When All the Small Things Add Up, by Alison Gehred

At this stage of my career, I wish I could go back and share all the lessons I’ve learned with younger me, especially what I’ve learned about imposter syndrome (which is something I struggle with) and how to deal with my depression. If I could go back, I’d talk about how I was good at what I did and that I needed to get out of my own head.

My first job was as a library page when I was 16 years old and I’ve pretty much continuously worked in libraries since.To my surprise, I got accepted to every graduate program I applied to. When I graduated from school, I felt completely lost. It seemed like everyone else had their life together. All of my graduate school friends were happily paired up romantically and had an idea of what their futures would be. I applied to work at colleges all over the country and felt utterly tetherless. I felt I wasn’t competitive enough to get a job. I would wake up in a cold sweat about how I was going to pay back my loans. I felt like I was a B person in a field where you needed to be an A + person to stand out.  All through graduate school I had thought it was some kind of fluke that I got in. Now I was in a competitive job market where I felt I wasn’t good enough to get my foot in the door. When I was in high school and I wanted to be an actress, I had this fear of being constantly told that my nose was too big and I couldn’t do it. This felt the same, only I wasn’t smart enough and I was begging for menial jobs. It was like the world shrugged and said, “you tried. Here’s what you get. You peaked here and the rest is disappointment.”

I fell into a depression so deep my parents paid for me to ship my clothes to their house and told me to give my furniture away rather than stay for an extra two weeks and wait for them to pick me up when my lease expired. The original plan was to get a small apartment in my college town, work at a non-professional job, and then slowly apply for a professional position. My depression was too great and I was barely functioning. When I moved back home  to Ohio, I found out that my license had been expired so long I had to take my driver’s test again. Nevertheless, during those six months I applied to about 80 jobs. I made a list and then would highlight it either red, yellow (for interview), and green if I ever got offered the position. I did a few phone interviews. I was told, “I was going to get hired soon but this wasn’t the right job for me.” I felt desolate. I called it being “funemployed.” I wish I could say I had this unshakeable sense of self, but I didn’t. I just narrowed my focus for applying for jobs. I realized that I wanted to stay in Ohio because my family was there and I had a network of friends nearby. I kept on adding to my spreadsheet and learned about new technology to add to my resume. I cooked all the time. I figured if my parents were letting me stay there, the least I could do was cook for them. Once I passed my driver’s test as a 26 year old, I went on road trips all over. I made sure to see the people I wanted to see. I read all of the “Game of Thrones” books. I got really close to both of my parents. I kind of re-centered myself.

Even though it was such a time of uncertainty, I can actually look back on it fondly. I learned that if you like an organization, it doesn’t hurt to get your foot in the door. You have no idea where your life will take you and the best thing you can do is not compromise what you truly want. Sometimes what you really need won’t look like your vision board. Librarianship is a really big tent. You can dive deep into a really specific collection. You can hang out and catalog to your detailed heart’s delight. If you have the stamina to make it through graduate school and work hard, you can be a successful librarian.

I love having a job where I can think creatively and I learn something everyday. (Yes, I did eventually get a job.) When I graduated and was scared that I had made a terrible mistake. I didn’t realize that some things are worth more than a ton of money. Get paid what you are worth, but make sure you are happy in your job. Has my depression snuck up on me? Of course. But now I know how to brace for it. I wish I had learned more about handling mental health when I was growing up because depression and anxiety is made to seem like a weakness. In reality, it’s a way of viewing the world and it has made me a more intuitive and empathetic person. These are good skills to have as a librarian. This is not to say my anxiety and depression is a cakewalk but I have to see them as part of myself and not something to be ashamed of. This was the time I really learned the meaning of Anais Nin saying, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

Blossoming and accepting that my life was changing was not an easy process but I did it and it made me a better person. I hope this helps someone who is struggling. I’m a big fan of being truthful and open. Please know that sometimes when things seem really bleak, you need to remember that you’ve got a drive in you and you are going to be in a career that is fabulous and important. Oh and the imposter thing? As someone who has now been on job search committees- if you are chosen it is not a mistake. You are worthy of earning what you worked for. If you got into graduate school, that was not a mistake. You worked for it and got in. This seems really simple but when you are depressed you are lying to yourself. We need more thoughtful and reflective people in this world. Welcome to a profession that celebrates that.

