Changing Roles for Health Sciences Librarians: A Term Paper

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Changing Roles for Health Sciences Librarians: A Synopsis of Current Trends

As modern technology stimulates increasingly savvy and complex electronic innovations, the role of health science librarians has continued to adapt and change year after year. Whereas in days of old health sciences librarians served as information keepers, today they serve more as partners, educators, creators and information mangers in a new sense. As Ralph A. Wolff once stated, "forging librarian/faculty partnerships will require new roles for librarians ... events within and outside higher education are changing our fundamental conceptions of the library" (Dunn, 1). Nothing could be more true. As technology continues to change the way anyone and everyone does business and conducts daily affairs, so too has technology changed the fundamental working of the library and the roles of librarians.

Health science librarians are adopting various changes in response to technologically stimulated trends that include the need for web design and Internet knowledge. Dunn (1997) suggests that change must occur beginning with the center of higher education's "information enterprises" which for many is its libraries (p. 4). Trends include changing roles for library staff.

Up until recently most information was stored on paper as paper documents, whether in the form of books, periodicals, magazines or other documents. The librarian's roles included managing such documents, preserving and distributing them (Dunn, 1997; Craver, 2002). Health science librarians roles are changing however as the way we select, organize and store or retrieve information changes. Rapid advancements in technology have enabled more direct and efficient service and assistance. Trends of the future include emphasizing selection, accessing and subsidizing of information resources, but also teaching students and faculty to identify, locate and evaluate information resources using new tools (Dunn, 1997; Craver, 2002).

Changing Roles For Health Sciences Librarians

Librarians may now expect to serve as network administrators, enabling a support structure of information and access to this structure by patrons (Dunn, 1997; Craver 2002). Librarian's roles may now include teaching and learning activities such as teaching web use (Dunn, 1997). Librarians are evolving "from an information organizer and provider to an active participant in the reach process" (Dunn, 7). Their role is to teach users "how to structure research questions, access information and select resources" in multiple formats (Dunn, 8). Librarian's roles may also serve as leaders, "facilitating the introduction of new technologies for learning and research" (Dunn, 8).

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More and more health sciences librarians face new opportunities and can now define how information and instruction "are communicated to students and faculty" (Dunn, 10). Librarians also may serve as counselors teaching people how to maneuver in an electronic environment, and serve as advisors instead of teachers rather than 'custodians of collections" (Dunn, 10).

Rather than collect, organize and store information librarians of the future will face new challenges that may include partnering with specialists to deliver information instruction, designing instructional or educational programs that enable information access, teaching users how to access information, creating "information access tools," preserving information in multiple formats and serving as facilitators who introduce information technology (Dunn, 11).

Librarians roles specific to health sciences research may include enabling health systems organizations to better utilize and understand health services, design tools for managing and researching information and working in collaboration with other faculty and staff to understand or discover new information sources and methodologies (NLM, 1999). Health Services librarian's roles no include improved ability to respond to question but also support and conduct research, and may even include participation on "health services research teams" (NLM, 1999).

The new roles emerging within the health sciences field may require additional education and advanced degrees in areas including distance learning, self-study and related disciplines (NLM, 1999). Health sciences libraries of the future must work to understand the contexts in which "biomedical and related information emerges and unique ways of interpreting those environments" (NLM, 1999). This requires understanding of changing health care e environments and policy sources (NLM, 1999).

While librarians have traditionally "engaged in organization and arrangement of information collections" today use of digital collections and accompanying services require librarians "to function as knowledge navigators" or even "cyberspace organizers" (Young, 103). This suggests that digital librarians learn methods for teaching users….....

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