My first day as a CHILI intern

Hi everyone! My name is Jemima Mbaka and I am the new Chili Intern at Cushing/Whitney Medical Library. Yesterday, August 3, was my first day as an Chile Intern. First, I met with Mr. Greenberg who gave me a tour around the Medical Library. The Library is such an amazing place filled with so much information about different health issues. During the tour I learned that the founder of the Library, Harvey Cushing, was a neurosurgeon who was one of the first doctors to pay attention to infection control while operating on a person. He understood that germs were one of the reasons for illness and death during his lifetime. I also learned that he was also a collector of books, especially medical books. He approached the president of Yale University at the time to permit him to open the medical library, and he was willing to donate all of his books in return.

After the tour I met with Bob Hughes, who is the business manager. He decides the budget of the medical library, how the staff gets paid, secures the people who visit the library as well as the library itself, and also is invovled in building rennovations in the library. He loves his job but also says it is a challenge to figure out the budget spending.

After our meeting, I met with Lei who is the instructional designer. He provides online education unit for the library. He helps people find their way locating certain resources in the library. He is right now working on instructional videos on how to get medical resources on your cell phones, and creating tutorials for students interested in nursing.

Meeting with Library Human Resource (Continue July 15, 2009)

After meeting with Janene, I met with Diane Turner, who is the head of Human Resources. She the 32 years of working she has been responsible for hiring, for salary and how much people are paid, training, and recruiting. She also has done Community Relations with schools, like Hill Regional Career High School, in Book Bowl, curriculum, looking at libraries, advising on research, and media specialist. Other programs she's been involved in are Book Drives for Little Children, with COOP doing a program where students in their history classes research their own history or their family's history, and had worked on different Boards like the one on AIDS. All her life she's wanted to do this kind of job because she loved working wiith people, solving challenges, and finding people the right jobs. Some benefits that she feels the community receives from what she does is the availability to resources and strengthening the view of the public schools. Somethings she hope could improve was the violence and the high school drop outs. Another future goal is to raise funds for the United Ways Agency. Some memorable experiences that she's had involve personal stories that she's heard and the people she's met. Some things that she has seen change from the time she began working is the technology, diversity, the social changes like for instance the style of clothing that people wear, and most important the white house with our new president Obama.

Meeting with Nursing Librarian (Continue from July 15, 2009)

After I met with Toby and Flo, I went to the Yale School of Nursing, where I met with Janene. She's worked in the medical library for 7 years as a Nursing School librarian and her main charge there is to help nurses, faculty, clinicians, with any information needs. She works with about 300 students and 600 faculty members. She also teaches whole classes of 80 people on how to search. When not teaching, she's designing classes like orientation classes for new students. She also does a program with public and private school nurses all over Connecticut, giving them resources that are useful and important for their career. She enjoys her job because she feels it's always interesting and she's always learning new things. Some future goals she has are to be better at what she does and also become an Expert in the field of nursing librarian. Some memorable experiences that she's had were when she presented to school nurses at a conference. She enjoys the aspect of talking and teaching the school nurses on resourceful ways to find information. Not only does she work at the School of Nursing but also at the Medical library, but she spends half the time mainly at the School of Nursing so that the students and faculty have easier access to her. Even though the professional environment is busy and constant she likes how her job is interesting and the fact that she can set her own work time and schedule.

My Fifth Day (July 15, 2009)

This morning I got a chance to get a tour of the OR and Anesthesiology units by Denise. She showed me the places to where she meets with Surgeons, Physicians, Medical Residents, etc. to help them use resources, get resources, and learn and use different softwares or technology to get important information. After the tour, I met with Toby, who is the head of the medical historical department and has been working at the library for 15 years. She does exhibits,(mainly in the rotunda), manages the collections, buys major rare books, and organizes manuscripts. She's helped staff and students find historical information. Recently she's done an exhibit on Darwin where any one can find out more about by visiting this website http://elibrary.med.yale.edu/blog/?p=703 .Toby also works in the Liaison program for the history of medicine and humanity in medicine. She feels that this collection makes the library unique because people benefit from the exhibits, tours, by learning about historical information that has impacted the future of medicine. An aspect that she hopes for the future is to have a finding aids database for medicine on the Yale website, so that people can have better access to historical information. While meeting with Toby, I met Flo, who works with the Digital library. She puts historical images online and makes sure that they're easy to access and look descent. You can these images at http://www.med.yale.edu/library/subjects/digital.html .

