HSL Staff Win Two Library Innovation Grants

Two Health Sciences Librarians have won Innovation Grants from the UNC University Libraries. The Libraries offers these internal grants to staff members as a way to encourage strategic creativity. A committee makes the awards on the basis of a competitive application process, and funding for the grants comes from unrestricted library endowment.

Brian Moynihan, Head of Health IT, won $5,000 to further develop the digital health device collection supported by the Carolina Digital Health Research Initiative (CaDHRI) at the HSL. Lauren Tomola, AHEC and Outreach Service Knowledge Librarian, won over $5,000 for her project designing a prototype to help researchers organize, share, and discover neuroimaging datasets.

CaDHRI will be the first digital health initiative at a university library or elsewhere to build a digital health lending library. This collection is part of a larger initiative to provide testing and expert consultation specifically for digital healthcare research, as well as host workshops and events for hands-on experiences with digital health devices. The lending library will allow researchers to check out wearable digital health devices, health sensors, and smartphones for use in their research or to test out applications they have in development.

“This grant will help us expand our digital health outreach to students, faculty, and researchers across campus,” Moynihan said. “We’re very lucky that UNC Libraries are so forward-thinking, and have been such strong advocates of innovation.”

Tomola will partner with Dr. Javed Mostafa, a UNC School of Information and Library Science faculty member with a joint appointment in the Biomedical Research Imaging Center and Director of the Carolina Health Informatics Program, to determine what current repositories for neuroimaging data already exist, as well as what metadata vocabulary they use, and use that information to build a new prototype for finding and using these data. An additional goal of the project is to demonstrate a different model for how librarians and researchers can work together to organize and manage data beyond the scope of neuroimaging data.

“Large sets of neuroimaging data are difficult and expensive to create, so it’s important for researchers to be able to locate existing datasets that they might be able to reuse,” said Tomola. “However, the current options for sharing this complex type of data are limited, lack standardization, and focus more on the original study than on potential future use of the data. This project will demonstrate a new way to share neuroimaging data, focusing on the needs of researchers who want to find and reuse existing datasets. This would open new options to researchers, promoting new work in an important field.”