The Accidental Health Sciences Librarian

Ross MacDonald (Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, Education City, Doha, State of Qatar)

The Electronic Library

ISSN: 0264-0473

Article publication date: 15 February 2011

143

Keywords

Citation

MacDonald, R. (2011), "The Accidental Health Sciences Librarian", The Electronic Library, Vol. 29 No. 1, pp. 149-150. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471111111505

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2011, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


The authors of this book begin by noting that almost nobody sets out to become a health sciences librarian. Their aim, therefore, is to provide those individuals who have suddenly found themselves in such a predicament with a broad and painless introduction the field. The result is a chatty, easy‐to‐read book that can be knocked off in an evening or two yet provides a useful starting place for those who want to know more about this area of librarianship, and gives an excellent taste of what the job can involve.

Ennis and Mitchell quickly allay the fears of all those English and history majors by noting that the vast majority of people in the job don't hold any health‐ or science‐related qualifications either. They then briefly survey the different working environments health sciences librarians might find themselves in, ranging from hospitals to medical schools to zoos. Next up are a potted history of health sciences librarianship in the US and the interesting origins of the US National Library of Medicine. This leads naturally into a discussion of NLM's classification system, Medical Subject Headings, CINAHL subject headings, and medical terminology. The following chapter discusses various aspects of the job, focusing on the foibles of different kinds of library patrons, notably consumers, students, clinicians, and researchers. The role of librarians in evidence‐based practice, and the increased need for outreach and marketing activities in the age of the Internet are also introduced.

Technology looms large in the life of health sciences librarians, and so soaks up two chapters. The first gives excellent advice on how to deal with IT staff, the gist of networking (and why it always seems to be a problem), how to keep up with relevant IT developments, and why you need to know about social networking tools and how they might – or might not – relate to your library. The second surveys some of the main online databases that are now part and parcel of the job. The final chapter of the book discusses professional development resources, particularly peers and professional associations; also discussed are training and credentialing. An appendix includes quotes from working health science librarians about what they most and least like about the field; there are also extensive lists of further reading, websites, and professional associations.

A nice feature of the book is the inclusion of numerous autobiographical snippets from health librarians describing how they got into the field, and what their jobs entail; these reinforce the book's “accidental” theme and illustrate the scope and variety of the work involved in what might seem a very specialised area. If there is a flaw in this book, it's the overwhelmingly US‐oriented view taken by the authors: the outside world and its contributions rate perhaps a dozen mentions (even counting World War II). This is by no means fatal, and is perhaps unavoidable, given that US‐based online resources, notably NLM's PubMed, dominate much of modern health librarianship. It certainly doesn't stop this from being an excellent introduction to a fascinating field of endeavor.

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