Healthcare and Science thomsonreuters.com

I've been here at the Center for 22 years now — I actually began working as a research technician here for about a year and a half before having my children.

After being at home for a while, I decided I wanted to become a librarian, I just realized I loved searching for information and the mystery of uncovering that piece of information to complete the puzzle. In college I always enjoyed picking a topic that was obscure and then finding out as much as possible about that subject.

When I became a professional librarian, I worked part time at a university learning about drug and general medical information before taking a full time position here — which was a funny thing because I'd worked in a Center research  lab all those years before.

When I first joined, the Center's library had just one computer. Now the library has many computers, and I am in charge of not only the library, but several other departments, including Continuing Medical Education, Multi-media and Creative Services for graphic arts, photography and video support services; as well as implementing a new learning management system (LMS) for online training.

Our biggest LMS challenge is developing educational content — it's very labor-intensive and we have to make it engaging for our staff. Our students are our staff, in fact, and we cover anything from how to use chemotherapy agents to patient safety issues along with all sorts of generalized training the clinical staff has to go though on a regular basis.

There are 2,000 people here at the institution, so our role is to make sure we have a good balance between encouraging staff who provide training to take advantage of our online system, while ensuring a high quality of content. So in addition to providing information from external sources (what the library does) I also manage internal education services.

One of the biggest changes over the years has been that librarians really have to prove their value because there's so much competition from other easily available information sources. We're constantly marketing and communicating how our services can make life easier for the people who work here. How our knowledge and expertise can provide them with better information than just throwing it into Google. That's a big challenge and a constant pressure on the library staff.

We are busier than ever though, and I'm trying to work out why that is! I guess it's because in addition to managing the LMS system, we do some other non-traditional things to support our researchers. For example the National Institute of Health, which is a major funding provider, now requires that all papers written as a result of its funding be made freely available. This is a new burden on our scientists, and we help them navigate their way through the submission process.

I think our EndNote involvement is somewhat unique — we pretty much hand-hold people with their EndNote training and support. We actually have an administrative assistant, who will go to the desktop of the investigator and also run classes on using the EndNote software. It's one of the most popular endeavours we undertake — when we run a class on EndNote, it's filled almost immediately.

We also use EndNote to pull together a database of staff publications database, from which we develop annual lists of Center-authored papers to help support our funding submissions to the National Cancer Institute. The new web-based version of this database is now available so we can share our publications with the world and demonstrate the interactivity between our scientists.

I've also used Micromedex for years and we link out to it from an internal pharmacy system that lists patients' medication. When you mouse over the name of a drug, the pharmacy system offers a link through Micromedex to the clinical information on that specific drug.

My overall goal is to make all the areas I look after become more valued within the institution: for them to be embraced and utilized more, and to have them regarded as valuable to the work the Center does. My task is to ensure people understand our full range of services and take advantage of them. To keep up to date with marketing our services and with changing technologies is a constant challenge.