{"id":21480,"date":"2024-10-09T11:09:07","date_gmt":"2024-10-09T11:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/?p=21480"},"modified":"2024-10-08T15:10:07","modified_gmt":"2024-10-08T15:10:07","slug":"hospital-librarian-brynn-beals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/hospital-librarian-brynn-beals\/","title":{"rendered":"Hospital Librarian, Brynn Beals"},"content":{"rendered":"

October is National Medical Librarians Month. Region 5 is celebrating by highlighting some of the wonderful medical librarians in our region. This guest post is from one of our colleagues in Washington state.<\/em><\/p>\n

Greetings from Tacoma, WA where I have been a hospital librarian at St. Joseph Medical Center (part of Virginia Mason Franciscan Health\/CommonSpirit Health) for (gulp!) 35 years. Time flies when you\u2019re having fun. After college I worked as an accounting secretary in the tech manufacturing field where I was also the accounting \u201clibrarian\u201d, which meant I was responsible for updating all the binders of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Not having a love of numbers, I explored other options and landed in library school at UW. Medical librarianship was a natural fit having grown up in a family in health care, so I took the one health sciences librarianship class offered. After graduation I worked very briefly at what was once called St. Joseph Community Hospital library in Vancouver, WA before moving to Tacoma. While I have had the same job title for my entire tenure, the environment has changed dramatically. I began serving one hospital, which eventually has grown to 7, and on Day 1 I had never heard of the internet.<\/p>\n

\"photo

Brynn in her hospital library<\/p><\/div>\n

I have moved the library twice, most recently last year into a much smaller space so library services are now almost all virtual but I am on site every day (even through Covid). It\u2019s efficient in our screen-based information world, but I rather miss the more frequent face-to-face contact with the wider hospital community. I enjoy the variety of being a solo but am also delighted to have joined forces with Mary Beth McAteer at Virginia Mason after our merger. With literally something new to learn every day I am never bored! Most recently, I am getting more involved with our expanding residency programs and working more collaboratively with the librarians in our national organization (CommonSpirit Health).<\/p>\n

There has been a lot of learning along the way. Somehow we have transitioned from a card catalog to a discovery system, from print books & journals to ebooks and journals, and from Microsoft Office to Google.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen a lot of change over the years but some things remain the same. One of the best parts of being a hospital librarian is when \u201cthat\u201d article you provided really makes a positive difference in someone\u2019s care. Much of the time we don\u2019t know what happens to the information we relay but it\u2019s a good day when a provider says \u201cthanks — a Google search was not getting what I needed\u201d. The other thing that has remained constant is the support of the medical librarian community. Especially as a solo, this is a vital resource. I can\u2019t count the number of times you all have made me look good, so thank you all, and Happy Medical Librarians\u2019 Month!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

October is National Medical Librarians Month. Region 5 is celebrating by highlighting some of the wonderful medical librarians in our region. This guest post is from one of our colleagues in Washington state. Greetings from Tacoma, WA where I have been a hospital librarian at St. Joseph Medical Center (part of Virginia Mason Franciscan Health\/CommonSpirit… Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[426,44],"tags":[345,148,117,60],"class_list":["post-21480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guest-post","category-network-members","tag-hospital-librarians","tag-librarian-roles","tag-medical-librarian","tag-medical-librarians-month"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21480"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21491,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21480\/revisions\/21491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}