Day Two

Meeting with Mr. Paul Huard and interview with Mr. Mark Gentry

My day began with observing a meeting with Mr. Paul Huard, a Australian Librarian, and the faculty here at the Medical Library. Mr. Huard gave a brief synopsis of his career. His first career was a high school teacher and years after, he became a librarian because he felt like he could do more for the students. After he introduced himself, the faculty here at Yale introduced themselves round-robin style and gave a synopsis of the responsibilities of their job. The highlights of this meeting was to discuss how can each library provide better customer service. They discussed the differences between the two libraries, and discussed how can they change and improve. Mr. Huard emphasized what methods can be used to help students find reliable information, and what can both libraries do to improve the student/librarian relationship.
Later, I began my interview with Mr. Mark Gentry. Mr. Gentry works in Technology and clinical support. He works with doctors who work in a clinical setting, and visits hospitals and other countries for outreach, support, and training. He's earned a bachelors and masters degree in Anthropology and earned a 2nd Masters degree in Library science. He began his career believing he wanted to be an Anthropology professor because of his attraction to research and the college atmosphere. Mr Gentry counts helping doctors, supporting clinicians, and making the library accessible to the users, amongst the most important aspects of his job. He is has worked on a special project in Uganda, working with clinicians there and worked here in the U.S. with Uganda people assisting them with their clinical experiences here. He is currently working on an iPad project as well. All 150 Yale Medical students will be supplied with an iPad so they can conveniently study and research on the go. He's a main component on making the Yale campus more mobile.

Day One

Tour of the Yale Medical Library and Interview with Mr. Charles Greenberg

My first day as a C.H.I.L.I intern went well. Mr. Charles Greenberg lead me on a rather detailed tour of the Yale Medical Library. The history of the library dates back to 1941 and has been at the service of countless medical students throughout the years. There was one thing that interest me most: The archives of the library.
During the tour, Mr. Greenberg pointed out a few surgical tools on display that dated back to ancient Roman times of the 2nd century and some that were used during the Revolutionary War. Immediately, this caught my attention. It was interesting for me to be able to see the progression of surgical tools throughout the many years. Some tools were heated and applied to open wounds, and doctors used this method to stop bleeding and reduce bacteria to prepare a body for recovery. It amazes me how over time so much in medicine can change.
During my interview with Mr. Greenberg, I learned a lot about the importance of a medical library, and librarianship in general. Mr. Greenberg originally wanted to work in education but towards the end of his undergraduate studies he descided he wanted to work as a libarian. When applying to graduate school, he was offered a full ride, and took the first job offering he was given at a public library. He enjoys his job here at Yale Medical Library very much and stated the management and flexibility of his job makes him perfer Yale over other University Libraries. He has created two special projects with students (C.H.I.L.I. and Healthflicks) and this will contiune his legacy. Mr. Greenberg is very passionate in his work.

Also, I had a brief interview with Mrs. Velma Williams of the Document Department. In the document deartment she aids other libraries with books and articles they may need via web. She has sent books and articles from the Yale Medical Library to all 50 states, and several other countries including Hong Kong, South Africa and a wide variety of other places.

My Last Day at the Medical Library

For my last day, I had an interview with Hongbin whose position is the Webmaster of the Medical Library. He has been here for almost 5 years. He is responsible for managing the website, and updating it. Also, he attended college at China, then he attended college in the U.S for his graduate studies. After that interview, I blogged about my experience here which I am doing right now. In concluding, I just want to thank all the staff members for taking their time to meet with me and answer questions. It was pleasure meeting everyone. I learned so much from this opportunity. Before, I used to think the library as a place where you get books, but my perspective changed. The medical library staff does many significant things; they make access to books, articles, and journals easier for people, inform people how to look up information effectively, and provide a place to study and check out books. They even reach out to medical students and doctors to help provide research for them. I would especially like to thank Charlie for letting me to do this internship. It was definitely an amazing experience of being a Chili intern. Lastly, I would recommend high school sopomores, juniors, or seniors to apply for this internship.

A day learning about the collection development and management with Daniel & Co.