Alison Gehred is a reference librarian at the Grant Morrow III Library at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. She blogs at Radiance Reflected and Columbus Moms Blog. She is also on Instagram @radiancereflected where she shares pictures of her cats and various food she has made. She graduated from Bowling Green State University for undergrad and the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her MLS.

So, You Want to Be a Hospital Librarian?, by Elizabeth

Source

Medical librarianship is not something that is typically encountered in library school outside of a special libraries class, and even then it’s just a section of the class. So when I first started as a solo hospital librarian, I knew next to nothing about health sciences librarianship, and even less about hospital librarianship.

Hospital librarianship is different from medical librarianship because a hospital librarian is both a medical and a business librarian. There are no subject specialties in hospital librarianship; you are a jack of all trades. Hospital librarians typically work with a broad range of people including medical students, residents, physicians covering a number of medical specialties, nurses, pharmacists, administrators, and sometimes even patients and family members. Not only do you need to be familiar with the typical medical literature databases (PubMed, CINAHL, Medline Plus), you have to be aware of special resources like point-of-care tools, clinical trial databases, evidence-based medicine, and resources concerning the business side of health care, rehabilitation, chaplaincy, psychology/psychiatry… The list goes on and on.

Hospital librarians are lucky because our jobs are never dull. We bounce from one user group to another, researching a broad range of topics with many different resources. But that’s also what makes it so hard. You have to know a lot. You need to know the basics of research, database searching, customer service, cataloging, etc., but you also need to know how to interact with different groups of people. How to know the difference between the kinds of literature an administrator wants as opposed to what a physician wants. Further,ou must be able to do this quickly and with authority. If someone is coming to you asking “how do we do xyz to help this patient get better?”, you need to be able to find the answer, have a basic understanding of the answer, and be able to give the user your opinion. 

Hospital librarianship is a lot like business or law librarianship. Your user isn’t interested in how you got to the answer, what database you used, or how to do it themselves. When someone calls you from the OR because the gastric bypass conversion went wrong or the colon isn’t where it’s supposed to be, a hospital librarian gives the surgeon the answer, plain and simple. There is no time to bombard the user with lots of information and details. A hospital librarian must always be aware that at the end of every search, of every PubMed lesson, of every article ordered, there is a patient, a real person who needs help.
Another thing to be aware of is that, unless you are very lucky and work for one the premier research hospitals, hospital librarians work either by themselves (like me) or with a very small support staff. Hospital librarianship is perfect for someone who can’t pick a specialty. Hospital librarians do reference and research obviously, but they also do the collection development, the cataloging, and the marketing. A hospital librarian is very often the director, the interlibrary loan librarian, the page, the electronic resources manager, the copier repair person, and tech support. In one day, a hospital librarian might attend a meeting with the president and chief medical officer of the hospital, join a group of clinicians on patient rounds, spend two hours making copies for various people, repair the fax machine, edit a powerpoint presentation, dust the library, and barter with a vendor over the price of a database.
If you are considering a career in health science librarianship, but want something beyond being embedded in the undergraduate nursing program or staffing the desk for the medical school library, take a look at hospital libraries. If you never considered anything related to health science and/or didn’t know that hospitals had libraries, still give hospital librarianship a thought or two. If you like juggling multiple projects at once, enjoy research, are not squeamish, like having autonomy and running the show, and are interested in the future of medicine, being a hospital librarian might be a good fit for you.


Elizabeth, better known as Lizy, is a solo hospital librarian living in the Heart of Dixie. In her spare time she enjoys reading romance novels, baking bread, and watching marathons on Netflix. You can check out all her ramblings on cooking, dating, traveling, home-owning, kitty parenting, and occasionally, being a librarian on her blog, Adventures in Life, Love, and Librarianship. She also tweets all the randomness that doesn't make it on her blog as @LibrarianLizy.

So You Want To Be a Medical Librarian, by Alison Aldrich

Nine years ago, I was wrapping up graduate school and looking for my first professional librarian position. I was thrilled to find out I’d been granted an interview at an academic health sciences library, but I was at a loss for how to prepare. I hadn’t really been focusing on medical librarianship as a possible career path. The career services office put me in touch with a helpful alumna who emailed me what amounted to a crash course in medical librarianship. It worked and I got the job. Nearly a decade and two positions later, I am still happy to call myself a medical librarian. In the interest of paying it forward, here is my advice to those of you who are considering medical librarianship today.

