Faces of our Region: Janet Crum

Posted in: Blog

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NAME: Janet Crum

Title: Director, Health Sciences Library

Institution: University of Arizona

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

I started my medical library career as a student assistant at Oregon Health & Science University. It was supposed to be just a summer job, but we kept in touch, and when they had a 2-year, grant-funded position a few years later, they invited me to apply. I did, and I was there for 14 years! (Moral of the story: I’m hard to get rid of.) I was promoted through the ranks from Cataloger & Systems Librarian to department head and other administrative roles and eventually left in 2010 to become director of the library at City of Hope National Medical Center in Southern California. A few years after that, I stepped down from my director role due to family responsibilities and left medical libraries to be a department head at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. I started at the University of Arizona in October 2020 and am thrilled to be back in medical librarianship, my professional home.

What are your research interests or top work activities?

My primary research interests are employee engagement and emerging roles for health sciences librarians, especially roles that embed us more deeply in the work of our institutions and allow us to collaborate with the populations we serve. My favorite work activity is encouraging my staff and helping them succeed.

What prompted you to become a medical librarian?

Sheer dumb luck 🙂 I started my library career as a 12-year-old public library volunteer, and some years later spent four years as a student assistant in Special Collections (my superpower: reading John Muir’s handwriting) while earning a BA in English. After I graduated and discovered I did not, in fact, want to teach high school English, one of my supervisors suggested I go to library school. So I moved to Seattle and went to library school.

The summer after my first year, I wanted to go back to the Portland area where my then-boyfriend, now-husband lived, so I sent a cover letter and resume to every library in the ALA Directory. I got one response: from Oregon Health & Science University. They needed someone to catalog rare medical books and cover the reference desk while librarians took vacation. I loved the work so much I signed up for a medical librarianship course as soon as I got back to Seattle.

What is your favorite librarian tool?

I’m an administrator now, so I don’t do much actual librarian work anymore, but I’d have to say PubMed, because it has revolutionized how we search for and find medical literature.

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

I see three major challenges:

1. Devaluing and defunding of libraries: Hospital libraries continue to close at an alarming rate. Libraries of all types face, at best, stagnant budgets and, more typically, cuts. We are long past the point of being able to do more with less and have become severely constrained in the services we can provide. As a result, staff are often exhausted and demoralized.
2. Disinformation and devaluing of expertise, especially medical and scientific expertise. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought this issue into focus, but the problems have been building for some time. I hope we as librarians can ameliorate this situation at least a little bit.
3. Diversity, equity, and inclusion, especially racial equity. We must diversify our ranks and ensure that diverse voices are heard and valued as we determine the future of our profession.

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

I’m not sure, “satisfaction,” is the right word, but this encounter was the most personally meaningful—and heartbreaking—of my career. I was working the reference desk one afternoon over 20 years ago, when a woman came in to ask for information about a recent diagnosis. She said her doctor had rattled it off and left the room without discussing her prognosis or treatment plan. She handed me a slip of paper with the diagnosis written on it—a type of Stage 4 cancer that was almost invariably fatal. Back then, before MEDLINEPlus and other online consumer health tools, we were trained to find information in medical textbooks to share with patients. So, I had to hand this woman a book that would tell her she was dying. She took the book and wandered off somewhere while I tried—and failed—to think of something more to do to help her.

Sometime later, she returned to the desk with tears in her eyes, handed me the book, and thanked me. I’m not sure how it happened, but we ended up hugging in the middle of the reference area. When she left, I hid in my office and cried.

I never knew her name and never found out what happened to her, but to this day, I’m angry at the cowardly doctor who wouldn’t tell this poor woman the truth about her condition and offer her the support she so desperately needed. Most of all, I hope I was able to provide some small bit of comfort and care to her that day.