Hospital Librarians: Training the Next Generation of Doctors

Hospital librarians address a wide array of information needs. They help nurses figure out how to take care of patients, help physicians with difficult cases, help families get reliable health information, and sometimes the information they provide even helps save a life. They also play an important role in training the next generation of doctors. At one hospital in Oregon, Providence St. Joseph Health System Library Services has integrated traditional library instruction directly into the curriculum of the Internal Medicine Residency Program. Providence St. Joseph Health (PSJH) System Library Services has a staff of 16 librarians and library paraprofessionals dedicated to meeting the information needs of a diverse group of patrons: the employees and medical staff of the PSJH healthcare system. The library staff supports patient care, scientific research, business, and continuing education needs of employees and medical staff, but is also a key part of training the future healthcare workforce as well. The library provides resources and services to support employees who are obtaining academic degrees to advance their career in healthcare, as well as education support and training for the School of Health Professions of the affiliated University of Providence, and the many graduate medical education programs located in hospitals across the health system. As the librarians located at medical schools play a key role in the education of our future doctors, so too do hospital librarians as they work with new doctors during their time in medical residency

Certification of Librarians: An Unproven Demand

This paper examines whether certification of librarians is necessary to ensure high quality service. The paper explains the purpose of professional certification and provides a synopsis of the history of national librarian certification initiatives in the U.S. A literature review evaluates arguments supporting and opposing certification. Arguments in favor of certification are unconvincing and reveal certification supporters’ professional insecurities, failure to consider the certification bureaucracy that would be created, and lack of evidence to support their claims. Given these findings, the paper concludes that librarian certification is unnecessary. Library professionals are encouraged to take other proactive steps to expand their role, importance, and impact in the 21st century

Making It to the Major Leagues: Career Movement between Library and Archival Professions and from Small College to Large University Libraries

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A review of professionalism within LIS

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of professionalism within Library and Information Science (LIS) and in doing so draw comparisons with the education and medicine professions. Design/methodology/approach: The paper provides a review of the extant literature from the three professions and gives a brief review of the theoretical constructs of professional knowledge using the work of Eisner and Eraut to explore knowledge types. It then relates these definitions to knowledge use within LIS, education and medicine, before examining the roles that professional associations have on the knowledge development of a profession. It concludes with a reflection on the future of professionalism within LIS. Findings: The literature suggests a fragmented epistemological knowledge-base and threats to its practices from outside professions. It does, however, find opportunities to redefine its knowledge boundaries within the phronetic practices of LIS and in socio-cultural uses of knowledge. It finds strengths and weaknesses in professionalism within LIS and its practitioners. Originality/value: This review provides a contemporary update to several earlier, related, works and provides useful context to current efforts to professionalise LIS by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals

Answering the Calls of "What's Next" and "Library Workers Cannot Live by Love Alone" through Certification and Salary Research

Members and staff of the American Library Association (ALA) worked diligently over more than a decade to develop a certification program for public library managers. Spurred by a long-standing trend in many other terminal-degree professions that have post-degree, voluntary certifications, the Certified Public Library Administrator Program was born. Legal authority recommended the establishment of a service organization, a 501(c)(6) to manage the program, which has become one of several programs that will be offered to library employees under the imprimatur of ALA. After the American Library Association???Allied Professional Association (ALA-APA) was instituted, advocacy for salary improvement initiatives was appended to the mission. One means of salary advocacy was to improve available data by expanding the scope and usefulness of the ALA Survey of Librarian Salaries, which resulted in the ALA-APA Salary Survey: Non-MLS???Public and Academic, conducted in 2006 and 2007 to collect salary data from more than sixty positions in the field that do not require a master's degree in Library Science. The experience of establishing two certification programs, the Certified Public Library Administrator Program (CPLA??) and the Library Support Staff Certification Program, has been a study in creating new national models of professional development. This article will also discuss the insights that have emerged from fulfilling elements of ALA strategic plans concerning the needs of support staff through certification and the salary survey.published or submitted for publicatio

Supporting Scholarship: Thoughts on the Role of the Academic Law Librarian

Discussing the role of the law library in legal education is necessary and essential, both because of the demands libraries place on increasingly tight law school budgets and space, and the challenges that libraries face as the information they collect and organize has moved largely from print to digital formats. This paper explores the roles of academic law librarians in supporting faculty scholarship within the context of the forces affecting libraries, librarians, and legal education in the (still early) twenty-first century. Although it has been more than 30 years since the widespread adoption of the legal research databases in the 1970s, the legal information environment continues to be seen as changing and uncertain, roiled by such new developments as working paper services providing pre-publication looks at new articles, growing interest in blogs and other varieties of short form legal scholarship, and the potential for open access publishing to reduce or eliminate reliance on printed law journals. As these developments continue to affect the processes of legal research and scholarly communications in law, what implications do they have for the role of law librarians in those processes

Crossing the threshold: Reflective practice in information literacy development

Do we think enough about what we are doing as information literacy (IL) practitioners? The relationship between reflection and IL development is well documented in academic and professional literature, particularly in the context of teaching librarians using reflective activities to enable learners to think critically about their IL abilities. Parallel literature from education and other fields has promoted the concept of the reflective or thinking practitioner. Drawing on literature and theory from various domains, we review the concepts of reflection and reflective practice, and discuss their application and take-up in library and information work, with particular reference to the teaching role of librarians in the context of developments in critical information literacy. Our review suggests that reflective practice is generally recognised as an important dimension of library and information work, but is currently underdeveloped in comparsion with other professions. Using terminology and theory from the pedagogical arena, we contend that critical reflection needs to be elevated to the special status of a threshold competence for library and information professionals generally and for IL practitioners in particular. We also argue that our profession needs purpose-designed domain-specific advice and guidance on reflective practice, to support initial and continuing education of library and information workers, and we conclude by identifying areas where further research is required to clarify the role of reflection in library and information research and evaluation, to explore existing approaches to reflection in professional education programs, and test the transferability of reflective methods used in other professional domains

Identifying and Encouraging Leadership Potential: Assessment Technology and the Library Profession

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Universities and Professions in the Early Modern Period

This article brings together old and new ideas and information to provide a different perspective than has so far prevailed upon the relationship between the universities and the professions in the early modern period. It focuses not only upon the direct impact of the so-called educational revolution upon the learned professions but also upon the indirect and less easy to quantify implications of that phenomenon. Special attention is paid to the transference of teaching methods from the universities to the learned professions and to the importance of the patronage system in linking universities and professions. Examples are drawn from a wealth of manuscript sources