National Medical Librarians Month: October is the month to celebrate medical librarians and health information professionals who work tirelessly to support healthcare providers, researchers, and patients for evidence-based medical knowledge.
Health librarians (also health sciences librarians, medical librarians, health information professionals, health informationists) assume several critical searching, teaching and leadership roles in university libraries, hospitals, academic health centres and clinical communities across Canada, the United States and in most of the English-speaking world.
In Canada, health sciences librarians often assume key roles to support a range of library and information services for medical and health clienteles. Health librarians are responsible for performing liaison and outreach services to support the research and frontline clinical activities of various health professionals, especially in hospital settings. They order and/or subscribe to a range of important print and electronic resources (i.e., licensing databases and ebooks), part of an overall information services program within academic and medical institutions. Health librarians monitor information trends such as research data management, and teach courses and workshops about expert searching, including artificial intelligence tools. Although health professionals hope to be self-reliant in locating information, due to easy access to information and AI, and while health librarians have increased their information literacy efforts, there is still much teaching involved given the importance of systematic searching. With so much research available given tools such as Open Evidence, some concern has been expressed that health librarians are not teaching the necessary skills needed by users to be self-reliant. Health librarians need to do some creative strategic planning to assess/address these deficits.
Health librarians are involved in ensuring access to high-quality, evidence-based information by:
staying current with trends in artificial intelligence (AI), medical informatics, open data, and related information fields
negotiating affordable subscription rates for key databases and monitoring open search and free alternatives
working with national and international library communities on the development of policies related to intellectual property and fair use in light of emerging technologies, esp. artificial intelligence (AI)
guiding the transition of library websites from static silos into sophisticated and user-focused information portals
Health librarians provide instruction & educational support to scholars and clinicians by:
providing instruction and teaching support for programs at the university, and medical school via face-to-face and online workshops
providing in-depth reference services to undergraduate medical students, residents, graduate students and faculty, as well as clinicians
developing expertise in presentation skills and learning theories to better support health library users
engaging in research about support of clinicians with other librarians and by collaborating with researchers
Health librarians are involved in information organization and access by:
providing timely useful presentation of information on library websites and by cataloguing resources for findability
advocating for wide, uniform access to scholarly clinical information, including the use of data curation and AI-powered techniques
ensuring clinicians and scholars have access to evidence to support research through lib guides library catalogues and search tools
negotiating access to electronic serials with publishers and through provincial and national consortia
representing libraries on national and international standards committees for information encoding, description and classification
ensuring the library conforms to and meets standards of description and access i.e., Dublin Core, Resource Description and Access (RDA), Archival principles for medical librarians, institutional data repositories
Health librarians are involved in collection development & maintenance by:
making timely, appropriate collections decisions with a view towards providing support of clinical/ education programs and people
monitoring scholarly publishing and communication trends, recognizing and anticipating emerging issues (i.e., AI, COVID-19, open science)
regularly attending conferences in specific disciplines and in various areas of health and medical librarianship (e.g., CHLA/ABSC, MLA)
maintaining regular contact with library associations and consortia, and pursue ways to share and pool expertise and resources
conducting citation analysis, studies in collection use patterns through bibliometrics re: highly-cited monographs, journals and other
curating and providing access to federal and provincial (and other) government information, including grey literature and data
