2014 Medical Librarians Month – A Journey

Posted by Patricia Devine on November 20th, 2014 Posted in: Funding, News from Network Members, News From NNLM PNR

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Jackie Wirz’ entry in our contest for Medical Librarians Month tells the story of her journey from a PhD in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology to Biomedical Sciences Information Specialist. It all started one night in the ER when she knew that Google was not the right tool.

by Jackie Wirz
Biomedical Research Specialist
Oregon Health & Science University
Portland, OR

Sitting in the emergency room, I felt a surprising sense of calm. Going to the ER in the middle of the night was an extreme precaution – although the chemical to which I was exposed could be potentially very dangerous, I was feeling normal (well, as normal as one could feel while doing a 36 hour protein purification). No burning lungs, no severe nausea, just a sense of mild boredom while I was waiting to be seen.

I was told that it was my lucky night, as one of the attending physicians happened to be an expert in chemical exposure. He bustled into the room, firmly shaking my hand while giving me a critical once over. Having ascertained there was no immediate danger; he turned to the computer and asked me to name the chemical I was exposed to. I replied, and watched with mounting horror as he opened up Firefox, and proceeded to Google the name of the chemical.

I’ve always been interested in information. From my early days reading the Childcraft encyclopedia to many years later assimilating and developing new data on collagen as a graduate student, I’ve always been able to find and, more importantly, understand the importance of sources while assessing information. My gut was telling me that a medical professional googling a chemical in front of me was likely not the best approach for gathering high quality information! Little did I know that this unfortunate experience was yet another sign that would ultimately point me to a wonderful and completely unexpected career in medical librarianship.

As I finished out my graduate career, I realized that a career as a research scientist was not for me. Having invested years in my graduate training, I wanted to make the most of my PhD, but was unsure how to best proceed. I spent a lot of time asking people questions about their careers: what is it you do? What were you trained to do? What about your job brings you satisfaction? The answers I received were comforting in that I realized that nobody’s career path is perfectly straight without detours or bumps. Many of the most happy, successful people with whom I chatted discovered their careers through innovation – creating their paths by exploring new opportunities and developing unique skill sets. While this was inspiring, it was also frustrating, as I couldn’t identify a good place to start.

Thinking on my experience with information — being the person who could always manage to find an obscure protocol, organizing my references and data using self-developed metadata, enjoying long conversations about how information is developed – it is perhaps no surprise that I was friends with librarians. One of those lovely people turned my attention to a job listing at the Oregon Health & Science University Library for their newly created position: Biomedical Sciences Information Specialist.

There’re a lot of syllables in that job title, but the job description seemed to speak directly to me: OHSU was seeking an individual to work with the research community on information and data, to serve as a liaison to the community, and provide new and innovative library services. Sure, I had no idea what those services were, but it sounded flash ideal. I put my hat in the ring, had a lovely interview, and ended up being offered the job 30 minutes before I defended my thesis.

That was the easy part. The hard part came next …

Developing a job, especially the first time that job has been offered at your institution, is a lot of work. In addition to trying to transition to a new role within the research community, I needed to learn about the library services that would provide the foundation of my new career. I was relieved to discover that my gut instinct was right: Google is, in fact, not the best resource for medical chemical information. Diving into the intricacies of databases, learning more about public access policy, and discovering the intricate layers of metadata that support a federated search was just the tip of the iceberg. I learned about the reference interview, how controlled vocabularies work, the key points of being a service organization and the importance of the medical library in all of our core missions. I was trained in collection development and began to select for the basic science fields, developed classes on NCBI, and served as a liaison to the research community. I spent much of my first year learning these and other core aspects of the responsibilities of a liaison librarian.

Innovation, however, was at the heart of my job description and a driving goal of my career: I was charged with developing new services and activities, and I began to develop a suite of unique projects that have truly enriched my professional experience. For example, I have been on the organizing committee for a variety of research conferences on campus, providing information and data management that have assisted in not only the conference development and execution, but have facilitated the development of new research collaborations and grants. From the Biology of Neurodegeneration to Women in Academic Medicine, the Vole Conference to Imaging at the Nanoscale, each conference has provided me with new contacts and relationships that have enriched my role as a liaison. I was fortunate to chair the inaugural year of Research Week, a university-wide research conference, a week-long event that featured over 300 speakers and presenters. This experience greatly increased the reputation of the library as a connector of people, ideas and research.

Conferences are but one aspect of research — of particular interest to me are the skill sets that are necessary yet oft neglected to succeed in science: communication, writing, public speaking and information management. While it is true that scientists pick up familiarity with these skills, early and frequent training would better serve the scientists throughout their career. I began to offer workshops and consultations on these topics, initially to students but expanding to postdocs and faculty. These have been incredibly popular and have made a true difference in helping my research community show off their amazing work to audiences of all types.

During this time, research data management (RDM) and eScience have become increasingly important issues within medical libraries. I, along with others at OHSU, have worked to better understand our institutional landscape and how we can develop RDM services at our institution through an extensive environmental scan and multiple structured interviews with research leaders and stakeholders on campus. Although data management is an essential skill, finding good hooks to get the research community involved has been difficult. Through the success and failure of pilot projects, I have begun to develop a strong data visualization consultation service. It turns out that this is an excellent entre to discussing larger data management issues with researchers. I am extremely satisfied when a consultation leads to not only a better visual presentation of data, but a strong understanding of basic principles of RDM.

The interest in data visualization has led the library to develop our first for-credit class. Collaborating with a faculty member from pediatrics, our Fundamentals of Data Visualization course has enrolled 35 students, faculty and staff from an amazingly diverse cross section of our research and healthcare communities. The class is currently ongoing, but has already led to several consultations and has also developed interest in a visual protocols database to be developed with the library.

As a former graduate student, I have always held an interest in working with our graduate programs. I have been fortunate to serve on our Graduate Council, whose charge is to set and adapt our policies for all of the graduate programs in the School of Medicine. Through this work, I now also serve on the admissions board for the PhD programs, and also work on the Graduate Program Steering Committee, which addresses specific projects and policies at an in-depth level. My involvement with education policy has been extremely rewarding, as I have been able to directly contribute back to my University’s education mission while simultaneously raising the profile of the library and, more importantly, finding opportunities for the library to work with researchers and educators on campus. For example, in collaboration with our Scholarly Communication Librarian, we have recently become the first institution to require incoming graduate students to register for an ORCID.

While conferences, research skill development, RDM / data visualization, and policy work have provided the most innovative aspects of my job, I find that the most innovative experience to me is one that reference librarians have enjoyed for years – a successful reference interaction with a patron, whether it is locating an obscure citation or helping develop a data management plan for an experiment, always brings a smile to my face. I hope that my work is helping to expand the role of the medical librarian, but the best benefit of this amazing career trajectory is that I have had the opportunity to become a medical librarian. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.