Although I
cannot remember ever having any type of formal library instruction, I must have
been shown or taught at some point on how to look things up and find materials
in the library. It seems kind of odd thinking about it now, but how else would
I (or others for that matter) know how to use a library without someone – most
likely a librarian – showing them at some point?
I guess that’s
why this class is so important to many of us who are planning or thinking about
becoming librarians for a career/profession, as well as those who are already
working as librarians and are expanding their education and/or knowledge base.
The course
has helped me to think about how library users view and approach the library,
and the library’s staff. As library users ourselves (i.e. those in this
course), we have our own experiences in using a library and its resources and
in interacting with library personnel, and the knowledge that our fellow
classmates have shared from their experiences help to broaden our insights.
Many of the
practices that have been discussed in this course have made clear the
importance of explaining and showing library users how to find resources, as
well as how to communicate in a dialogue rather than simply answering a
question and moving on to the next task at hand. Personally speaking, in order
to be able to teach someone how to do something or explain how something works,
I feel that I have to know how to do that thing myself, so this class has been
greatly beneficial in this respect, by having exposed us to resources that can
find information from resources that are pretty easy to use once you know about
them.
I decided to
look at medical libraries – The National Library of Medicine, in particular. As
our national population ages, healthcare and medically related issues will play an ever-increasing role in
all aspects of life.
The patron
type of a medical library includes “scientists, health professionals,
historians, and the general public.” So this could include doctors, nurses,
medical students, biologists, as well as anyone who is in need of medical
information of some type.
Some of the
resources for instruction that a medical library can provide some of the things
that can be found at the National Library of Medicine’s Health Services
Research & Public Health Information Programs web page (see: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hsrph.html).
These include health and environmental databases, information on healthcare
quality, information and results on medical studies, and online webinars, tutorials,
and interactive exhibitions.
While all of
these resource tools seem beneficial, my only concern would be that not enough
people are made aware of them, and that all the time and work that went into
developing them will go unused by people who could benefit from them.
