Nancy's Scenarios
Scenario: Assisting a Patron With Personal Health Information
A patron came to the reference desk to ask for "health information." After a little gentle prying, the patron told Nancy they were looking for information about a specific diagnosis. Nancy did some quick searching in Pubmed and found some relevant articles. Nancy printed out some of the articles and gave them to the patron. However, Nancy suspected the articles might be too difficult or specific for the patron's needs and decided to do a quick search of WebMD. Nancy was a little concerned about the veracity of WebMD, but she gave the patron printouts of a few articles from WebMD that didn't obviously contradict the Pubmed materials.
Scenario: Finding a Spanish Speaking Doctor
A Spanish speaking patron came to the reference desk asking about local doctors. Nancy decided to try out the new subscription health information service she had convinced the purchasing committee to pay for. She was able to search for health providers in the area and filter them by language. Nancy gave the patron a list of multilingual doctors and clinics in the area along with telephone numbers.