Public Health Outreach Forum: lessons learned

The accompanying article in this report, ‘‘Public Health Outreach Forum: Report,’’ describes the planning process and the program that constituted a forum held at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) on April 4 to 5, 2001. The forum brought together health sciences librarians who had been funded from 1998 to 2001 to conduct information outreach to the public health workforce, along with selected public health professionals. There were twenty-seven such projects represented at the forum: twenty-one of these were funded by NLM through the Partners in Information Access to Public Health Professionals, the remainder were funded through other mechanisms by the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM). The cost of each project, on average, was slightly less than $50,000