About the Health Sciences Library

We advance scholarship, research, education and health care by anticipating information needs, providing essential resources, and facilitating learning for the greater health sciences community.

Based on the southern end of UW’s Seattle campus, HSL is one of the flagship branches of the UW Libraries system and the premier health sciences library in the Pacific Northwest. To achieve this mission, the 36.26 FTE librarians, paraprofessionals and student workers of the HSL support and collaborate with a wide set of users from students, faculty and researchers at UW to librarians, health professionals, researchers and interested citizens in the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest. HSL supports more than 25,000 employees of UW Medicine with 2,374 employed faculty at the School of Medicine, 4,683 faculty across the Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho (WWAMI) region programs and over 4,700 medical students and trainees. Examples of the support provided include, but are not limited to:

• Educating and assisting users to identify, evaluate and manage information
• Providing on-site and remote access to information resources in a variety of formats
• Offer a shared physical and virtual learning commons in support of evidence-based practice and life-long learning
• Conducting literature searches and providing research support

Additionally, HSL specifically supports the education and research of six schools at UW:

• School of Dentistry
• School of Medicine
• School of Nursing
• School of Pharmacy
• School of Public Health
• School of Social Work

For more information, please see the HSL Narrative Summary and HSL Statistical Summary. If you need a custom HSL summary to support a grant or accreditation, please contact Michael Moore, Grants Administration and Special Projects Librarian, at mtmoore@uw.edu.