Faces of NNLM Region 4: Emily Eresuma

Posted by liaison on October 27th, 2021 Posted in: #CC/Academic List, #Health Interest List, #Health Sciences List, #Public/K-12 List, All Members

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 For National Medical Librarians Month, we will be shining a light on Emily Eresuma, MLS, MBA, AHIP, the Senior Medical Librarian at Primary Children’s Hospital, Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City, Utah. Below is an interview with Ms. Eresuma about her experience being a medical librarian.

 

Can you give us the elevator-speech rundown of your medical librarian career?  

I began my journey as a medical librarian at Primary Children’s in May 2006 when I was hired by the late Lynn Wilson. She believed in me even though I was a new graduate in library science and did not know what PubMed was. Two weeks into my new job she called me at 7 a.m. to say she had an emergency and could I present to the new residents. What?! It didn’t go well, and the residency director was not impressed. Time went on and I still love all there is about medicine, especially the practice of Pediatrics. In 2010 the same residency director that witnessed my flopped presentation in 2006 introduced me to the incoming pediatric residents as the most clinically knowledgeable medical librarian he has worked with. Triumph! I am part of an amazing, hard-working, innovative team of five librarians that support Intermountain Healthcare which has 24 hospitals, 160 clinics, 3,800 affiliated physicians, 2,400 employed doctors and advanced practice providers, and a total of 41,700 employees over a multi-state area. Primary Children’s is ranked among the best children’s hospitals in the U.S. and is a Level I Pediatric Trauma Center serving a 5-state region. Primary Children’s is the pediatric teaching hospital for the University of Utah School of Medicine. It is exciting and challenging to work in a leading healthcare system and be known as the “pediatric medical librarian” in a nationally recognized pediatric hospital. 

What are your research interests or top work activities?  

My interest lies in advocacy and outreach of library services. I have not explored these via research but will consider it after pondering this question. I am the outreach and marketing librarian and work with another librarian on our team to market library services. One of my favorite and top work activities is being the webmaster for our internal library website. I am excited to start creating a series of workshop and tutorial videos covering a range of information literacy topics for the clinicians that partner with us for knowledge management and creation. 

What prompted you to become a medical librarian?  

I have always loved hospitals and my children had been treated at Primary Children’s Hospital long before I applied for my job. It is an amazing pediatric hospital with the motto, “The Child First and Always”. When a medical librarian job opened at Primary Children’s, I applied with the thought that it would be more a practice interview rather than a real job possibility. I think I was hired because Lynn Wilson’s dog at the time was named “Emily”. She also told me after I interviewed with her, she just knew I was the one.  

What is your favorite librarian tool?  

By far, my favorite tool is PubMed! I use it everyday all day. It is essential to my job. And it is the database all vendors overlay their platform onto so how is it not the best?! And it’s available to anyone in the world that has internet access! I know it is not a fancy or new tool, but I love it. 

What do you think are the most important challenges that medical librarians face? 

An important challenge for medical librarians is making connections to customers and understanding their information needs. We live in an information economy, making personal connections allows medical librarians to be proactive and effective in the acquisition and dissemination of information. By building the customer’s trust through personal connection the medical librarian expands the customer’s capacity to generate, process and apply knowledge-based information. Clinicians that need our services the most have very limited time to connect. Creative ways to connect with our customers is an important challenge we face at Intermountain.    

Please tell us about an interaction with a library user that gave you a lot of satisfaction.  

I was contacted via email in May of this year (2021) by a customer I had not worked with before. She wanted documents from the U.S. Department of Energy Environmental Measurements Laboratory. The documents were dated from the late 1970’s to early 1990’s. I had extensive communication with an international agency that housed these documents. The contact person was in Europe and I persistently contacted him. By the end of July, he had obtained and emailed the requested documents. The research coordinator was very thankful. “We knew these papers were important to our work, but until we reviewed them did not realize how important they are!  Thank you again for all of your effort and persistence in obtaining them!” This project was for our precision genomics department and the papers contained information on radiation levels and Nevada test sites. They didn’t think they would get access to this information and I obtained it with many different librarian skills. My detective work and persistence made an important contribution to their project outcome.