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Walking the Walk (in festive reindeer socks!)

12 Dec

A message went out today to several listservs, announcing that my current position – Head of Research and Scholarly Communication Services at the Lamar Soutter Library, UMass Medical School – was open and that the Library was accepting applications from qualified candidates. If you, dear reader, are a qualified candidate looking for a really exciting opportunity, I’d advise that you give the post a look see and consider applying. Mine is a progressive, innovative place to work. We also have a great holiday party each year. In fact, we just had it today. Sorry you missed it!

New Holiday Socks for the Holiday Party

New Holiday Socks for the Holiday Party

The best thing I can say about my Library and its administration today is this… my current position is now open. What this means is that my library director and others in leadership here believe that the role of an embedded librarian is one so key to our future success that they’re willing to put someone on it (me) full-time. One of the issues shared by other informationists, as well as audience members, at the November professional development day, was that of sustainability. “How do you manage these new roles while doing everything else you’re already doing?” was a question asked by almost everyone in attendance. Well, one answer (it fits in with an earlier blog post that I wrote) is that you make those things that you feel to be important, priorities. It’s one thing to say something is important. It’s something altogether different to make the necessary shifts and changes required for it to happen. This is what we’re doing here in my Library.

So this is a short post today. I’m sitting here with my feet up, showing off my reindeer socks, and feeling way too full from a good lunch and a table filled with homemade goodies for dessert. It won’t last long, though. I have my work cut out for me finding new research projects to work on and convincing researchers of the expertise I can bring to their teams. It’s a really exciting time to stay put! And it’s a really great thing to work in a library where you can do new things without having to leave. We should all be so fortunate.

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Thankful for Differences

21 Nov

I was going to start off this post with “Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!”, but then remembered that posting on the Internet means that one has a worldwide audience  and as Thanksgiving is an American holiday, not everyone who reads and follows my “Librarian Hats” blog celebrates it. All that aside though, being thankful is a universal act and we can all pause and give thanks for family, friends, colleagues, professional growth, good food, and banjos. (I’m picking up my new banjo – an early Christmas present – this afternoon! My mind keeps wandering in that direction.) As for me, I’ve much to be thankful for, not the least of which is gratitude for the many people who have shared with me, over the past couple of months, how much you’ve enjoyed this blog. I really do appreciate that – I appreciate YOU!

I read a commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education this morning that also brought to mind something to be thankful for in my profession and that is the fact that the leadership, namely the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, sought to celebrate progressive, out-of-the-box thinking, when they opted to offer up the administrative supplement grants to place informationists in funded research projects. We are a profession that talks a lot about the need to do things differently, yet we more often stay stuck in traditional roles and services because we either (a) can’t think of how to rearrange things enough to do different things or (b) cannot financially support new endeavors. By providing some funding for the informationist projects, NLM gave librarians and library administrators some real support towards their pitch to researchers. We could say to them, “Here is a funded person to support your team.” Like it or not (and I personally don’t), money talks.

The piece from The Chronicle speaks to recognizing those in the classroom who think differently, who approach problems differently, and who may not be the best students, as measured by grades or other standardized measures.

Shortly after Sir John Gurdon won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine this year, a report circulated that had been written by one of his high-school biology teachers. The report lambasted the young scientist, stating: “Several times he has been in trouble, because he will not listen, but will insist on doing his work in his own way.” This perfectly illustrates how teachers can fail to recognize a new way of thinking. In our most obstinate moments, the mere suggestion that a student can do something contrary to the way we teach it and still become successful is inconceivable.

As librarians, we instruct people on how to use information “the right way”; “Search PubMed like this,” we say, “Impact factors are essential for determining the best journals,” we believe, “We MUST have a reference desk!!” we cry. And many times, we are correct. I’m not suggesting we’re in the post-modern world of learning where there are no rules nor best practices, but like Anne Sobel, I do believe that we too easily get trapped by and in our comfort zones. Not having the money or the time or the staff or the resources to do something different becomes an easy fall-back excuse against trying new things. These realities (and they are realities), can lull us into staying put while our relevance walks right out the door. Sometimes, maybe we need to look to troublemakers and say to them, “Go ahead, make some trouble.” If it turns into something new and useful and great for our libraries, we can celebrate. If it turns into trouble, we can say, “Let’s try something else.” No harm, no foul (Or in the case of Thanksgiving, “fowl”. ba da bing!)

I’m personally not much of a rule-breaker and I also think that we’ve nurtured a generation of young people who believe that they’re geniuses because they’ve heard that they’re special from the day they were born. Not everyone is gifted, nor is everything we ever try a brilliant move. When Sobel states that an overactive mind may be a sign of gifted-ness or genius, my first instinct is to snort and think, “Or much more likely, just someone who never learned the discipline of paying attention.” Still, I appreciate the salient point of her piece, that “one remarkable student with progressive ideas can elevate an entire class.” 

Remarkable or not, let’s give thanks for the individuals in our profession who think differently and for the institutions, administrators and leaders who support them. When we work in a field driven by information and technology, and a world of continuing change, to do otherwise is to set ourselves up for a long road of frustrations and not much to be thankful for.

