A Librarian by Any Other Name

I’ve been away from work for almost a week, spending time with my father and doing those things that make people say, “Oh, you are such a good daughter,” despite the fact that I wasn’t feeling like one. Watching your parents age, as well as helping with things that come along with the aging process, is difficult. It can bring out both the best and the worst in you.

The time away also made me miss my Librarian Hats blog. I missed time with my teams and I missed time in the library. I missed my projects and the work that I’m doing and the weekly sharing of that with all of you. It’s great to get away. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m hardly one to shy away from a break from work and I’ll never turn down a good vacation, but it’s also a really nice feeling to know that I’ve come to a place where I enjoy my work so much that I miss it when I’m away. Fortunately, I know a lot of people in this profession who feel similarly. It’s a nice bonus for being a librarian.

Last week, before leaving town, I had the chance to speak at a staff development day for the librarians at Tufts University in Boston. I always like getting to meet colleagues outside of the health sciences and/or medical library world. While Tufts Medical School librarians were present at the event, so were others from their different libraries, making the meeting a great chance to hear about some ideas, projects, innovations and tools that I don’t usually stay up to date on. Discovery tools and on-demand purchasing are the kind of topics that don’t make their way across my radar, so it was a nice opportunity to hear about them.

Two librarians shared their experiences being embedded in different programs and projects. Regina Raboin, Data Management Services Coordinator and Science Research & Instruction Librarian for the Tisch Library at Tufts described her work as part of the faculty teams for 4 different undergraduate courses. A couple of things that Regina said that really struck me, (1) “I was part of the team” and (2) the courses that she was embedded in were all multi-disciplinary in nature. A couple were in environmental studies and the other two were seminar courses. In other words, the classes involve bringing together faculty from different parts of the campus – different schools, different disciplines. This reminds me of what I’ve experienced in my work as an informationist, i.e. all of the studies and projects that I work on require a lot of different kinds of people with different skill sets in order to be successful. I wonder if this isn’t an important key to librarians finding a home on research teams. When the team is made up of people from lots of backgrounds, no one discipline and/or skill set dominates. Team members naturally look to the expertise of the different members, making the skills of the embedded librarian and/or informationist not stand out as such a foreign thing, different from everyone else.

Jane Ichord, a clinical librarian for the Hirsch Library of Tufts Medical School shared her experience being embedded one day each week, attending rounds and working with the pediatricians and other providers at one of their hospitals. Jane also mentioned a few things that I wrote “blog” next to in my notes, my reminder to myself to expand on the thought in one of my posts here. First, she said that when she was first asked to take on this role it was several years ago and while she really wanted to do it, the administration and structure of her library at the time were not in the right place for it to happen. More recently though, things changed and she was given the okay to pursue the role. One cannot stress enough how important this is in the success of embedded librarian programs. Library administration has to be supportive in time, structure, direction, and mission for these programs to work. Librarians wanting to become embedded have to feel empowered to make a lot of decisions on their own. They have to know that it’s okay to be away from the library. They have to be assured that their bosses trust them to build relationships. I feel really fortunate in my current position that this is true, but like Jane, it wasn’t always the case. We weren’t always ready for me (or others) to take on this role. However, when I heard my director say that she would give me the role of informationist on the mammography study whether we got the NIH grant or not, I knew that she was fully supportive of the work. It’s that kind of attitude that gives a librarian the feeling of autonomy necessary to become fully embedded in a team.

Lastly, Jane said regarding her Mondays at the Floating Hospital, “It’s changed my life. Well, it’s changed my work life.” When it comes to my own experiences as an informationist, I can’t say it any better. I have the job today that I always wanted in a library, even when I didn’t know it existed. Heck, even before it did exist! And I’m happy to be back at it today.

Tags: embedded librarians, libraries, library management, Team Science, Teams, tufts university