For the most part of my day, I got to meet the staff who is charge of the collection development and management. The manager whose name is Daniel. Currently, he has two jobs; he does the same position, but he does it for the Medical Library and University. He has been here for about 10 years. The way he interprets his profession is similar to a puzzle; It's always constantly changing, therefore gaining more responsibilities. The main task he does is organize these profits to decide how these profits are to be spent on certain books and resources. He started at D.C, where he got to work in the library congress. Then, he ended up getting a profession here. The interesting thing I learned today was that last month he got to travel to Guyana, South Africa where he taught a class. He described that experience as exciting and significant.Then after my interview with Daniel, I got to meet with Holly. She is currently on a fellowship. So, she gets to work on projects, and learn and be involved with the collection development and management. Also, she also working for the Cushing Center by working with other colleagues to come up with a database from all the research and medical writings of Harvey Cushing. After, I met with Diana. She introduced me to GoogleScholar. It's really efficient. Basically, if you looked up something on Google, and on the side if it says Yale has access to it, you can just click on it and the whole article shows up. So, it's very useful and practical for research. The end of my day, I got to meet with Melissa. She is in charge of ordering books, and organizing information. In fact, she has undergraduate degree in agriculture which I thought was really cool. As you can see, everyone I got to interview today enjoyed their profession, and they all taught me all sorts of new stuff. I enjoyed my afternoon there.

Interview with Kelly and Sarah

• For today, I got to go down to the scanning room. As you can see above, it's a high tech scanning machine in which they used. It was pretty interesting to see old books. They would scan pages of each book. then they would edit the photo, and lastly, they would convert it to PDF format to have people all over access to that file. It makes the access to these old scanned copies of the books much easier for people. I actually got the chance to use the scanning machine which was exciting. I tried both automatic and manual mode. As you can see, I learned how to use a scanning machine, and it was really nice to meet Kelly and Kristen.

• The second part of my afternoon. I got to interview the Preservation Librarian, Sarah McGlynn. She told me a quick explanation of the Historical Library. Then, she showed me the place where they kept old books in security. They arranged by time period. So, it was really nice to get the chance to see actual books from 11-19th century. She mention how some older books used plates to make the text stand out, and they also used animal skin as the cover. You can really see how things change in terms of resources and its usages. Not only did they have ancient books, but also ancient paintings. If you're wondering about his position, she preserves the physical aspects of the books thus adequate lighting and temperature is essential. Overall, I enjoyed meeting Sarah, and she is very motivated and passionate about her profession. She definitely has a great curiosity towards the way people before decipher mental conditions through drawings and other various ways. You can learned a lot of interesting facts about the library and the books from her especially in a historical perspective.
  

Meeting with Judy and Kenny.

• Around 3:00 p.m, I got to interview, Judy Spak, who is a part of the Curriculum and Research Support. She definitely enjoys her profession mainly because she's able to help people find information, solve problems, and teach patrons how to access and use electronic sources. She has been in this profession for 15 years. Also, she is motivated to stay in her current profession because she is challenged and her coworkers are friendly. The neat thing I learned today from her was that her section administers the Black Board which is mainly training.

• The other half of the afternoon, I meet with the Library Director, Kenny Marone who has been working here for 30 years now. She mentions how her profession is constantly changing in terms of technological changes. For a background, she tells me how she is was always interested in history; in fact that was her initial major in college. She thinks her profession is fascinating because she gets to learn how to work with databases and electronic devices. The interesting thing I learned from her was that the medical library had their own website and last year, it got 9.2 million hits. My favorite part of the interview besides getting the chance to met her was gaining some information about "Anthropology." At first, I didn't know what it meant so I asked, and she told me "It was the study of humans." A cool fact I learned from her: Chimpanzees are known to have 99.4% correlation with human genes. This made me think about evolution and natural selection. So it was nice to be able to learn about new things, and to interview Judy and Kenny. There's a website you can go to find out more information about Anthropology which is http://anthropology.net/.

  
  

Attending the History of Health Sciences Lecture

I attended this History of Health Sciences Lecture at 4.00 p.m. The presenter on the left was giving out a speech about Shen Kuo. He is known as a polymathic Chinese scientist. He has contributed tremendous amounts of remarkable works in many fields such as Mathematics, Astronomy, Archaeology, Meteorology, Climatology, and etc. I thought the speech was very informative and elegant. I admit this is my first time encountering the name, Shen Kuo, and I'm glad I had the chance to learn about him. So I suggest anyone who hasn't heard of Shen Kuo, you should definitely research about him; he deserves great recognition from people. My day at the lecture was great.