Health Literacy Initiatives for Library Employees

Background: Shortly after the Library’s employees began to work from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a new health literacy working group was formed to explore how best to use the Library’s resources to respond to the current public health crisis. The working group’s mission was to improve the health of library employees by making health information easy to understand and use.

Description: In this poster, we describe the initiatives implemented by the working group since its inception, including creating a charter, co-sponsoring a health literacy article discussion series, publishing an online semesterly newsletter, and implementing a health literacy lecture series. We also discuss our reasons for creating an in-house working group rather than depending on campus health literacy resources, our experiences after the first full semester of this working group being active, and our plans for future initiatives and possible collaborative partners.

Conclusion: The initiatives from the first semester were well-received and met the goals laid out in our charter. We will continue to practice our current initiatives and expand to other activities as time and resources allow.