Report from the Medical Library Association’s InSight Initiative Summit 1: Engaging Users in a Disruptive Era

Akers, Katherine G.

Shalu Gillum described her library as a success story of user engagement through its focus on teaching IL to both faculty and students. Her library opened in 2009 as a "born-digital" library with the motto "Information, Anywhere, Anytime, on Any Device." Gillum said that the primary IL challenge facing faculty is predatory journals that lure in authors who are desperate to publish in order to achieve promotion or tenure. Librarians' solution is to deliver brief presentations on predatory publishing in departmental faculty meetings, teaching faculty how to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate journals and seeking to dispel the myth that open access publishing is equivalent to predatory publishing. Their goal is to help faculty see librarians as partners in the publishing process and to give them tools for evaluating journals (e.g., Editage Insights checklist, Allen Press's phony versus legit infographic) rather than relying on a blacklist. As a result, librarians have received positive emails from faculty, some boasting about their ability to identify email solicitations from predatory journals.