It's Because I'm an Expert

Stephanie's recent post, What Do Faculty Want of Librarians, got me looking back the past 6 years since I became an academic health sciences librarian. These are the things faculty members enjoyed having a connection with me, a health sciences librarian:

• Get full text articles, print or electronic, at the point of need.
• Conduct literature searches on their projects and research topics.
  
• Update their course materials each year.
  
• Update their dissertation references on a regular basis. Some of them are working on their PhD degrees while teaching in the departments.
  
• Teach their students on how to use the library's resources to complete course assignments.
  
• Create workshops tailed to a specific group of students.
  
• Set up automatically email alerts on their research topics or on their favorite journals' TOCs.
• Send out brief news, tips, and resources related to their fields.
  

In the past two years, I have been the library liaison to 9 academic units, including 2 colleges, 4 departments, and 3 divisions. I felt grateful and honored to be invited to co-teach with a nursing faculty in Informatics for Healthcare since 2006. I'm also a team member in this nursing information literacy grant--LISTEN. I felt I'm not quite understood as an academic librarian, though. I've tried to find ways to promote what I can do for the faculty and my departments. This comes back to Stephanie's invitation and question: "what can you do to help your department?"