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The Library & Information Science Professional's Career Development Center |
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The Accidental Academic Health Sciences Librarian |
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When I applied to library school, I had only one general idea of what I wanted to do with my MLIS. I dreamed of working in a college library in an idyllic campus setting, serving the research needs of an academic community. I partially achieved this goal with my first professional position, but the setting isn't quite what I visualized. Instead of a large, majestic, cathedral-like campus library, my college's library building was converted from an abandoned ophthalmology clinic. My corner office was once a patient exam room! I have the fluorescent lights to prove it. Instead of being on a library staff made up of a dozen professional librarians and potential mentors, I am one of three professional librarians on staff. Did I mention that one of them is the dean? Instead of working as a subject liaison in one of my undergraduate or graduate disciplines at a large public university like I wanted, I serve as the liaison to an entire School of Arts and Sciences at a tiny private college. This may sound like sour grapes, but this first job out of SLIS has provided me with valuable, varied library career experience that I might not have gotten anywhere else. Adapting to the Organization The college in which I work is an affiliate of a regional medical center. The college library serves the research needs of the hospital to the best of its ability because the medical center currently has no library facility of its own. The college offers degrees in health sciences, medicine, nursing, and various other health related disciplines to prepare students to work in the parent medical center and other hospitals around the state. This sort of hybrid academic-clinical library setting makes for a unique work experience and is certainly not what I envisioned coming out of library school. The key to getting by during your first year in an academic health sciences library is to build strong relationships with the faculty, who are the experts in the subjects you are responsible for. Also try to teach yourself as much of the material as you can. Having handy access to a Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary will help you understand the medical jargon that your students and faculty will lob at you during reference hours and instructional sessions. Health Sciences Librarianship At first, the task of developing a collection and acting as a liaison for subjects in which I had no academic background in seemed daunting. Once I dove into the job, however, I learned that the basics that I learned in library school classes and graduate assistantships were applicable to the academic medical library world as well. You must be able to do the following:
Do these sound familiar? They should. Becoming a medical or academic health sciences librarian does not require any special training outside of library school or any particular undergraduate or graduate school discipline. However, I recommend that any students interested in medical librarianship take a related course or complete an internship while in library school. Varied Responsibility I was hired to be the public services librarian with my primary duties being instruction and circulation. During my first month of employment, the access services librarian left for another position in the college which left us with only two professionals on staff. Due to budget constraints during that fiscal year, we were unable to fill the empty position, so I took on local system administration, collection development, electronic resources coordination, and interlibrary loan duties on top of my primary duties. I have had the opportunity to try on just about every possible hat a librarian can wear and I’ve only been out of school for a year! During my first year on the job, I created the library’s first information literacy plan, taught many orientation and information literacy sessions, help build the print collections up to a respectable level, and negotiated purchases of an e-book collection and electronic databases. I’ve fulfilled interlibrary loan requests, written articles in the campus newsletter, supervised student workers and paraprofessionals at the circulation desk, and sat in on many college administrative committees. This experience has given me a taste of almost every aspect of librarianship and a clearer picture of what I would like to focus on if I move on to another position. By doing a little bit of everything, I have found what I like best and what I like least about being a librarian. Recently, we were able to hire another librarian to fill the third professional opening and the duties of our staff have been more equally distributed. With a little more time on my hands, I have been able to reflect on the drawbacks to juggling so many responsibilities. Obviously, there is the feeling that you are stretched too thin and are responsible for too much. Yes, you learn to manage your time more effectively by giving each of your areas of responsibility equal time, but some things will still go neglected. An old cliché comes to mind when I think of the kind of catchall position I held during my first year as a professional: “jack of all trades, master of none.” Basically, I was able to hold my own and learn the many facets of being a librarian, but I still do not feel like an expert in any one area of my job. Expertise usually comes with doing one or two things and doing them well, something one cannot experience in a position where he is expected to do it all. I feel like I am learning more each day and becoming more confident in my abilities. With another professional on staff, I am now able to focus on fewer areas and complete those fewer tasks with more depth and understanding. Size Matters Not all academic health science libraries will offer this sort of à la carte experience, but there will be some sort of cross training in most of them because these libraries tend to be smaller than regular academic libraries. Obviously, the size of the institution determines how much responsibility any entry-level librarian will be expected to take on during the first year. Other factors, such as budget limitations and size of the collection, will also vary greatly. Many academic health science libraries tied to major state and private universities have at least one professional responsible for a single traditional library department like Circulation, Reference, Collection Development, Interlibrary Loan, Electronic Resources, Technical Services, and Instruction. In Conclusion Library school graduates looking for that first professional job in a medical or academic library should look at academic health science libraries. These libraries offer a happy medium between the two types of libraries and will give you valuable experience as you work towards the next phase in your career. New graduates should also consider the size of the library to which they are applying. If you are unsure about which aspect of academic or medical librarianship you want to focus on, then working for a smaller school will likely provide you with varied responsibilities and give you a little taste of everything. Kevin Baggett is a graduate of the University of Mississippi with a BA in Political Science and a Master’s of Library and Information Science from Louisiana State University. He currently serves as the Access Services and Collection Development Librarian at Our Lady of the Lake College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Article published Feb 2008 Disclaimer: The ideas expressed in LIScareer articles are those of their respective authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the LIScareer editors.
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Page last updated
02/27/2008
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