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Thoughts and Updates (It’s Been a LONG 10 Days)

19 Oct

Every now and then, Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe titles his column “Picked Up Pieces.” I used to find this kind of lame, a column of random thoughts and pieces, things that he could easily elaborate on if he took the time. However, now that I’ve adopted this weekly writing regimen and have people actually following what I write (kind of like Dan, on the mini-Dan scale), I clearly see the advantage. Sometimes, lots of things happen in a short time frame and in order not to miss capturing them, we collect the bits and pieces and put them in a column – or in my case, a post. So here goes:

The Missing Link

Last week, I wrote about the need for documentation, for writing code and logic and field descriptions based upon guidelines, and how often we skip this crucial step. Pressures of time and staff shortages, coupled with the ease by which we can make changes in practices and procedures, lead us to take shortcuts that may well prove beneficial in the moment, but later end up costing much more. After another exasperating hour that found the research team going round-and-round questions that they simply couldn’t answer, we decided to go to the source this week, and called for a meeting with the IT guru for the study. At this meeting, Scott graciously drew pictures, showed us code, and clearly laid out the details we were lacking. I left the meeting not with the problem solved, but with a MUCH clearer understanding of it. I also had the beginnings of the tools needed to begin putting together the documents that we need that will, in time, give us the solution we need.

Could the research team have done this at the outset? Sure. But it’s hardly a fault that they didn’t. They did what most studies do, working within the constraints that we all find ourselves in today. What sets the PIs and this team apart is that they realized how this pattern was detrimental to their outcomes and the insertion of an informationist can help prevent the same in the future. To date, it’s the clearest indication of my value to the team. Now to get to work with the tools I’ve been given.

INFRARED SATELLITE IMAGE – OCTOBER 30, 1991 (NOAA Archives)

What Did You Say?

Communication shortcomings continue to baffle me. As I posted earlier, this isn’t a bafflement confined to the study. I am universally baffled. “Baffusally” – (see my name in that word? makes sense.) I feel like I keep repeating myself over and over and over again. And unlike Einstein’s famous quote about insanity, I’m not repeating the SAME thing over and over. I feel like I practice saying something this way and that, different ways to try and get my point across. But still… my efforts seem to be falling short. Am I alone in this? Do others feel like they give clear instructions, offer clear descriptions, state clear facts, yet people keep coming back asking for more and more explanation? I wonder if it’s overload – the information overload, stimulation overload, an epidemic of an inability to pay attention. Maybe it’s just more of what I stated in the previous paragraphs; continuous high pressure of time shortage meets the wall of information flow meets too few people to do all that needs to be done… it’s the perfect storm.

What I take away from this is that I need to continue to work on being clear, being concise, stating things in multiple (even if frustratingly obvious) ways. We’re all in this rocking boat together. (Bet you thought I was going to type “sinking ship” didn’t you?)

All Beagles are Dogs, But Not All Dogs are Beagles

I was really lucky to be invited to speak on a panel at last Friday’s “Emerging Roles Symposium” sponsored by the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Medical Library Association. It was a wonderful day of learning, meeting new friends and colleagues, and soaking in so much positive energy. (As an aside, if everyone and everything related to Portland, OR is like I found it/them, I’m moving there tomorrow! What a wonderful place.) One thing that I appreciated most from the event was how many different emerging roles were covered. Steven Bell, current President of ACRL, got us started by sharing a plethora of examples and ideas we need to embrace in the age of the “Alt-Librarian.” I talked about eScience, data and scholarly communications, embedded librarianship, and being an informationist. Mary Anne Hansen from Montana State University talked about teaching library skills via online/distance courses. Amy Harper from Harborview Medical Center in Seattle shared how clinical librarians at her hospital are really engaged in providing the tools and resources to give clinicians the information that they need in the most seamless manner.

That was just the morning!

In the afternoon, Erica Lake from the Eccles Health Library at the University of Utah told us about all that she’s doing to successfully integrate herself and her skills into the world of the EMR. Stephanie Wright showed off a fantastic tool she’s built to help researchers at the University of Washington manage their data. And finally, Jerry Perry, Director of the Health Sciences Library at the University of Colorado and immediate past president of MLA (and all-around good guy – we love Jerry!) presented role after role, activity after activity, opportunity after opportunity, that he sees librarians at his library, as well as around the country, becoming engaged in. It was a terrific recap AND for me, a much-needed reminder that there is no one direction that we need to be looking and/or heading as health sciences librarians. We can, we do, and we are evolving and emerging in so many ways we likely never imagined before. It’s hardly a time to fret, friends. We may look different, but we’re still here.

The Tail Wagging the Cat (for Tater, my cat, because I titled the previous segment about dogs)

My latest philosophical pondering goes something like this… When did we stop creating new environments for the sake of adopting ones? In other words, when did we give up teaching behaviors and instead, simply build environments to suit the behaviors we’ve adopted. I’m sure that I’ve posted on this before, but it’s still there, the big question that I come back to again and again in my mind. We talk so much of control, yet have given so much of it away. It’s kind of what I teach people who are struggling with weight issues (this would be when I’m wearing my exercise physiologist hat) – you need to create your own environment, a healthy environment. It takes work. Restaurants serve the foods people will eat, not the healthy foods we are better off eating. Ball parks and airlines and movie theaters install larger seats, because that’s what we need. We sit a lot traveling, watching movies, watching others play instead of playing ourselves. The ballplayers like the big salaries we give them by filling the seats. They’ll build bigger seats in bigger stadiums to meet our behavior. (If you find this of interest or need help and support in becoming more healthy, follow my favorite researcher/doc in this area – @drsherrypagoto on Twitter and at FUDiet.) 

What does this have to do with being an informationist? Oh, pretty much everything. The one common thread that is emerging in our profession is our need to take chances, take risks, and be more creative. I was asked last week how one goes about getting over his/her fears or resistance to step out and do this risk-taking that we keep talking about. My response, “Film yourself playing your mandolin and singing a song and then post it to YouTube.” More seriously (sort of), I added, “I don’t know if it’s building self-confidence or just lowering your fear.” Control your own environment, as much as you can, and you’ll have a lot more confidence and a lot more success. I feel pretty certain about that. So does Tater.

Happy Friday, everyone! Enjoy a little weekend ahead. And if you live in or around Worcester, come out and see my band, RedRock, tomorrow night. 🙂

 

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