Meeting with Publicity and Reference (Continue from July 14, 2009)

Today I met with Lynn who does reference, marketing, publications, publicity, and statistics. In reference she helps people get resources that they might need. In marketing she offers exhibits and events so that the medical library can be seen from other people. In publications, she's done announcements about the library in the Yale Medical Bulletin. For publicity, she makes sure events are announced in the newspapers, on the Yale website, etc. again so that other people get the opportunity to find out and see more about the medical library. For statistics, she keeps track of questions asked at the information desk, in the Liaison program, in the Library Chat-IM, and with the texting. The statistics are recorded every 2 days a month, to where people put all the information about how many questions came to them, in a web form, the information is then calculated and put in statistic form. Lynn is also a Liaison for pediatrics and dermatology and is a personal librarian to a group of Yale medical students. She balances the time to achieve her work by each day, when possible, taking one topic and working on it all day. Like for instant one day she might spend the day doing statistics but the next she might do publications. What makes her job challenging is that some days she might be busy all day in meetings and only get about an hour in her office to work. Throughout her 27 years of working at the medical library other programs that she has been a part of are Consumer Health, Yale Health Plan, and with the New Haven free public library promoting health by buying computers, books, creating a website, so that people have more access to learning about healthy living. She also been a part of programs with the Yale school of nursing. What Lynn enjoys about her job is the aspect of helping at the information desk and finding resources that can teach and help others. Some future goals that she has are to learn ballroom dancing and to reach a higher level in her career, she's currently at a 3 but hopes to soon be at 4, through a promotion package. Some things that have changed during her time at the medical library that I found interesting was that in the 1990s the physical library changed, when she 1st came to the library in the 1980s no computers were around, that the 1st computer the library had was more like a typewriter, that there was only one computer for the whole staff, and that over the years the staff members have changed.

My Fourth Day (July 14, 2009) Meeting with Access and Delivery Services

Today I met with John, Mary, and Rick and also Ana and Dexter who work with the Access and Delivery services of the library. John is the Deputy Director of Public Services, which means that he deals with any interactions between the library and patrons/ people who visit the library. He is responsible for overseeing all the circulation departments, webmaster, interlibrary loan, liaisons, the security of the people who come into the library, and copyright. His main job that Ana, Dexter, and Mary as well as other departments in the library contribute to, is to help people find information they need, but he finds information mainly through journals. John is also works with the liaison program with the Orthopedics department, he also has been developing a website for a non-profit organization about Orthopedics, he has also served as a personal librarian for 7 to 10 students a year, and is a member of the medical library association. He also helps people with their library accounts and any other problems that may occur. Over his 9 years of working at the medical library, the aspect that he enjoys the most is the opportunity of getting to meet new people like students, staff, doctors, and hear about their interests, backgrounds, etc. He also enjoys receiving feedback from the patrons because it show the appreciation or the aspects he may need to work on. Somethings that he feels could improve and hopes to improve is the way in keeping up with the change in technology, the demand of people, and the personal skills and knowledge to do his job efficiently. Mary is the manager of the interlibrary loan, where she oversees a small group of lending and borrowing co-workers. The lending group, which consists of 3 people, fulfill orders that come from people or organizations that aren't a part of Yale. The borrowing group, which only consists of one person, fulfills orders to get journals or any other resources that aren't in the medical library, to be used at Yale by students, staff, physicians, etc. She describes her work environment as a way of learning a lot, especially on new databases, and that there is a lot of teamwork among this department and sometimes with other departments like the IT, reference, history of medicine, etc. A challenge is that some of the orders that the department receives are rushed, which means that they only have two hours to see if they have the resource, if they need to get it from another library, and then send it to the person who needs it. When the department has more than one person at a time needing resources rushed to them, it get challenging to see how many they can get done at a time. Some improvements that she feels are needed are technical issues. She feels that there should be more training for staff on software. What she enjoys about her jobs is finding solutions for bad citations, statistics, and knowing why some orders might not have been fulfill. Rick is the manager, who does the day to day operation. He focuses mainly on the operation at the circulation desk. He makes sure that patrons get what they need and if they don't he makes sure that next time they do. he enjoys his job because the problems aren't too bad, even though some of them can be a "rollercoaster", but he mostly enjoys it because the job isn't stressful. Ana and Dexter both work mainly with Access services, helping patrons find what they need faster. They both also try to find other ways to find information and resources in an easier manner.

Meeting with the members of Collection Development and Management (Continue July 9, 2009)

After meeting with Jason, I met with Cindy, Chris, Jeanette, Melissa, and Daniel who are all members of the Collection Development and Management part of the library. Cindy is the Associate Department Head to where she orders books, chooses what books are chosen, works with vendors to choose books, gives certain topics to vendors to find books, checks reviews to see if the books she might choose are good, get books people suggest, get books teachers want, and supervises that the travel time for the book to get from where it is at to the library is accurate. What's sad is that her job will soon be eliminated, but Cindy hopes to continue to at least still be working at Yale or as a research assistant. Next I met with Chris, who's main job is to catalog. She gets the books that either Cindy has bought, that others have donated, or that libraries have sent to the medical library and catalogs them. She does this by putting a code number on the book, and doing a descriptive cataloging that says hoe many image pages the book may have, how many pages the book has in total, etc and puts all that info. into the computer. She also works with a program called Hinari done through Switzerland getting subjects for people looking for journals. Jeanette's job is to mainly put serial numbers for Journals or electronic journals. She also works with Hinari, updating the dates of old journals. Melissa job is to order electronic books, catalog those books, and also labels books with Chris and electronic books. She also works with Hinari making it easier for people to access the journals. Now Daniel is the manager of the department. his job is to make the goals for the department, the assignments, sign time sheets, manage the library collection, manages the budget for book buying, looks at statistics and usage data of books to get those books used more. He also manages an electronic book called "UP to DATE" and the program Hinari. Even though each member has a different role, there is still a lot of team work.