Blog Reflection # 8

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.