“See a Need, Fill a Need” — Reaching Out to the Bioinformatics Research Community at Iowa State University.

This article describes my efforts in organizing the "National Center for Biotechnology (NCBI) Field Guide" workshop in March 2006 and four NCBI mini-courses in April 2007 at Iowa State University. It also includes an overview of academic libraries that are providing bioinformatics support and summarizes library involvement in hosting NCBI courses. A discussion of how hosting the NCBI courses has influenced my collection development, instruction, and liaison activities and suggestions to librarians about how to get involved with bioinformatics is also included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]