched curricula in the discipline at U of U Health and beyond. That project continues to this day.

Jean Shipman became EHSL’s third director in 2008 and oversaw upgrades to the library building. These included the addition of an information commons with computers.

In response to data showing that usage of print resources had dropped by 75 percent, in 2013 EHSL pared down its collection of print materials by 150,000 volumes, reducing the collection by more than 90 percent. In keeping with EHSL’s history, access was shifted to computerized resources, with a host of initiatives launched in years since.

More than a collection of books, EHSL continues to wield technology to meet user needs under the guidance of Soehner, who became director in 2019. Many people think of a library as a place for books, and those still can be found in the library, but she sees the purpose in a broader context.

Generosity Comes Full Circle

After all, even the book and the printing press were new technologies once upon a time.

“Libraries today do what libraries have done for centuries, and that is collect the content as well as the platform that it is served up on,” she said. “We buy it once so that everyone can use it. The content has just taken a different shape.”

Today, EHSL manages thousands of subscriptions to ensure the university community has access to the full text of journal articles. U of U School of Dentistry students can practice the procedure for installing implants using virtual reality goggles at EHSL. Faculty and students can translate certain medical images into physical structures with 3D printing.

EHSL’s excellence has brought it to a place of prominence nationally. Since 2001 it has been a National Library of Medicine–designated regional medical library, facilitating access, education, and funding for medical libraries across nine states.

In 2011, EHSL became the sole national training office for the Network of the National Library of Medicine. With that role, librarians at U of U Health train the trainers, promulgating best practices for information access to medical libraries across the US. Both National Library of Medicine grants were renewed early in 2021 for $10 million over five years.

“Our librarians are connecting with people across the country,” Soehner said. “We want to be able to transform health care by making sure that folks who otherwise lack access have access to a librarian we’ve educated.”

VISION FOR WHAT LIES AHEAD

The EHSL team refuses to rest on its laurels.

Instead, they have created a plan that expands the library’s impact. With the new building for the recently renamed Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the U of U, they will have the benefit of additional space opening up for resources and services.

“The library is doing, and will do, what it has always done,” Soehner said, “which is to curate medical information using the latest technology, in order to educate professionals and advance the health of people in our region.”

One of her team’s goals is to employ their resources and information-science acumen, in collaboration with bioinformatics experts, to inform research questions.

“That’s part of how you get major research grants,” she said. “By completing a systematic review, you can say, ‘Here’s what is known, but here are places where research is still needed.’”

The EHSL team also aims to help expand research into the history of medicine. In an early step, they dipped into the library’s extensive collection of materials to create an exhibit about the importance of vaccines, including a vintage iron lung.

“Reminding people of our history is an important aspect of what the library is about,” Soehner said. “We want them to appreciate that the polio vaccine has kept them out of this iron lung.”

The third, longer-term element of EHSL’s future vision is helping to transform rural health care, with a focus on evidence-based medicine.

Today, U of U Health alumni and others who serve small, outlying communities often lack access to the medical literature that could be pivotal to informing their treatment plans. Soehner and her colleagues want to bridge that gap by arranging for broad, regional access to medical publications as well as the library professionals who can quickly find relevant papers.

“You need to have the evidence in order to provide optimal treatment,” she said. “You need to have data to support your decision making and treatment options. That data lives in journal articles and books, making the library a critical cornerstone of care.”