Member Spotlight: Brian Real

Posted by benniefinch on July 26th, 2021 Posted in: Blog
Tags: Member Spotlight

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Southern Connecticut State University has been a very active member of NNLM in Region 7, from SCSU departments such as the Department of Nursing, the Hilton C. Buley Library, and the Department of Information and Library Science.

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to Dr. Brian Real, who is an Assistant Professor of Information and Library Science. I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Real recently to talk about his work, his experience working with NNLM and NLM products and resources, and to learn about his LIS interests. He also shares some of his thoughts on workforce development.

*Southern Connecticut State University is locally referred to as Southern or SCSU, so I will alternate among those terms.

What are your primary responsibilities in your role at SCSU?

Southern is mainly a teaching institution so teaching is my core role as an assistant professor. I am also the internship coordinator which, counts toward my teaching time, but that means I’m responsible for placing every student who comes through the MLIS degree program in an information institution for their internship. I oversee their experience from the academic side. I also have a certain amount of research responsibility, which means that I am constantly trying to do research and publish. 

Can you think of one word to describe the NNLM?

Connected

How have you utilized NNLM resources in your work?

My best experience with NNLM was placing two interns with the organization. And I was able to have one of the regional directors come and speak to one of my classes, as well. In general, I try to teach students about PubMed and some of the other resources that are coming out of NLM because they are excellent reference resources. And at this moment we are dealing with needing to bring more health information into all sorts of libraries, not just medical libraries, but we need to bring a lot more discussions of health and public health into public libraries. I have used NNLM as an example of where to go to start when pursuing this.

Dr. Brian Real also shared about some of his other experience with NLM and NNLM.

I do work in film and media archives, and I do work on public libraries. I have far more work experience in public libraries from before starting in academia and I did a short stint back at public libraries after finishing the PhD and before becoming a professor.

A lot of my awareness of the National Library of Medicine came from the fact that I did my MLIS and PhD from the University of Maryland which is right down the street from the National Library of Medicine. I have several friends who ended up with careers there and work for the organization, but also because of the film and media archives. Medicine on Screen has been a wonderful project done by the National Library of Medicine.  Staff members with NLM, such as Sarah Eilers, have done great work in collecting these historical film and media documents of medicine and sharing them with research communities and film studies and a lot of people who are doing work on non-theatrical film. One of my mentors from outside of the library and information science field, Oliver Gaycken at the University of Maryland, has been an integral part of the Medicine on Screen project and has done some publication and presentations on films held by the National Library of Medicine.

But beyond looking at NLM and NNLM as historical resources, they are massively important now because of where public libraries are going.

Dr. Real emphasized the importance of information institutions in providing access to trusted health information. As someone who has done research on rural and small libraries, Dr. Real highlights these communities, as particularly important places to have access to trusted health information on COVID-19 and other health topics.  As the average age is increasing in many rural communities, he also spoke about digital literacy and access to technology, as well as the importance of learning to evaluate health information. He states: Public librarians are trusted by their communities…The fact that the NNLM has started to offer training to public librarians is already incredibly valuable and will just increase in value going forward.

Dr. Real also spoke about the value of Continuing Education.

I started as a librarian for a rural system that did not require the MLS degree. It did for management, but not regular staff. Anybody who was hired as regular staff would go through fairly intense training that we had through a tri-county cooperative of rural libraries.

As a result, when I did the MLS degree two years into my career as a librarian, and as a reference librarian as that, I had an issue with some of my classes where it felt that I was retreading work I had already done. And as I became a professor, I realized the number of people who already had jobs in various types of libraries and especially public libraries and academic libraries -some people who had years of experience but were getting the degree to advance in their careers and move to management. I wanted to be sure to try to shape my classes in a way that would offer something new. So, I’m teaching students how to learn, how to gain new knowledge, but also the fact that I learned so much in my library career through continuing education training that was offered by my library system and the state library in Maryland. I always try to make students aware of the fact that there is more to learn beyond the degree. We will not be able to cover everything and I strongly suggest that they look at institutions offering continuing education training. OCLC WebJunction has done incredible work in this area, but I’m now finding myself very frequently suggesting that students and people I know in the field of librarianship go to NNLM to look at their resources and their training. The fact that this is free and enhances areas that are especially relevant now in the wake of COVID-19 is a wonderful gift to libraries.

Can you share a little more about your program at SCSU and about your internship program?

The MLIS program at Southern is fairly new. We rebuilt it several years ago.  And we are currently expanding, but at present it’s somewhat general in what it’s covering. We supplement this by sending students to professional organizations and groups that are offering specialized training. As such, NNLM has been an invaluable resource for students who are interested in medical librarianship. We have students work with them and I have done internship placements with the organization, as well as medical libraries in Connecticut, so that even if a student isn’t getting a degree that’s specialized in medical and health librarianship, we have been able to offer resources that allow students to pursue these types of careers and be competitive in the market.

Are you looking for new internship sites?

I am always looking for internship sites and internship placements. We were focused on on-the-ground internships before COVID-19. We had planned to gradually start to offer online internships, but literally overnight I had to figure how online internships would work and how to make them as rigorous as on-the-ground internships. The experience that we had with NNLM served as one of my best models for how an online internship can work. But even for medical libraries and other health organizations related to librarianship that are not in the greater New Haven area, we would be glad to talk to them about doing remote internships.

Is there one piece of career advice that you have found helpful?

Over the years several people have taught me to diversify what you do. That especially in the field of  libraries, archives, and other institutions, it’s best to be able to do several things. When I was hired as a public librarian in rural Southern Maryland, my first library job, I wasn’t hired because I knew how to be a librarian and how to do the traditional tasks – they can teach that to people. They hired me because I had interests in things like comic books. This was before the graphic novel boom, and they figured out I would have suggestions on what to buy. They also realized I had an interest in film and film studies and they wanted somebody who would be able to actually talk to customers about different movies and things like that. And again, this is in 2006 when DVDs were huge, and had just become a huge part of library circulation. So, this wasn’t advice that was given to me directly, but after I was hired out of a pool with thirty-some people, I did ask the question “why did you pick me” and they said because of those reasons, because you have interests that are outside. So, if you’re interested in something, it can always become relevant in the library career.  It can always connect to something and it’s best to always pursue that.

If you would like to reach out directly to Dr. Brian Real to learn more about the LIS program or how to become an internship site, you can reach him at realb1@southernct.edu.