Welcome to the Hirsh Health Sciences Library

To serve the needs of all the health science schools of the Tufts Boston Campus, the Hirsh Health Sciences Library maintains collections in medicine, dental medicine, nutrition, veterinary medicine, and supporting collections in the basic sciences. This includes access to nearly 19,000 electronic journals, 164,042 print volumes, and over 173 electronic text books. The library's Special Collections includes works on the history of science and medicine, imprints prior to 1914, and historical artifacts.     

HHSL Library Homepage

Library Renovation

The library is located on floors 4 through 7 of the Arthur M. Sackler Center for Health Communications and has recently been renovated  to include two new microcomputer labs with current media presentation equipment that are available to students and faculty for instruction, learning, and general computing use. Newly configured group seminar rooms are available for both group study and instructor-led classes and are all equipped with projection units. The amount and quality of the comfortable seating was increased, along with the expansion of the nomadic/wireless computing services.  The addition of a café within the library space offering coffee, beverages, and light fare has proven to be extremely popular. 

Images of the library

Floor Layout

Services and Education Supports

The Information Services librarians at the Hirsh Health Sciences Library offer instruction on biomedical resources individually, in small groups, and in conjunction with the curricula of the health sciences schools.  Services available to library patrons make full use of the expertise of the talented health sciences professional staff.

• Tailored searches of bibliographic databases.
• Assistance with MEDLINE and other databases searching.
• Identification of licensed literature for reading lists.
• Help obtaining articles via the library's homepage.

The course-specific instructional services provided by the IS Librarian staff are well-integrated into the curricula of the Tufts health sciences schools, with Librarians serving as representatives on the various curriculum committees. Other teaching activities include conducting orientations to library services and resources for the various residency programs at Tufts Medical Center, and site visits to Tufts-affiliated hospitals to apprise their staffs about what is available to them through the Hirsh Health Sciences Library.

• IS librarians follow a progressive instruction program beginning with Problem-Based Learning (PBL) for first year Medical students, leading up to Evidenced-Based Medicine (EBM) in the second semester of the second year.

• The Dental School's courses in dental ethics and epidemiology, both at the graduate and post-graduate levels, are led by IS Librarians.

The Learning Resource Center

The Learning Resources Center (LRC) located on the 5th floor, houses multimedia rooms, seminar rooms with projection units, and two computer labs equipped with Windows XP workstations. The labs are open for computer-assisted instruction, personal computing, Internet access, and Web-based email. LRC staff members at the Service Desk are available to assist patrons with email accounts, internet access, laptop computers or PDA registration for nomadic/wireless computing at the HHSL. 

SPIRAL Project

SPIRAL is an acclaimed website that started as a joint initiative of the Hirsh Health Sciences Library at Tufts University and the South Cove Community Health Center through the National Network of Libraries of Medicine's New England Region. The 2001-03 project proved to be very successful and following its completion, Tufts HHSL was awarded another subcontract (October 1, 2003 - March 31, 2005) to enhance and add health topics in more Asian languages and to make the site accessible to physicians/health care providers and patients alike. Presently SPIRAL provides access to consumer health information in eight Asian languages with English language versions of the material available from the site as well. It continues to be enthusiastically received; Tufts Hirsh Health Sciences Library has presented on the project at regional and national venues; the Medical Library Association's 2005 annual meeting, the 2005 annual conference for the North Atlantic Health Sciences Libraries Inc., and the Office of Minority Health's 2006 National Leadership Summit on Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health.

http://spiral.tufts.edu