October is Medical Librarians Month, and Ann Dyer, director of the WSU Health Sciences Library in Spokane, recently spoke about her profession and the importance of medical librarianship to all health sciences fields, which rely on an incredible degree of trust between patients and their providers.
“That trust is based on the idea that their providers know the best current information to help them prevent illness or return to health,” she said. “However, the landscape of medical information is extraordinarily vast, complex, and in constant flux. Medical libraries organize that information in a way that makes it findable and useful for providers, and medical librarians provide invaluable guidance and services to get the right information into the right hands at the right time.”
WSU medical librarians’ important roles
As an academic facility, the Health Sciences Library has a broader mandate: to also support the research conducted at WSU Health Sciences, Dyer said.
“The scholarly conversation relies on having all of the relevant information on a research question before publishing new findings, and medical librarians are essential team members in collecting that information in a systematic and comprehensive way,” she said.
They are also essential to the curriculum and instruction teams in the health sciences colleges, Dyer said. Students in the field need extensive practice and guidance in finding and using new information throughout their careers.
“Evidence-based practice requires practitioners to be able to find the best current information efficiently and effectively, every time, for every patient. Library search methods help them do that,” she said.
Today’s challenges in medical librarianship
The information landscape is incredibly overwhelming, Dyer said. In addition, the ease of online searching means that people often overestimate their ability to find reliable information, often disregarding quality for speed.
“Medical librarians face an uphill battle with many practitioners and researchers to demonstrate our deep need for well-indexed, organized, and curated information,” she said.
Another challenge is the changing economic model for scholarly information, Dyer explained. An intense push for open-access publishing models has shifted publishers’ revenue streams from subscribers to the suppliers of the information: researchers who want to publish their findings. Making access to information more democratic and equitable has created the opportunity for some individuals to establish “a publishing underworld of predatory publications.”
“These are publications that look like reputable titles but fail to provide the peer review and editorial practices that are standard and required to ensure that the information being published is reliable and high quality,” she said. “The increasing challenge of identifying these low-quality publications makes the role of the medical librarian ever more important.”
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