Medical Librarians Month: Giving Providers Best Information to Make Informed Decisions
Before Ann Dyer became director of the WSU Health Sciences Library in Spokane, she served as a research and instruction librarian at the Maine Maritime Academy. In some ways, the job was not unlike what she does as a medical librarian today.
“Working at a maritime library allowed me to hone my experience of being within a specialized environment and appreciate the challenges of building and maintaining a focused collection that meets the need of a unique institution,” she said.
October is Medical Librarians Month, and Dyer recently spoke about her profession and the importance of medical librarianship to all health sciences fields, which rely on an incredible degree of trust between patients and their providers.
“That trust is based on the idea that their providers know the best current information to help them prevent illness or return to health,” she said. “However, the landscape of medical information is extraordinarily vast, complex, and in constant flux. Medical libraries organize that information in a way that makes it findable and useful for providers, and medical librarians provide invaluable guidance and services to get the right information into the right hands at the right time.”
WSU medical librarians’ important roles
As an academic facility, the Health Sciences Library has a broader mandate: to also support the research conducted at WSU Health Sciences, Dyer said.
“The scholarly conversation relies on having all of the relevant information on a research question before publishing new findings, and medical librarians are essential team members in collecting that information in a systematic and comprehensive way,” she said.
They are also essential to the curriculum and instruction teams in the health sciences colleges, Dyer said. Students in the field need extensive practice and guidance in finding and using new information throughout their careers.
“Evidence-based practice requires practitioners to be able to find the best current information efficiently and effectively, every time, for every patient. Library search methods help them do that,” she said.
Today’s challenges in medical librarianship
The information landscape is incredibly overwhelming, Dyer said. In addition, the ease of online searching means that people often overestimate their ability to find the best current information.
“Medical librarians face an uphill battle with many practitioners and researchers to demonstrate our deep need for well-indexed, organized, and curated information,” she said. “Students take for granted their ability to find information and often disregard the quality of information in favor of its speed.”
Another challenge is the changing economic model for scholarly information, Dyer explained. Over the past several decades, an intense push for open-access publishing models has shifted publishers’ revenue streams from subscribers to the suppliers of the information: researchers who want to publish their findings.
Researchers may be drawn to publications that have high publication rates, publish materials quickly, or skimp on the peer-review process, she said. They are still motivated to publish in highly respected publications, but now have an added adverse incentive and mechanism to simply get the material published in less-than-top-tier journals. Making access to information more democratic and equitable has created the opportunity for some individuals to establish “a publishing underworld of predatory publications.”
“These are publications that look like reputable titles but fail to provide the peer review and editorial practices that are standard and required to ensure that the information being published is reliable and high quality,” she said. “The increasing challenge of identifying these low-quality publications makes the role of the medical librarian ever more important.”
What the future holds
Dyer predicts that medical librarians will become increasingly integrated into medical teams, both clinical and scholarly. Many teams already integrate librarians into their work, such as those who make rounds with clinicians and co-author on scholarly projects.
“I think this practice will increase, and those organizations that underestimated the role of the librarians will have to carve out new spaces to right the ship,” she said.
Pun aside, Dyer’s time at the Maine Maritime Academy continues to influence her role as a medical librarian. She earned a master’s degree in international logistics management while there, which informs her approach to information and library management.
“My ideas related to getting the right information into the right hands at the right time come directly from the field of logistics,” she said.
As a capstone project for her degree program, Dyer conducted a strategic analysis of the academy library, a valuable process for determining the institution’s future direction. Last summer, she did a similar analysis for the Health Sciences Library, out of which came a new evidence synthesis service for any WSU health sciences faculty member and student working toward publishable secondary research. The service allows users to add a librarian to their research teams who will guide the creation, implementation, and writeup of the literature search methodology.
“That degree was accompanied by a certification as a maritime port manager from the International Association of Maritime Port Executives, which I proudly display in my office,” Dyer said.