My Library Day : July 31, 2009

This was really an interesting project! I have been enjoying reading a day in the life of librarians. Mine is routine mostly, but with challenges every single day.

Here was my day, Friday, July 31, 2009. I found it quite difficult to record exact time frame for things I did during the 8-hour for work plus 1 hour for lunch.

• Woke up at 5:30 am, spent 20 minutes preparing breakfast and lunch for my son and husband, and headed for gym. It is my daily routine to workout in gym for one hour before going to work. During the one-hour workout I watched TV feeding my brain with national and local headlines or news.
  
• Work started at 8 am when staffed the Reference Desk for one hour. It was quiet this morning. I quickly checked Ask a Librarian email account and my work email to see if there were things that needed immediate responses.
  
• Posted a library tip to the library blog for our scientific editor, who once in a while sent out Library Tips to the campus via email. Whenever he posts a tip, I would repeat the tip in the library's blog.
• Logged in the library's Twitter account to view followers' tweets and posted tweets to the library's Twitter account.
• Answered two email questions from Ask a Librarian email account. One requested research help and the other was about off-campus log-in problem.
  
• At 9 am, telephone meeting with LISTEN project coordinator and my supervisor about BOLT (Brief Online Learning Tutorials) we developed for LISTEN modules. 10% of my time devotes to this grant project since July 2007.
• Right after the BOLT meeting, two nursing students came for help with their group project. I spent 40 minutes with them searching PubMed and showing them how to limit searches and retrieved full text articles.
• During my one-hour lunch break (11-12 pm), I stepped out the library and took a nice 20-minute walk. After the heavy rain and tornado sweeping through some areas of the city last nigh, it turned out to be a beautiful day.
• My second shift at the Reference Desk was from 12 - 1pm. I was able to use this hour preparing budget report for the SC/MLA '09 Local Arrangement Committee meeting as I am the conference treasurer. The meeting was held from 2-3:30 pm.
  
• I spent 30 minutes going through my RSS feeds briefly and bookmarked interesting information to my delicious page, and saved some favorite articles to my EverNote site.
  
• Spent one hour on my social web profile to maintain a professional appearance on the social Web. Two people subscribed to my FriendFeed, three people requested to follow me on Twitter, one person added me as a contact in slideshare.net, one Facebook friend made two comments on my wall.
• At 5 pm, I finished my 3rd shift at the Desk and went home.
  

What I enjoy most is everyday is not the same.

My Story

I was asked by CHILI (Careers in Health Information, Librarianship, and Informatics) project directors to blog about my experiences working in a library before I received my MLIS degree and how that experiences helped me to be what I am today. Imagine, I'm talking to a group of high school kids visiting my library hoping to inspire them to enter medical librarianship.

During the first semester in McGill Library School, I had no idea of what kind of libraries (i.e., special library, public library, academic library, and hospital library) I should set my feet on in the future. By the end of the first semester something happened that changed my career life. I failed in Dr. Beheshti's Information System Design, a required and core course for all Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) students. I lost 3 credits! I had a gloomy Christmas for the year 1999 pondering and reflecting how to be more effective and efficient in coping with the Winter 2000 required courses. I was told I must take another course to make up for the lost credits as soon as possible. The earliest chance I could have was Spring 2000 and the only available selective course was Health Sciences Information. I had no choice but registered for the course in order to get the 3 credits back. It turned out to be the turning point in my life. I pictured my career goal from vague to crystal clear by the time I competed the course. I knew what I wanted to be, a medical librarian, a health sciences librarian. I started building my career path by looking for any kind of part-time job or volunteer work or anything that would lead me in achieving my career goal. My every first experience was working as a volunteer in the Nurses' Library in Montreal General Hospital in Canada, part of the McGill University Health Center (MUHC). Another step I took was to take a Practicum and worked at Royal Victoria Medical Library. The Practicum gave me the opportunity to create current awareness program for doctors and physicians. Working 2-3 hours a week in the Nurses' Library, slowly and gradually, I touched almost every aspect of the library's functions from shelving to cataloging. The then librarian, Lynn Kiraly-Batist, was nice and professional, who inspired me and trained me to be a professional medical librarian. She showed me many of the things that were not taught in the library school.

By the time I received my MLIS degree in 2001, I was offered a part-time position as a research librarian working for McGill University School of Nursing. It was there I was given a lot of chances to conduct literature searches on medical literature for nursing faculty members. In 2002, after Mrs. Kiraly-Batist moved to another hospital library, I was hired to work solo and manage the Nurses' Library and worked on every aspect of the library including collection development, acquisitions, serials, cataloging, interlibrary loan services, reference and instructional services, training volunteers, recruiting and hiring library research assistants. These experiences helped me understand many of the health science resources either print or electronically and greatly enrich my professional knowledge as a medical librarian. They also laid a solid foundation for me to grow in the field of medical librarianship.

Being a reference librarian in a health sciences library is very challenged and this is the part I like most. Challenges always motivate me and inspire me to keep pursuing for career advancement. I have been active in serving on professional committees of the Medical Library Association (MLA) and Southern Chapter of the MLA, presenting posters and papers at professional conferences, writing and researching related to reference services, and networking with medical librarians across the country. Looking back, I'm grateful and happy for every little step and effort I have been taken to lead me to where I am today. I always believe working persistently towards one's goal will eventually lead you to what you want to be.

Rachel 's Unstuck Strategies

We sometimes got stuck no matter we were new to the profession or even at junior or senior level. At the Southern Chapter of the Medical Library Association (SC/MLA) Annual Meeting last week, Rachel Singer Gordon gave a wonderful speech about how to get unstuck when difficult episodes appeared. Here are her 12 strategies to get unstuck:

1. Set goal: realistic and small objectives
2. Address your own mindset: identifying negative thoughts and what drew you to the profession
3. Identify and overcome obstacles
   
4. Defeat the status with bias: trying one little change every week
5. Defeat procrastination: go back to your goals
   
6. Get by with a little help from your friends
7. Keep learning and innovating
8. Cultivate resilience and neoteny (carry youthful characteristic into adulthood)
   
9. Go around if you can't go forward
   
10. Realize that change is inevitable
11. Be proactive: don't sit around waiting
    
12. Work from a place of personal and professional power: realize your value and skills

Are you inspired?