Search Mastery Speaker Series: “Central Roles of Public Libraries in Supporting Their Communities’ Needs for Information and Beyond During the 1918 Influenza and COVID-19 Pandemics”

Description:

In this talk, Dr. Beth St. Jean will share her research findings regarding the many important contributions made by public libraries toward preventing and addressing infodemics during the 1918 influenza and the COVID-19 pandemics. These contributions help to fulfill the World Health Organization’s call to “strengthen the resilience of individuals and communities to infodemics,” ranging from providing the public with access to accurate information, offering literacy training, running programs to support people’s mental and physical health, providing information and resources that enable people to engage in crucially important health behaviors, and helping to address health inequities within their communities and beyond.

Bio:

Dr. Beth St. Jean is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland College of Information in College Park, Maryland. She holds a PhD and an MS in Information (Library & Information Services specialization) from the University of Michigan School of Information. Beth’s research and teaching focus on the intersection of people’s health-related information behaviors, information access, health literacy, and health justice, particularly aiming to identify the information-related causes of, and potential solutions to, health disparities.

Over the past 15 years, Dr. St. Jean has published nearly 30 articles reporting her research on people’s information behavior within the health context and beyond. These articles have appeared in many of the major journals in our field, including Library Quarterly; Library Trends; Library & Information Science Research; Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology (JASIS&T); International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion; Journal of Consumer Health on the Internet; Journal of Documentation; Information Retrieval Journal; Journal of Information Science; and First Monday.

Dr. St. Jean has taught several undergraduate- and graduate-level courses related to people’s information needs and information behaviors over the past decade, including the BSIS (Bachelor’s of Science in Information Science) course “Information User Needs and Assessment,” the MLIS (Master of Library & Information Science) course “Serving Information Needs,” and two cross-disciplinary courses she created: “Health Justice” (open to entering Freshmen in the University of Maryland’s Carillon Communities living-learning program) and “Consumer Health Informatics” (open to our College’s MLIS, MIM (Master of Information Management), HCIM (Master of Human-Computer Interaction), and PhD students). The latter two courses focus on the intersection of consumer health information behavior and health justice (consumer health information justice).

Additional Information:

Please contact infoevents@umd.edu at least one week prior to the event to request disability accommodations. In all situations, a good faith effort (up until the time of the event) will be made to provide accommodations.

Register here for this event.