1. How did you become interested in medical librarianship? I first became interested in medical librarianship by working at a college with nursing, occupational therapy, and physical therapy programs. Working with the students was very rewarding, and seeing the passion that the students had for their chosen professions was great to see. While I still have trouble looking at some of the graphic photos in their medical textbooks (I generally avoid it if I can!), and I didn’t necessarily think of myself as a medical librarian yet, I knew that working with students in the medical field was something that I wanted to pursue. After moving to Marshall B. Ketchum University (MBKU), I have joined MLA and MLGSCA and have committed to learning as much as I can, so I am able to help our optometry and physician assistant students and faculty.
2. What is your current position? I just started my second year as an Education/Technology Librarian at MBKU.
3. What do you enjoy most about your current position? What I enjoy the most about my current position is the collaborative nature of the position, and learning a lot of new skills. In my previous position, I was a solo librarian, so working with three other librarians at MBKU is a great way to draw off of their experience, listen to new ideas, and work with people who are great at their jobs. Additionally, I am also able to take on a wide variety of responsibilities, including managing the library website, troubleshooting our ILS, and teaching instruction sessions to optometry and physician assistant students. It also doesn’t hurt that I get to travel to places like Austin and Toronto for MLA!
4. What do you think is the most interesting or challenging issue in librarianship today? I think it is open access publishing. It’s obviously a complicated issue, but with more universities creating institutional repositories, more journals moving to open access, and researchers wanting their research to be seen by as many people as possible, it just feels like that is the direction that publishing is moving. Combine this with increasing journal costs, limited library budgets, researchers wanting to publish in the top journals, cost of open access publishing, etc., and it’s a convoluted situation that nevertheless can change the structure of academic librarianship.
5. Please provide a link that made you think (an article, video, blog post, other webpage, etc. that you found to be interesting or thought-provoking): I found myself spending a lot of time looking at the Altmetric top 100 article list for 2015: https://www.altmetric.com/top100/2015/#explore. I’m always interested in looking at data to help inform decisions, so having the data that Altmetrics uses, like the number of news stories, blog posts, and tweets that mention an article, or the number of times the article is cited on Wikipedia, can provide a broader picture than just the number of times it has been cited. It also provides an idea of what type of research is getting headlines, for better or worse. I’ll admit that I’m not an expert on altmetrics and that there are problematic aspects to it, but it was interesting to see both what was talked about, and what metrics were used to rank them.

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