Online Academic Days: Celebrating Student and Resident Scholarly Activity During a Pandemic

Background: For many years, our School of Medicine and Health System has held Academic Days. These highly attended in-person events took place at the School of Medicine and hospitals throughout the system, showcasing the scholarly work of our many graduate and undergraduate academic trainee programs. Medical students and residents are invited to submit abstracts and posters of their current research for display, and often the best contributions are recognized and a keynote speaker is invited. Due to the response to COVID-19, many events at the School of Medicine and Health System, such as Academic Days, were required to be fully online.

Description: Not wanting to miss the opportunity to celebrate our students’ and trainees’ successes, the School of Medicine Library worked with the Academic Competition and Research Day Planning committee at the system level and one hospital site to leverage the existing Bepress repository, Academic Works, to display the students’ and trainees’ scholarly work online. As a complement to the event program, Librarians created pages for the events that matched the overall style of the repository but allowed for custom banners, organization, and metadata requirements for each event depending on their needs. Full-text posters and abstracts were digitized and added to each program’s event site. Librarians restricted full text access to the scholarly work by IP address to ensure only affiliated users could download them while also creating a publicly available metadata record to ensure findability.

Conclusion: Both online events were a resounding success and planning is already underway for the Health System’s 2021 Academic Competition. Creating these event pages as a part of Academic Works has increased awareness of the repository in general, driving traffic to the site following the high numbers of views made around the time of the online events for each Academic Day. With the 2020 events available as an example, other graduate medical education programs have expressed interest in developing similar pages to highlight their Residents’ research. The Library anticipates the creation of these online showcases will continue even when in-person attendance is once again permitted.