Sarah Vitelli, spring 2024 Funk Fellow
IU Libraries is committed to “providing students with more engagement and pre-professional support,” Dean Dallis-Comentale states. The Carla J. Funk Health Sciences Fellowship provides graduate students in the sciences with such a ticket. Established in 2022, the fellowship has helped three students gain skills in health science librarianship. Fellowship students Heidi Yarger and Sarah Lopez both learned and executed skills, gaining invaluable experience that aided in their finding professional positions in academic libraries. Now, Sarah Vitelli joins them.
Listening to the comradery of donor Carla Funk, Funk Fellow Sarah Vitelli, and librarian Amy Minix illustrates the success of the Health Sciences Fellowship over the last three years. Vitelli, who graduated this May with her Master of Library Science, shares her appreciation of Minix, IU’s Neuro- and Health Sciences librarian, as a supervisor. Minix states her gratitude for former Funk Fellows and Vitelli as well as Carla Funk, former Executive Director of the Medical Library Association, and generous benefactor of the Fellowship.
“A huge goal for me before beginning this fellowship was to see what foundational skills I was going to need as a health sciences librarian. It's an area that I've been really interested in for a long time,” Vitelli says. As an undergraduate, she studied psychology. Being able to practice health science librarianship during her time as a Funk Fellow has had a big impact on her.
Just like last year’s Funk Fellow, Vitelli created a poster presentation with Minix at this summer’s Medical Library Association conference. This year’s poster details some of the previous foundational work with Interprofessional Practice and Education (IPE), the formation of the Health Literacy Toolkit, and highlights the work Vitelli has done. IPE fosters collaboration across the state for health science students from IU campuses along with Butler and Purdue.
The poster presentation features Vitelli's efforts. “We've explored a lot of databases and how to search those effectively and examined how those skills can transfer across disciplines,” she shares. “The health literacy piece is a big part of the work that I've done.” She explains it has included performing some literature reviews and gathering resources. It has also involved looking at health resources in different areas and different contexts. Like science itself, the information of health is constantly changing and evolving.
“Learning a bit about scholarly communication and open science has been a big piece for me. I have been really drawn to that this whole semester. So being able to explore that further, and the context of this project, has been wonderful,” Vitelli says. “I'm excited to keep learning.”
“It’s been an interesting and fun year,” Minix says. She explains that Vitelli’s work has been focused more on creating a comprehensive Health Literacy Toolkit than working with IPE. In the past Yarger and Lopez worked directly with health care students, creating an activity around a simulated patient’s use and misuse of information resources. The Health Literacy Toolkit will have a broader audience than just IPE and is built off the initial work done with IPE. It will be an instructive tool to show IU students and future health professionals how to structure a search, discover resources, discern credible sources and material, evaluate them, and synthesize the material.
The toolkit will include modules on consumer health, evidence-based practice and searching, health equity, critical appraisal, and communication. Writing instructions for each module takes a lot of energy. “We’re trying to get some of the foundational pieces in place,” explains Minix. “We’re building this toolkit for the health disciplines specifically to give students at all levels a space to get help with literature searching. If they're unfamiliar with specific databases or how to structure a search, they'll have a place to go.” Minix feels the Health Information Literacy Toolkit will address discrepancies in the types of skills that all students have, depending on their past exposure to literacy skills. She hopes to "provide basic, intermediate, and advanced information for concepts discussed in the toolkit."
An activity and assessment can be added directly to a class’s curriculum because the toolkit will be in Canvas, IU’s online classroom management platform where assignments, grades, syllabi, and other classroom announcements and business go. “The Information Literacy Online Toolkit was framed for instructors to grab the pieces that are relevant to their class and to plug them into their Canvas site,” Minix explains, “whereas ours is designed to be outward facing, so students can access it no matter what the class is or no matter what level they're at in their learning. They have a space to go back and brush up on skills.”
Funk, who is pleased the Fellowship is proving to be useful, is excited for the work Minix and Vitelli are doing in health information literacy. “It’s very important to get those messages out there,” she says, “because people, in spite of all of the use of the Internet, still don't know what they're doing, therefore, I think it's really important to do this.” She states, “Another advantage is getting involved in the Association community.” To show the importance of making connections and meeting people, Funk shares her experience starting out in public librarianship and ending up the Executive Director of the Medical Library Association.
Minix describes being at MLA in years past, seeing Funk’s name in many places. “Your name is so big in MLA,” she tells Funk. Minix tells the story of being asked if the Funk Fellowship was through the MLA. Minix finds it funny, but there’s also pride - pride that Carla Funk is an IU alumna and that the Funk Fellowship is at IU.
“I want to thank you so much for funding the scholarship and the opportunity to have a wonderful learning experience,” Vitelli tells Funk. “It truly has been so valuable, and in all of my interviews I talk about it. Thank you for making that possible.”
Sarah Vitelli recently announced she garnered a job as the Science and Engineering Librarian at University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
