1. How did you become interested in medical librarianship? To be honest, I came upon medical librarianship by chance. As I enrolled in library school, I knew I needed to find a position within a library to give me the real-world experience. I thankfully applied and was hired on at local hospital library as a Medical Library Technician. It is through this positon, that I began to see the importance of having medical librarians in a hospital setting. Working with two amazing librarian co-workers allowed me to see that the work we do can truly have a positive impact on patients. I was hooked after that, and got a full time position with the same library.
2. What is your current position? I am the Medical Librarian at Melisa Reasner McGuire Health Sciences Library at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego, CA.
3. What do you enjoy most about your current position? The diversity of my job duties. No two days are the same in a week for me, as I am always doing something new or different. One day I will be conducting literature search for physicians, and then the next day I will be cataloguing new books. This variety helps prevent me from burning-out on any one specific task. I also love conducting research for our patrons, as I find it thrilling to be track down information that may positively impact someone else’s life. Lately, I have been really interested in data, and have started collecting and analyzing data regarding out patrons and usage.
4. What do you think is the most interesting or challenging issue in librarianship today? Expressing the value of the work we do to our administration and non-librarian colleagues. As librarians, we understand the value of what we do, but we now must find ways to show this value to our administration. At MLA ’16, this was one of the issues brought up by other hospital librarians. While there is not a simple solution to this issue, I feel that engaging administrators and showing real world data to them can help express the value of the library. While this may be a daunting challenge and troubling at times. I believe that we can thrive in this moment, and step outside of our comfort zones to face the challenges ahead.
5. Please provide a link that made you think (an article, video, blog post, other webpage, etc. that you found to be interesting or thought-provoking): http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp048190 – A fun interesting futuristic view of medical libraries written in 2005 about where they will be in 2015. Now what will medical libraries be like in 10 more years?

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