Developing a culture of lifelong learning in a library environment

Between 1995 and 1996, the Annette and Irwin Eskind Biomedical Library (EBL) at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) radically revised the model of service it provides to the VUMC community. An in-depth training program was developed for librarians, who began to migrate to clinical settings and establish clinical librarianship and information brokerage services beyond the library's walls. To ensure that excellent service would continue within the library, EBL's training program was adapted for library assistants, providing them with access to information about a wide variety of work roles and processes over a four to eight-month training period. Concurrently, customer service areas were reorganized so that any question--whether reference or circulation--could be answered at any of four service points, eliminating the practice of passing customers from person to person between the reference and circulation desks. To provide an incentive for highly trained library assistants to remain at EBL, management and library assistants worked together to redesign the career pathway based on defined stages of achievement, self-directed participation in library-wide projects, and demonstrated commitment to lifelong learning. Education and training were the fundamental principles at the center of all this activity.

Preparing librarians to meet the challenges of today's health care environment

OBJECTIVE

Refine the understanding of the desirable skills for health sciences librarians as a basis for developing a training program model that reflects the fundamental changes in health care delivery and information technology.

DESIGN

A four-step needs assessment process: focus groups developed lists of desirable skills; the research team organized candidate skills into a taxonomy; a survey of a random sample of librarians and library users assessed perception of importance of individual skills; and the research team framed, as a unifying hypothesis, a training model.

SURVEY METHODS

The survey was distributed to random samples of 150 librarians, stratified by type of library, and 150 library users, stratified by type of use. A non-randomized sample was obtained by mounting the survey on a World Wide Web server. The survey instrument included 96 distinct skills organized into 13 categories. Respondents rated the importance of each skill on a Likert scale and provided a separate ranking by identifying the ten most important skills for the profession.

RESULTS

Among the participants, 51% of librarians and 36% of library users responded to the survey. All categories of skills were rated above the midpoint of priority on the Likert scale. All groups rated personality characteristics and skills as most important, with an understanding of the health sciences, education, and research being rated comparably to technical skills.

CONCLUSIONS

Health sciences librarians need a new educational model that provides them with broad-based tools to discover new roles and new resources for acquiring individual skills as the need arises. A unifying training model would involve trainees in developing their learning plan in a way that promotes proactive inquiry and self-directed learning, and it would rotate the trainees through projects to provide skills and an understanding of end-user work processes.

Integrating health sciences librarians into biomedicine

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) developed a model training program to prepare current and future health sciences librarians for roles that are integrated into the diverse fabric of the health care professions. As a complement to the traditional and theoretical aspects of a librarian's education, this mixture of supplemental coursework and intensive practical training emphasizes active management of information, problem-solving skills, learning in context, and direct participation in research, while providing the opportunity for advanced academic pursuits. The practical training will take place under the auspices of an established Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems (IAIMS) library that is fully integrated with the Health Center Information Management Unit and Academic Biomedical Informatics Unit. During the planning phase, investigators are analyzing the model's aims and requirements, concentrating on (a) refining the current understanding of the roles health sciences librarians occupy; (b) developing educational strategies that prepare librarians to fulfill expanded roles; and (c) planning for an evaluation process that will support iterative revision and refinement of the model.