Archive | Bits and Pieces RSS feed for this section

Giving Thanks

22 Nov

Happy Thanksgiving Eve, everyone! I love Thanksgiving. It has long been my favorite holiday – a low key affair, tucked in between the over-the-top madness of Halloween (what in the world has happened with that holiday?!) and Christmas. I enjoy cooking, football games, fall weather. I do little, if any, shopping but do spend time making gifts and cards during the long weekend. It’s quiet and peaceful and indeed a time to give thanks.

I started a list of thanks in my head last night and so I don’t forget them (and have a place to look back on them during those moments I may feel frustrated and not particularly thankful), I’m going to put them here.

When it comes to my work, I am easily the most thankful for my team in Research & Scholarly Communication Services here at my library. Lisa, Tess, Leah, Kris, and Robert are an amazing group of people who make my job immensely enjoyable. They are talented, creative, both independent and collaborative, and always willing to help while maintaining healthy boundaries for themselves and others. They are accountable, respectful, professional, and each one of them kind and fun to work with. We have done such great work together over the past year (and more) and we have so many wonderful opportunities to do more in the future. I’m grateful for them all.

I’m also thankful to work in a library with an administration (library administration) that is supportive of professional growth and professional service. The latter has meant so much to me in my career and I know that both of these things are not givens for everyone in my profession. Investing in your staff, in my opinion, is essential. It’s putting your money behind your values. For this, I’m grateful.

I admit that I’m at a low point with my feelings for UMass Medical School, where I’ve worked these past 19 years. I’m not convinced that the administration of the university is putting money behind the values it espouses, but that said, I am thankful for this place that I’ve called my work home for so long. I’ve had lots of opportunities to grow, to do different things, even to leave the library for a few years to gain experience in another aspect of research. Before I came to work here, my longest stint at any workplace was 7 years. There’s something to be said for any place that keeps calling you to show up each day for so many days.

I’m thankful for my larger medical / health sciences librarian community – my frolleagues (HT, MJ Tooey). On more than one occasion I’ve said, “I could get stuck pretty much anywhere in the United States and be able to call someone who would at least know someone that I know.” We are an amazing network of people and I’ll always be thankful for landing in this profession.

I’m thankful for plenty of things outside of work, too. I’m thankful for a grand group of friends who are a bit younger than I am, yet who welcome me along to all sorts of youthful engagements (still vacillating on that invite to a late-night music event this evening). I do so many things solo in my life and yet I have so many friends wherever I land. It’s a gift.

I’m also thankful for the people I know around Worcester who keep the music going. From my pal, Linda, who I occasionally sing and play music with, to all of the others who share their immense talents around town, to WCUW, our community radio station where I’m fortunate to spin tunes every other week… if ever I’m looking for an afternoon or evening of music, it’s easy to find here in my hometown. Music makes the world go round. Amen.

I’m thankful for old friends that I’ve known forever. I’m thankful that as I pulled into work this morning and my phone rang, the picture of my best friend and college roommate popped up. It was the whole family, on their way to her mom’s (my adopted mom) house, calling to wish me Happy Thanksgiving (and ask about a clarinet – but that’s another story). I have a good, big handful of friends who have been a part of my life now for 40+ years. Despite miles and time between visits, we remain close and always there for one another. That’s awfully special.

And finally, I am thankful for my warm and comfortable home, complete with someone I’ve also shared a lot of years with, in varying ways. Lynn had a frightening health scare two years ago at Thanksgiving and has gone through a lot since – chemo and radiation and scans and scans. She got WONDERFUL news yesterday that’s likely the best Thanksgiving news I can imagine. AND I’m thankful for that goofy beagle, Bayer, who found me almost a year ago, and for my Tater who’s been with us through most of our Worcester years (still hissing and growling and ruling the house). As we are, we are a family.

I was in a bit of a funk last holiday season. I wasn’t into much of any of it and then when it was over, I felt regret. I’m not going there this year. There is so much sadness and anger and fighting and just the worst of humanity in the world today. I’m not adding to it. I have too much to be thankful for. May you also have much the same.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Tags: , , , , ,

The more things change, the more they need to change?

6 Oct

For awhile now, I’ve been mulling over the work that we do in my department of the library. This is in part due to some strategic planning for big changes, planning for a department retreat, and engaging in leadership training. Whenever I find myself asking what it is that we do as health sciences librarians and why we do it, I always end up pulling a book off of my shelf, Access to Medical Knowledge: Libraries, Digitization, and the Public Good. Written by Frances K. Groen in 2007, it is a thoughtful treatise on these very questions.

