{"id":5061,"date":"2011-10-25T17:13:13","date_gmt":"2011-10-26T00:13:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nnlm.gov\/pnr\/dragonfly\/?p=5061"},"modified":"2026-02-03T16:14:27","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T16:14:27","slug":"massage-school-librarian","status":"archive","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/region_5\/massage-school-librarian\/","title":{"rendered":"Massage School Librarian Tells His Story of Growth and Relevance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kenneth Pfaff, Librarian at the Grotto Library of the Cortiva Institute in Seattle, continues our series on librarians and advocacy for our contest to recognize National Medical Librarians Month. Other entries will be featured later in the month of October.<\/em><\/p>\n

Be Vital or Be a Museum Exhibit<\/strong><\/p>\n

I know history, and about my forebears, in addition to being a healthcare librarian for Massage Therapists.\u00a0 I can tell you from historical perspective that any profession that failed to provision for and support its depositories of knowledge ended up with only the consolation prize; an exhibit in a natural history museum.\u00a0 Mad Hatters, anyone?<\/p>\n

Massage Therapy as a form of medicine has a very long history, and can be found in practically every culture.\u00a0 Despite that long history, a concerted effort to conceptualize and structure a true Body of Knowledge began only five years ago.\u00a0 Because I know a bit of history, I\u2019ll tell you about The Grotto Library historically.\u00a0 This library was literally created from the remnants of a simple 4\u2019x8\u2019 wooden box at a long-time Massage Therapy school in Seattle.\u00a0 The overarching institution integrated with another competitive school a few blocks away, which itself had a small, neglected room with a few hundred books.\u00a0 Whereas the institution wanted the library to be<\/em>, they had no plan or time or strategy.\u00a0 The simple mandate was \u201cto take care of the library, and by the way, there\u2019s no budget.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was 2008.<\/p>\n

From barely 400 books and some magazines, The Grotto Library now maintains nearly thirteen percent of the world\u2019s possible resources for Massage Therapy (donation drives for the win).\u00a0 I scoured the online world of libraries looking for best practices, better mechanics and organizations.\u00a0 I created an online catalog and website right away.\u00a0 I had no budget, so that was self-funded.\u00a0 Also from that search, from watching instructors in classes and students asking for more information in different modes, I developed a downloadable Internet browser-based Toolbar with the help of a third party vendor called Conduit.\u00a0 This Toolbar aggregates online links to our periodicals, medical animations, videos, the library\u2019s online catalog and the catalogs of several others to boot.<\/p>\n

With that Toolbar in place and available for library patrons to download for themselves, I actively pinged one of our research instructors \u2013 I wanted to present the new library during classes.\u00a0 He liked that idea, and the feedback from that class at term\u2019s end showed a remarkable improvement in their acceptance of research as more approachable (as it can get).<\/p>\n

Part of my strategy was to be as mobile as the people I intended to help, and although that meant the intuitive leap to mobile app as an tool, my strategy was about helping graduates in their practices.\u00a0 The former schools allowed graduates to use their respective libraries, but didn\u2019t allow for anything other than a reading room.\u00a0 I altered that philosophy so that graduates had regular access to their library for the rest of their lives.\u00a0 I also wanted to help the employers of our graduates by granting them access to the library\u2019s services too.\u00a0 Electronic, peer-reviewed periodical access was another benefit I added.\u00a0 I wrapped that into a basic mobile app for all platforms, and then added the online catalog search to it.<\/p>\n

Our school was already on the forefront of Massage Therapy research by actively introducing students to peer-review and case study information as part of the curriculum.\u00a0 Since 2005, our students have won Gold, Silver or Honorable Mentions in practically every Student Case Report Contest provided by the non-profit Massage Therapy Foundation.\u00a0 Unfortunately, graduates from years past had little context for massage research; I had to introduce that as part of the library\u2019s dialogue.\u00a0 I extracted periodical articles that spoke about research and massage.\u00a0 By sending these out to our graduates, I slowly geared them up by asking and answering: 1) yes, there was a new library system they could use, 2) research isn\u2019t a scary thing, and 3) here\u2019s how the library wants to impact their practice.\u00a0 This little push was the start of a larger-scale endeavor I was planning for the next year.\u00a0\u00a0 Before 2008, we barely saw graduates.\u00a0 With this new effort, we saw or heard from graduates a lot.<\/p>\n

I increased the exposure of the library by adding a new program called Author Spotlights.\u00a0 I would invite authors of this profession to give a talk to our population, and that has drawn many graduates back to the school.<\/p>\n

