Building Resilience to Health Misinformation in Local Communities: A Public and Academic Libraries Partnership in San Diego County

In 2021, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors declared health misinformation a public health crisis – acknowledging its negative impact on informed health awareness and choices during the COVID-19 pandemic. OBJECTIVE: To support the County’s campaign to counteract health misinformation, San Diego Circuit, a consortium of public and academic libraries, aims to develop health information literacy and health misinformation resilience in our regional communities. APPROACH: Employing an inclusive, participatory process, we prioritized eight information initiatives to pursue in 2022. They align with national and county guidelines for mitigating health misinformation. We ensured the new initiatives would complement established library services and match our member libraries’ diverse missions and expertise. OUTCOMES: We developed a logic model to connect our libraries’ resources, activities, and outputs to the impact areas recommended by public health and government bodies. This model ensures that our library initiatives – to disseminate health information to the public, partner on strategic initiatives with health experts and public officials, provide educational services about health misinformation, and engage community groups around information literacy – will directly support the County’s campaign. Our project briefing will reflect on the alignment of our unique partnership to the collective impact model – a social innovation concept whereby a network of community members, organizations, and institutions coordinate to advance equity and facilitate social change.