Librarians without Borders

Published: Wednesday 17th June 2020

The Librarians without Borders (LwB) was founded in 2007 by the Medical Library Association (MLA) and supported by the Elsevier Foundation to provide essential face-to-face, train-the-trainer workshops for the R4L community.

Supporting librarians worldwide

Before the digital revolution, practicing evidence-based health care, policymaking or education in developing countries was virtual impossible. In 2001, that slowly began to change, first with Hinari, WHO’s biomedical free and low cost access to research program and later with open access and Research4life (R4L) which comprises 5 programs including Hinari, 100,000 peer reviewed resources, 9,000 registered institutions and 200 publishing partners. Despite these gains in access however, many researchers, doctors, librarians and policymakers in developing countries still suffer from a lack of information literacy.

Since 2016, LwB also supports a corps of librarian trainers through annual training grants. To date, the partnership has awarded 15 training grants, conducted 90 workshops in forty-two countries and developed a decade worth of training modules. The 2019 FAO R4L MOOC supported by the Elsevier Foundation will complement LwB’s efforts, helping to scale up virtual training reach and offering participants a required pre training for face-to-face LwB workshops.

Read more about the partnership:

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