That was 2009.<\/p>\n

Students need to know a lot anatomy.\u00a0 They feel it under their hands, but being able to see it visually (or three-dimensionally) was something I wanted for them.\u00a0 The National Library of Medicine, of course, had the Visible Human Project<\/em>.\u00a0 I applied and was granted full access to both the male and female data set (18,000 images of two cadavers, centimeter by centimeter).\u00a0 Obtaining the data was easy.\u00a0 Integrating it into the curriculum was easy.\u00a0 Making the data available on library computers wasn\u2019t so easy.\u00a0 Turns out, old computers and new, large format files don\u2019t mix well together.\u00a0 I contacted a third party vendor called CoolIris about their fancy scrolling wall application.\u00a0 Very soon, our old computers could display hundreds of images in a scrolling wall akin to scrolling apps on a mobile phone, at a reasonable speed.<\/p>\n

Part of the overall strategy from Day One (which was scanning ISBNs into the catalog, oh how I remember that well) was to create a Library-in-a-Can<\/em> model that could easily be replicated across the eleven other campuses of the institution.\u00a0 I submitted a five year proposal that would actively alter those basic libraries (boxes of books is some cases) to be fully functional branch libraries; I would be their Head Librarian.\u00a0 The proposal included a year-by-year plan to acquire books and access our digital periodicals here in Seattle.\u00a0 I intended to push the entire Visible Human Project<\/em> to each campus as well.<\/p>\n

Massage Therapists are the third-most licensed healthcare profession in Washington State, and only the third if you lump all physicians and surgeons into one group.\u00a0 They have access to Heal-WA, and I became an advocate for that.\u00a0 I can\u2019t tell you how many faculty or graduates have stopped by hoping to get a journal article from there.\u00a0 I tell them I can\u2019t do it myself, but here\u2019s how they can do it for themselves using the handy front page search field.\u00a0 \u201cWhat do you mean you haven\u2019t logged in before?\u00a0 Tsk, tsk.\u00a0 Did you know there are a ton of ebooks and even some CE there too?\u201d<\/p>\n

That was 2010.<\/p>\n

For graduates, however, who aren\u2019t so conveniently located within a few miles of the library, I had to plan for their predilection to move about in the United States willy nilly.\u00a0 Having access to the various campus libraries nationwide wasn\u2019t sufficient enough, by my way of thinking, to qualify as a baseline.\u00a0 With a slight poke at my institution to get them moving, I submitted an application to the network of the National Library of Medicine.\u00a0 Of course, that was accepted.\u00a0 I wanted our graduates to be able to reasonably access other healthcare libraries wherever they ended up practicing, and so the NN\/LM provided more than a few extra perks.<\/p>\n

Those perks included very handy library evaluations and reporting tools.\u00a0 Very handy!\u00a0 For every $1.00 spent by my institution (now that I can show objectively that I really, truly need and want a larger budget), the return to the institution and patrons is $6.45.\u00a0 Our three major contributors towards Value of Resources and Services are: 1) books and periodicals, 2) articles accessed and 3) computer-use.\u00a0 Following in close fourth place was the Toolbar being downloaded and utilized (which we quantified as $25 per based on costs from Toolbar uses in other industries).<\/p>\n

Fifty three percent of students in the 2011 summer term said the library had a major contribution to completing assignments and finding information (reported a 5 on a scale of 1 to 5), whereas only three percent said it had only a minor contribution (reported a 1).\u00a0 Eighty four percent felt the library helped them achieve academic excellence (reported 3 to 5 on that same scale) in this summer term; 81% in spring term 2011.<\/p>\n

The year 2011 draws to a close.<\/p>\n

The Visible Human Project<\/em> is now on its way to each campus even as I write this.\u00a0 The Toolbar has over a 1,000 downloads.\u00a0 I see every research-based class each term, whether presenting the Librarian\u2019s Perspective on Research<\/em> to basic research students, to a full-on field trip to the library for the entire class.\u00a0 I\u2019m assisting the Massage Therapy Foundation with the establishment of a Toolbar of their own.\u00a0 There\u2019s a possibility that an additional ten schools unrelated to our institution may want to integrate under the library and library system I created.\u00a0 So far, I and The Grotto Library directly serve the accrediting requirements for four schools, and may well serve twenty-two by the end of next year.<\/p>\n

What else?\u00a0 I now have a volunteer Library Advisor, a graduate of our program, to assist me in collection and re-describing materials into \u2018therapist-speak\u2019.\u00a0 Although my larger institution couldn\u2019t move fast enough to meet the deadline because of competing needs, I had intended to submit a subcontract proposal to the NN\/LM to create a Professional Massage Therapist Mentorship Program as part and parcel of the library\u2019s mission:<\/p>\n