Afternoon with John Gallagher

I spent the afternoon with John.He is the deputy director for the Medical library. He said when he started working as an evening supervisor for the library, he only worked with books. Now he works with books and electronic library resources.

The Yale Medical library has about 9,000 journals and millions of articles on library user computers. To find these articles or journals, an electronic index like Pubmed and Scopus is being used. If the library does not have an article or journal, an Interlibrary loan staff would help find it.

Vermetha, one of the Interlibrary loan staff, would use a national catalog of library holdings like docline and OCLC to find it. This is very similar to any kind of library. If someone is looking for a book at a local library and does not find it, the librarian will look at other libraries to find the book that the person is looking for and borrow it. Vermetha stated that when she started working at Yale 14 years ago, she sent all the requested articles via mail; today she sends them through Email. This demonstrates that technology spreads information quicker and faster.

Today I learned that a library is supposed to be a quiet and inspiring place.I also learned that medical librarians have a role in patient care and research. The big problem regarding medical librarianship is lack of recognition for important tasks that are often invisible.