About that science background…
Many medical library job descriptions list a science background as a desired qualification. If you’ve got it, you should definitely flaunt it, but if you don’t, it’s not the end of the world. You should be curious about how bodies work, willing to learn, and not easily intimidated by the likes of scientists and brain surgeons. It also helps if you’re not squeamish. If you can picture yourself spending an enjoyable afternoon working on a literature search about bowel obstructions, medical librarianship might be the career for you.

The M word
Marketing, marketing, marketing. This advice goes for any kind of librarianship, really, but if you are offered a position as a hospital librarian, be prepared never to stop proving your worth. Librarians provide critical support for healthcare quality, but libraries don’t bring in the big bucks for healthcare organizations. Without specific examples of how you are making a difference, your library could look like an easy target to a hospital administrator at budget cutting time. Get to know your administrators. Make sure you have champions among the clinical faculty who are willing to vouch for you. Definitely get out from behind that library desk. Be flexible about taking on roles that aren’t traditionally library-ish, like helping to implement a new electronic medical record system, getting involved in knowledge management, or serving on a patient safety committee. Success is possible! For more information about hospital librarianship and its associated challenges, check out the Vital Pathways Project.

Understand how medical education works
MCATs, four years of medical school, this crazy thing called Match Day, a year of internship, three to five years of residency, maybe a fellowship, three levels of board certification exams… Understanding the process of becoming a doctor in the United States (or wherever you are) is important for figuring out how to make yourself indispensible. The same concept applies to nurses, dentists, pharmacists, physician assistants, chiropractors or any other professional group you might be serving. Recognize that the healthcare team is made up of multiple players, including you, and that each player has a distinct role. Know about scope of practice (who does what) and how the level of responsibility increases through the educational process. This will give you a big head start when it comes to interpreting and drawing out your patrons’ information needs.

Make friends with PubMed

PubMed is the National Library of Medicine’s taxpayer funded, freely available interface to the MEDLINE database, which is an extremely comprehensive index to the world’s biomedical journal literature. Because it’s free, it’s universal, so if you are going to learn an interface in preparation for job interviews, this should be the one. Learn how to develop a good PubMed search strategy using keywords, controlled vocabulary (Medical Subject Headings or MeSH), and limits. Plenty of online tutorials are available to help you get started.

More than buzzwords
Evidence-based medicine and health information literacy are important concepts in medical librarianship right now. Do some homework so you can be prepared to talk about these topics if and when they come up in a job interview.

Physicians practice evidence-based medicine when they factor the best available research information into decisions about how to care for individual patients. To the uninitiated, this might seem like a given. Surely your doctor is keeping up with the best evidence… right? Well, it’s not so simple. Consider that hundreds of thousands of new biomedical research articles are published every year. Consider, too, that medicine is an art as well as a science. Some physicians might bristle at the suggestion of evidence-based medicine because they feel it underestimates the importance of their own clinical judgment and experience, or they might see it as a cost-control measure standing in the way of what’s best for individual patients. True evidence-based medicine is supposed to incorporate scientific evidence, clinical judgment, and patient values. The librarian’s job is to make sure the scientific evidence piece finds its proper place.

Health information literacy is the set of skills and abilities we all need in order to find, understand, and appropriately act on information having to do with our health. As a medical librarian, some of the most challenging reference questions you ever answer will come from patients and their families. Become familiar with reliable sources of consumer health information. MedlinePlus is a great place to start. Recognize, too, that sometimes the best thing you have to offer a worried patient or family member is a sympathetic ear.

Medical librarianship just might be the most dynamic, rewarding career path you never thought about pursuing. If this post has piqued your interest, I encourage you to get connected with medical librarian community. We have a great association, Medical Library Association, an active listserv (details here: http://www.mlanet.org/discussion/medlibl.html) and our very own Twitter hashtag, #medlibs. I wish you the best of luck as you prepare for those interviews.

Alison Aldrich recently started a new position as Clinical Informationist at the Ohio State University. Follow her on Twitter @aldricham