Faces of our Region: Naomi Bishop

Posted in: Blog

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NAME:

Naomi Bishop, MLIS, AHIP

Health Science Librarian

University of Arizona College of Medicine- Phoenix

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

I had the opportunity to be a corporate librarian for Roche Tissue Diagnostics early in my career and that introduced me to medicine and medical librarianship. I worked as an academic science and engineering librarian for 8 years before coming to the University of Arizona College of Medicine Phoenix.

What are your research interests or top work activities?

My work involves lots of teaching and reference with faculty and medical students, but I also do collection development and curriculum support and research support for researchers here at COM-P. My favorite work is providing research consultations to students for their scholarly projects.

My own research interest is American Indian youth literature and representation of Native Americans in youth literature.

What prompted you to become a medical librarian?

An opening at the College of Medicine Phoenix brought me back to medical librarianship. I have been waiting 10 years to find a job in Phoenix and to live close to my family and the GRIC reservation.

What is your favorite librarian tool?

I don’t have one favorite, but I enjoy OVID:MEDLINE, Twitter, and citation managers. I think it’s important for medical librarians to connect to other librarians because our field requires us to stay up to date and connected to all the new research. Twitter helps me stay connected to other medical librarians and learn from them.

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

Racism in medicine and healthcare is one of the most important challenges in medical libraries. We need to do a better job of highlighting the inequalities in medicine and why there are health disparities. We need students and faulty to have context and information that goes beyond published literature. Sharing the stories of communities and oppressed people will change medicine.

Naomi was recently featured in the American Libraries Magazine

 

 

 

 

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

Emails from students that tell me they published their research and recognized me in the acknowledgements is always rewarding and satisfying to see. I have done so many literature searches, but some of those searches have turned into having bigger impacts on patients and people.