Methods in Medicine: The Role of Medical Libraries
By Katharine Dunn, Dean's Editorial Fellow
There are many changes afoot in academic libraries, perhaps in particular in science, engineering, and medicine — fields that have in a short time migrated much of their data and publications online. Practicing science librarians say that despite the economic downturn there are good jobs for people who like fast-paced, interdisciplinary work. In this issue, we explore what some of those jobs look like and how to prepare for them.
David Flynn '06LS explains the case to a dozen first-year Boston University medical students: A 15-year-old girl riding her bicycle gets hit by a car. She's rushed to the emergency room where they, the students, work as physicians. When the girl's parents arrive, they're offended by her treatment so far because she's a Christian Scientist. What's the best way to treat her? Flynn says to the group. What does being a Christian Scientist entail? Flynn asks the med students where they can find reliable information to answer these questions.
"Everyone goes to Wikipedia right off the bat," says Flynn, head of library and information management education at BU's Alumni Medical Library. During the first couple weeks of the school year, Flynn and his staff teach two required library sessions to medical students taking the class Integrated Problems (IP), in which students learn to analyze cases like this one. (IP, for which Flynn has been a facilitator, is kind of like the TV show House, he says.) One of the library sessions focuses on "evidence-based medicine," a systematic way to solve cases that rely on strong research skills.
Flynn tells the students that Wikipedia may be a good social experiment, but it's not necessarily where a patient and her family would want their doctor researching treatment. He walks them through the process of finding medical information in textbooks, on the library website, and in databases like MedLine. The goal is to teach them not only to find better information, but also to find information better.
"I like to use shock and awe to get people to pay attention," he says. "Sometimes we have people self-survey. We say, 'How good a searcher are you on a scale of 1-5?' Everyone comes back and says, 'I'm a 4.5. I'm fantastic. I'm a Google expert.' But you go to class and start with something like quotes around your search string, and it blows their minds. And if that blows your mind, you're not a 4.5 on the scale. It's a way to show them that what we're doing is important."
BU's medical librarians have become increasingly important. Since Flynn started at BU in 2006, the number of education librarians has grown from three to six, each of whom has reference-desk duties and teaches at least 75 classes and workshops a year across all four schools on the medical campus, including dental medicine and public health. (Flynn teaches about 150 sessions a year.) This year, Flynn estimates his staff will directly teach 3,500 people on a campus of 6,000.
This level of academic library outreach is certainly rare; the BU medical library's education program is one of the few in the United States so tightly integrated with curricula on campus. "It takes time to build up those relationships, to have faculty comfortable inviting you in," says Howard Silver '07DA , co-head of the engineering and science libraries at MIT.
But there are many ways librarians can get involved in education. At MIT, Silver and his staff work on outreach with departments, and they teach classes and workshops on subjects like patents and on citation tools like Endnote. And like many libraries, MIT's focus in the last decade has been pushing their educational content onto the Web and making it intuitive so students and faculty can use it easily. At Tufts University in Medford, Regina Raboin '95LS, the science reference and instruction librarian, co- teaches a half-credit, eight-week course called "Research for Success," in which sophomores through seniors learn advanced research techniques to help them write papers or senior theses. She also helped develop a library research Web tutorial that's a required part of a popular biology class.
When many academic libraries struggle to stay connected and valuable to faculty and students, Flynn and other librarians increasingly practice what he calls active learning. "We hit people where they live," he says. "We have to show that everything we do is going to be relevant and make your life easier."
Flynn credits much of the recent growth of the BU medical library's outreach programs to his predecessor and former GSLIS classmate, Lauren Maggio '05LS, who encouraged him to apply for a job about a year after she arrived in 2005. Maggio saw that few people were attending the workshops the library offered. ("We'd talk about what we wanted to talk about, like Boolean operators, and they didn't care," says Flynn.) So she decided to stop running them and instead began spreading the word. She talked to people on elevators. When she noticed that students were asking similar questions at the reference desk, she'd call faculty members and offer to create pathfinders for their classes. She fought to get on to curriculum committees, arriving at meetings 15 minutes early to have casual chats with faculty, many of whom, she says, were shy about admitting they had any information troubles. "Those were fruitful exchanges," says Maggio, who now works as a medical education librarian at Stanford University.
"Lauren's a fantastic proselytizer for what the library can do. You impress the right person, it leads to something else," says Flynn. As the librarians became more involved in training medical students in IP classes, other schools at BU began to ask for their help. In 2007, Maggio, Flynn, and other librarians designed an entirely new class for BU's Division of Graduate Medical Sciences called Introduction to Biomedical Information, the goal of which is to help students prepare to write their required theses. Flynn is the course director, and there are 180 students in the class, which is now in its second year.
Recently, the Boston Medical Center, the teaching hospital affiliated with BU's medical campus, asked Flynn's staff to do intervention education with its 1,000 nurses. Flynn says they're starting with the charge nurses on each floor and participants in the hospital's journal club, offering search training to about 25 nurses a month. "We're kind of at the point where we're victims of our own success," he says. "Even though our staff is bigger, it's not as big as it could be."
Flynn knows he's lucky to be so appreciated, though that doesn't mean there aren't challenges. He routinely runs sessions in which participants say they've worked at the medical school for 20 years and didn't know there was a library on campus. His "lowest hope" for intervention when he teaches, he says, is that people remember the library exists and that they can come in and ask a question "to an actual person." After all, the BU librarians likely score a 5 on a search scale, knowing as they do that quotation marks work wonders around a search string.