Friday Foolery #21: The Phoenix of Full Disclosure

(I'm sorry for the lack of content since last Friday, I and my family have been ill and that's quite a drain on energy beyond life and work.)

This week's foolery is courtesy of myself in May, 2007

Note: No actual textbooks were incinerated in the production of this picture since I paid WAY too much money for them

Can you tell I didn't particularly enjoy that semester? Combining my payroll & human resources job, family (including a preschooler) and a full time load of distance education graduate classes in biomedical informatics (bottom text), information organization (top text), and electronic databases & services (no text) was not fun. It was, however, a necessity since being a full time student was a condition of the fellowship funding my education, for which I am eternally grateful. I wouldn't say that I hated any of the classes, but the amount of information from them was completely overwhelming to take in all at once.



At the end of May 2009, I will spent a long day en route from Seattle to Boston then take a two hour bus ride to Woods Hole, MA, because I learned on Tuesday that I was awarded a fellowship to study biomedical informatics there for a week.

Yes, one of the same subjects from May 2007 that almost drove me to the brink of insanity, and it gets even better. One or both of the authors of that informatics textbook will likely be there as instructors and one of them is the Director of the entire program. Is it possible to just die of embarrassment now and get it over with?

I'm sharing this in part to avoid an A-Rod situation and come clean from the start: I have zero natural talent here. I have enough existing knowledge to understand the basics of the field but am obsessed with learning even more from an impressive faculty without juggling other classes and the rest of my regular life duties at the same time. Hopefully I will not embarrass myself by asking too many stupid questions. My goal is to develop an online class to bridge the gap to health informatics for medical librarians because I truly believe we are all working towards the same goal (improved health information access) with many of the same tools but aren't speaking the same language.

With an increasing focus on the implementation of electronic medical records (EMRs), it's critical for medical librarians to not only be aware of but become actively involved with their planning and implementation at their facilities since we best understand the information-seeking behavior of our users. Information vendors would be very happy to entirely take over that role from us otherwise.