Faces of NNLM Region 4: Sandi L. Bates

Posted in: #CC/Academic List, #Health Interest List, #Health Sciences List, #Public/K-12 List, All Members

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Sandi L. Bates

Southwest Clinical Campus Librarian

School of Medicine and Health Sciences, University of North Dakota

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

Being a librarian is my second career. When I decided to pursue my MLIS, I was lucky enough to have a professor at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee who had worked as a medical librarian so was able to take a medical subject reference class. My second lucky day was having the assistant director at UND’s SMHS mentor me for the head of reference position. I stepped away from the medical school for a period of time while working at a community college library. I am very happy to be back in the research-intensive world of medical librarianship.

What are your research interests or top work activities?

Currently I am focused on scholarly publishing and creating tools for our faculty and students to use to be successful at submitting an article for publication.

My colleagues and I are working on a self-study looking at how to map curriculum and determine best ways to match our knowledge and skills with subject areas across the complete health sciences spectrum.

What prompted you to become a medical librarian?

My background is journalism, which morphed into graphic design/public relations but I’ve always been interested in research – finding information, solving riddles, reading everything on a topic area. When I decided it was time for a career change, librarianship had all the areas I was interested in for job satisfaction. The broad range of training available along with areas of professional development for medical librarians is very attractive as I’m always looking for personal growth, too. My mom was a nurse – an old-school 1950’s RN, which sparked my interest in health information. Being a medical librarian is the best combo of being a health professional without having to deal with things like bodily fluids.

What is your favorite librarian tool?

Controlled vocabularies so when you invite me to “dinner” and I show up at noon, you do, too, instead of 6 p.m., which is supper. Then when asked if I’d like a “coke” to drink, I’ll be served the Mt. Dew flavor.

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

The most important challenge I see is the degradation of librarians as degreed professionals. Librarianship is the only profession where everyone who works in the building, named the Library, are called librarians – there is no distinction that we earned a degree and are trained in the theoretical areas relevant to making the best decisions for our patrons.

It is disheartening to me to see positions advertised for access services positions involving teaching information literacy, reference interviewing and other very important areas listing no library degree required and sometimes not even as a preferred qualification for such a position. It diminishes our hard work to understand the intricacies of learning outcomes, ties to curriculum and in-depth skills in ferreting out search strategies in order for our users to get the best outcome in their search. For me, the information literacy sessions are then rote presentations rather than true instruction.

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

While at my previous job one of the dual credit English teachers brought her rural school students to the campus for an intense, two-hour library session. The class was mostly designed to teach the students information analysis and validating online sources. Following the session, one of the students approached me and said, “I thought there could be nothing worse than spending two hours in this class. I was totally dreading it. I was so wrong, THIS WAS GREAT! I’m so glad I learned all of this today. I’m sure it will be helpful to me as I go to college for biomedical engineering.” I keep her name card hanging on my wall to remind me some of the students really do get it and appreciate what we as librarians can do to advance their research.