Crashing the #hcsm party

I can never attend the designated Healthcare Communication Social Media (abbreviated hcsm, affix a hashtag and you get #hcsm) community chat on Twitter in real time on Sunday nights, but have usually seen several medical librarians actively engaged and I enjoy catching up on the conversation when I can.

Tonight I also noticed mention of a blog entry entitled The Pew Internet/Health FAQ by Susannah Fox on epatients.net about how people search for quality health information that contained a shoutout to the Medical Library Association (MLA), a comment from medical librarian Luke Rosenberger with an explanation about how the 'Google as diagnostician' article isn't necessarily accurate, and offered a comment of my own with more quality health information evaluation resources.

Part of the #hcsm discussion?



Bring it on!

While I'm happy about steps that MLA is taking to advocate for the role of hospital librarians, such as the recent Vital pathways for hospital librarians: present and future article and others from the October 2009 Journal of the Medical Library Association, I'd love to see the profession take a more active role for medical librarian advocacy in non-traditional settings as well. There are plenty of us there already at @medlibs on Twitter and elsewhere.

Acting More Like a Librarian

I did not become a librarian because I love books.

This is a good thing because one of my childhood friends is much better than I with regularly reading and writing about books, and she let me do a guest entry review today for Girl in a Blue Dress.

I may give the book a re-read down the road but my guess is Diana Gabaldon has permanently wrecked my expectations for the historical fiction genre. I still have to smirk at the title of her upcoming novel (An Echo in the Bone) but it's not like I'm counting down the seconds until it's out next month.





OK maybe I am. Of course I'm hoping Amazon gets it to me before the release date!

Friday Foolery #4: The 1947 librarian

We've come a long way, baby. I make sure I watch this librarian vocational film once in a while to remind myself that this was cutting edge technology and information about the field at the time it was produced.

What will librarians (or whatever the job title turns into) of 2069 refer to in their era about ours? My great-grandfather's cousin is 103 and still sharp as a tack and my grandmother's cousin in her 80s runs our family's genealogy website, so perhaps I'll be a ninety-somethingbrarian and get to offer my own perspective on whatever media we're using then!

(above is an embedded video which may not show up in RSS feeds, it's from the Internet Archive and not YouTube)

About 8 minutes and 10 seconds into the film is a perky medical librarian. I share an alarming similarity with her in that my medical terminology pronunciation is currently pretty awful although I'm slowly making progress.

I particularly like this quote that is 9 minutes and 25 seconds into the film.

You will derive satisfaction from a knowledge that your work is vital and essential in forming the kind of world in which you want to live.

I can only hope so. I'm doing my part and thankful that Brewster Kahle is doing the same on a much bigger scale.

Freak or geek by osmosis? Reflections on librarians' distance education

While I am enjoying the MLA Web 2.0 101 class, I have a confession to make: my sociocultural anthropology side is learning far more by observing my colleagues in the course than my librarian side is with the curriculum. Sorry. Apparently I'm such a Lackluster Veteran (although I don't quite fit the demographics, what are you?) that it's a serious challenge for me to be 'ooh, ahh!' about Web 2.0.

When we arrived at the midpoint of our 8 week class, more than a few colleagues expressed dismay at falling behind due to a variety of reasons that mostly involve time and/or technology & requesting/proposing alternate arrangements. I am certainly sympathetic to the demands of the life/work/education balance yet somewhat puzzled. There appear to be common expectations that our coursework would tidily fit in with our regular routine at our jobs without any extra effort (i.e. homework) required.

I'm fascinated by this and want to understand why as a future online teacher. Were these expectations because the class is free? Online? Massive at over 600? Something in the way it was marketed to MLA members? Having the curriculum administered via a blog? How is this class any different than a college course where professors surely must hear the same things from students at midterms? Do we truly value CEs or see them as something we sit through, grab our certificates for our points then head out without much further reflection on the material?

As I've shared in my profile, I was a full time distance education library school student for 16 months while working at a non-library job 24 hours a week and being some semblance of a wife & mom to a preschooler. If there was a Most Non-Existant Friend award for 2006-2007 I probably would have won it, but I think most of my friends understood & have forgiven me :)

I say this not to boast or suggest taking that life/work/education balance to anyone (I'd discourage it unless you want to question your sanity on a regular basis), but to note that I'm still not certain if I am a freak or a geek by osmosis by being online since the early 1990s and comfortable with learning information in whatever form as rapidly as possible. I have to be careful as I teach in the future to realize that many (most?) of my colleagues are not set on automatic information-seeking overdrive, although I believe that many (most?) of our users are. Of course this depends on our particular library and services, but perhaps this is part of the current disconnect where users are not perceiving libraries as being of value.