Consumer health information services at Iowa City Public Library

Library Trends, Wntr, 2005 by Candice Smith, Kara Logsden, Maeve Clark

The retirement residence was Oaknoll Retirement Residence. Oaknoll has a very active, engaged community of retirees aged sixty-two and older. Oaknoll provides its residents with the opportunity to participate in a wide variety of educational and cultural activities, and its location near campus and within walking/driving distance of the downtown area means that the city's and the university's many offerings also are available to its residents. Many Oaknoll residents choose to live there specifically because of these attractions. Residents have a vested interest in life-long learning; consequently, project classes were always well attended there. Oaknoll has a small but adequate computer lab with three computers, all of which offer Internet access, and this is where the classes were conducted.

It was a similar situation at the Johnson County Senior Center ("The Center"), which is located in downtown Iowa City one block from the library. The Center serves adults aged fifty years and older who live in Johnson County and offers a variety of classes and activities that support life-long learning and community involvement. The Center has a large base of volunteers who teach classes and assist with daily Center activities. The Center is a very popular and well-utilized facility. It offers a computer lab that has several computers, a printer, and a scanner. The library held both basic Internet and consumer health classes there, which always had attendees. Several people who use The Center also came to classes offered at the library.

The final two sites were neighborhood centers. Both are located in low-income areas of Iowa City, and both serve minority populations. The Broadway Neighborhood Center has a large African American and Hispanic population, while the other, Pheasant Ridge Neighborhood Center, primarily serves immigrants from the Sudan and Jordan. Both centers focus on strengthening neighborhood and community bonds, providing various services to families that could not otherwise afford them, and bringing different types of programming into the communities so residents could participate more easily. Each location had a designated computer area with at least two computers.

The directors of both of these sites were very optimistic about the health classes being taught at the centers, and they felt that they would provide a service that was important and useful to the centers' populations. It is odd, then, that these were the two places where we had no success.

Several classes were offered at the Pheasant Ridge center, but attendance was always zero. No classes were ever scheduled at the Broadway center, despite several phone calls and visits in which possible class times and topics were discussed. The directors of each center were called and/or emailed at least once a month throughout the duration of the project, but they only responded a few times, usually to say that schedules were too busy at the moment.

In discussions with neighborhood center staff after the conclusion of the project, staff identified many reasons for not fully participating in the project. Obstacles included staff turnover, work overload, lack of space, and conflicts with other programs.