Forging ahead with the NAHRS Nursing Essential Resources List

Background: The NAHRS Nursing Essential Resources List (NNERL) Working Group took on the task of updating the (26th) edition Essential Nursing Resources formerly created by the Interagency Council on Information Resources in Nursing, last published in 2012. Volunteers recruited from the NAHRS Caucus have worked on the NNERL project since October 2020. The goal of the NNERL Working Group is to create a nursing resource list that is available to a broad audience, represents current materials and formats, and utilizes a selection process that is transparent and reproducible.


Description: The NNERL Working Group has three areas of concentration: evaluation of current and prospective list items; an item-level metadata creation process to ensure that resources are easily findable; and format and accessibility of the NNERL. During the Summer of 2022, the NNERL Working Group finished updating and scoring resources from the 26th edition. The total number of remaining resources is 210 as of May 2023. One hundred eighty-three resources were eliminated from the original list due to being discontinued, outdated, or irrelevant to nursing. In tandem with the screening of resources for the NNERL, two subgroups formed within the Working Group. The Tagging Subgroup developed metadata generation guidelines and metadata tags to describe the content of each resource and assist in findability. The NNERL Working Group recruited 20 MLA and/or NAHRS members to tag all 210 resources. Two information professional independently evaluated each list item and assigned tags identifying the item’s format, cost, and topics. Similarly, two information professionals independently reviewed each list item using a tool developed by the Evaluation Rubric Subgroup . The rubric scores use a numeric system to indicate existence of information about authorship, currency of publication, intended audience, and potential areas of bias or conflict of interest. At this time, the rubric score is not intended to connote validity or reliability. Rather, the score is metadata that is useful for data visualization and discovery.


Conclusion: The future draft of the NNERL will include complete APA Style citations, content metadata tags, and a rubric score for every item on the list. The NNERL will be copyrighted to the NAHRS NNERL Working Group and will be made available to all MLA members under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives Creative Commons License. The Working Group aspires to make the NNERL available via an open internet source and therefore be available to the general public under the Creative Commons License.