Frances had a long and distinguished career in medical libraries, culminating as the Trenholme Director of Libraries at McGill University. She was a president of the Medical Library Association and recognized professionally in both the United States and her home country of Canada. I had the wonderful pleasure of meeting with Frances on several occasions and invited her to speak at the annual meeting of the North Atlantic Health Sciences Libraries, Inc. (NAHSL) in 2015.

But back to her book. In the preface she states, “This book was written as an attempt to understand why librarians, whether working in the health care environment or in the academic milieu, make the choices and develop the services that they do. Are they guided by principles or values within a conceptual framework, or are they merely responding opportunistically to a variety of influences – institutional, social, technical, or political?” These two sentences have stuck with me for years and I bring them to mind regularly, particularly when I’m in a place like I find myself now, i.e., planning and leading (or at least trying to).

Frances’s career and study led her to believe that our profession has 3 core values (in my words): (1) ensuring access to quality information to anyone needing it, (2) empowering and educating people to use that information, and (3) preserving knowledge from the past, for the future. Whenever I think about what we do and why we do it, I run it through “The Groen Test” to see if it measures up.

One big issue facing librarians like myself who work in research support and scholarly communications is the push towards open science and the 2022 OSTP Memo that will mandate that the outputs of all federally-funded (United States) research be immediately and freely available to the public starting in December 2025. The repercussions of this mandate will be many and they will be large. I think a lot about how we will tackle it. I think about who will pay for it. I think about structures and processes being redone to make it happen and I think about how this will affect my library, especially my library’s budget.

I think also about other things that we do in my team – maintaining an institutional repository, publishing journals, maintaining a publishing platform, assisting with data management, helping to ensure compliance with funding mandates (publications, data, and more), generating and analyzing reports to demonstrate how research is disseminated, how it has an impact, and always teaching, writing, researching. So many of the things we’re doing now – or at least how we’re doing them – were not common in 2007 (some not even in 2017!), when Frances was writing, but I still run it through the test.

Open science, data management and sharing, and ensuring that we, as an institution, comply with mandates towards these things all clearly support the value of providing access to as wide a group of people as possible. Our institutional repository does the same, while also meeting the value of preserving the knowledge generated by our researchers, faculty, students, and staff. We constantly educate to empower our patrons, to help them find and discern information, and more recently battle the onslaught of disinformation. We help people know how to track their work, how to disseminate it more widely so that it reaches the audiences it needs to reach. This, too, is a means of empowering people to use information.

And so, I feel we pass the test and that the work we do still meets the values of our profession.

But … I’ve also been wondering a lot lately about HOW we do what we do. More specifically, I’ve been wondering if the longstanding belief that academic libraries operate freely, i.e., that we provide resources and services without cost to our users, makes any sense any more. A few weeks back, I worked on a bibliometrics report and a network analysis for a professor. It took a good bit of time, access to some expensive databases and tools, and my own expertise. And when it was done, I happily passed it along. For free. That is our modus operandi. In a way, it’s something that we have adopted as a deeply held value. But does it make sense? Particularly when we are faced with budget cuts and staffing shortages?

What if the library was a core service, like every other core service on campus, and charged for the work we do? I admit that I’m not sold 100% on that idea, but I am more and more convinced that we need to start looking at other models for our services, besides this historically free one. Especially as I think about non-funded government mandates towards open access, I cannot help but think that someone has to pay and it cannot be us. At least not without severe cuts into everything else that we do or more likely, elimination of services and resources all together. And that does start to mess with our values. Messy, it is.

Friday thoughts. I hope my readers have had a good week!

Pause and Reflect

25 Aug

I love Julie Foudy. The retired member/captain/co-captain of the Unites States Women’s National Soccer Team, former president of the Women’s Sports Foundation, member of the National Soccer Hall of Fame, founder of the Julie Foudy Sports Leadership Academy for girls and the Julie Foudy Leadership Foundation, and television analyst for ESPN and other media outlets is an accomplished leader and inspirational force for girls and women in sports, and beyond. To me, she is in the mold of Billie Jean King, my childhood hero*. She sees sports as an opening to make the world more fair and more just. She’s just someone to admire.

But that’s not why I love her. At least not in total. I love Julie Foudy because she is funny. She is fun. Her podcast, Laughter Permitted, that she co-hosts with Lynn Olszowy, is at times snort-laugh-worthy. And her guests are a list of interesting women leaders from the sports world and more. I first listened to the podcast a couple years back, but my overall podcast listening has fallen off of late and I’d forgotten about it. But with the recent Women’s World Cup airing on some channel (FOX) that she’s not affiliated with, I found myself feeling like something was missing. It just didn’t seem like soccer without Julie, to me. And that’s when I googled and was reminded of the podcast! It was a goldmine of fun, hearing Julie and Lynn talk with so many of the 99ers. Just a hoot. And the bands. The stress-busting strength bands – I have adopted these into my own stress-relief routine. Thanks for the tip, Jules.

One feature of the podcast is called, “High, Low, Cheer,” an activity Julie says she did with her kids around the supper table, asking them to share a high (good thing), a low (not so great thing), and a cheer (a thanks to someone who supported/helped them) during that day. On the show, guests are asked to share these as they relate to their respective careers. I was thinking it’s a nice activity to add to these Friday blog posts (or at least my own Friday afternoon reflections on the week). So here goes:

High

In December of 2019, I was asked to serve on the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Board of Regents Public Service Working Group on ClinicalTrials.gov Modernization. That’s a mouthful. It was a one-year appointment, with the possibility of a second year. In February 2020, I traveled to Bethesda where the group met in person for the first (and last – thanks COVID) time. Dr. Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institutes of Health at the time came and met us. So did Dr. Patty Brennan, the Director of NLM. We met the ClinicalTrials.gov team, got our charge, and began the process of dreaming about what the modernization of such an important – but dated – resource would mean. It was a real honor to be asked to take part, particularly as I realized I was there to represent the medical/health sciences library community, as well as the patrons we serve (clinicians, biomedical researchers, patients, and caregivers). Today, 3-1/2 years later, we held our final meeting. It proved to be a bit longer of a commitment than anticipated and I didn’t get to travel to Bethesda regularly as I’d hoped, but the work we did as an advisory group was so interesting and so rewarding. When the new site launched earlier this summer, I felt pride in knowing I had the tiniest fingerprint on it. It’s a good feeling.

Lawrence A. Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D., Acting Director of the National Institutes of Health, thanks the working group for their service.

Low

While I fortunately do not have longterm COVID in the physical sense, I’m certainly feeling the longterm effects of how much it changed my world. We work so differently today, scattered to the four-corners of our private worlds. I don’t see my colleagues every day – some I don’t see at all. And there seems a sense of us being adrift as a staff – lacking vision, leadership, focus, something. And it isn’t just my work place, not even just the library here at the medical school where I work. People in other departments have shared the same at times. As do friends and folks I know outside of work. It’s just this weird feeling, like people have just checked out. The political and social climate sure doesn’t help, either. Unmoored. That’s what it feels like to me. We’re all unmoored, drifting about, not quite sure what’s coming next. It brings me down sometimes, this week particularly so.

Cheer

I got TWO invitations this week to speak to early career and/or library school students over the next few weeks. I was first invited to be a guest speaker for the first members of the North Atlantic Health Sciences Libraries, Inc. (NAHSL) Health Sciences Librarianship Apprenticeship Program. This is such an innovative program and I’m delighted to get the chance to talk to the two apprentices in September. Shout-out cheers to Rachel Lerner (Quinnipiac University), Rebecca Morin (Tufts University), and Eugenia Opuda (University of New Hampshire) for leading this effort and thinking of me as someone to share some wisdom (or at least a laugh or two). It’s appreciated!

I was also invited to be part of a Collaboration and Leadership panel that will speak to students in the Data Services Professional Education (DSCPE) program at Simmons University’s Graduate School of Library Sciences. Along with 3 other leaders in our field, I’ll get to share my journey to leadership, some of the services we’ve developed and implemented here at my library, and how we partner and collaborate with other groups at the institution. I was invited by my former library director and boss, Elaine Martin. Elaine is one of the professors and directors of the DSCPE. She’s also fairly instrumental in my being where I am today, in terms of a career in research support, scholarly communications, and data services librarianship, since these services all began under her watch here at LSL. It’s nice to give back. Thanks for the ask, Elaine.

So that’s my “High, Low, Cheer” for the week. I hope it prompts you to reflect on the same for your past week. And if you need a good chuckle, check out that podcast because laughter is permitted there. Happy Friday!

*Billie Jean King is STILL my hero. I once did a job interview where I presented a “Top 10” of individuals who I’d like to be a personal librarian for (because everyone needs a personal librarian). BJK was numero uno.

Tags: , , , , ,

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →