Blogging about Professional Blogs

My manager/library mentor suggested to me two blogs about medical librarianship that she herself follows.
The two blogs I followed are:   A Librarian by Any Other Name-Reflections on My Time as an Informationist-by Sally Gore and The Krafty Librarian Blog -Things of Interest to a Medical Librarian by Michelle Kraft.  Both blogs are run by women who are medical librarians.  Sally Gore works for the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.  Michelle Kraft is the Senior Medical Librarian at the Cleveland Clinic, in Ohio and the incoming president of the Medical Library Association.

Sally Gore wrote a great deal about a mammography study team she was in at the University.  This was the first time I have been able to hear candidly from a medical librarian who was fully embedded in a research team.  Where I work, our librarians are contacted by personnel to assist but are rarely members of the study team.  Unfortunately, due to lack of funding, Gore was cut from the team (eventually they did add her back to the team in a part-time capacity).  The team decided they could use someone who was already part of the team to do the job of "librarian".  This resonated greatly with me.  My original career goal (back in high school) was to become a school librarian.  Half way through my undergrad degree I realized that most schools had cut the job of librarian and/or replaced the job of school librarian with a volunteer parent.  
Both ladies had posts in their blog discussing the changing role of the library.  Gore wrote, "We work in a rapidly evolving field, something pretty ironic for such an old, old profession, and the clash of these two characteristics is clearly evident in most of our professional issues and discussions today." (Gore, 2014).  Gore also referred to librarians as " information management professionals".  I really like this term to describe what librarians do.  Gore even performed her own experiment on "Information Tracking Behavior" (Gore, 2014).  This was a great look at how we can trigger patrons to think of the library when they are in need of research assistance.  

Both blogs also mentioned libraries closing and staff cuts.  Michelle Kraft dedicated most of her blog to information regarding MLA (Medical Library Association).  Kraft addressed medical library closings with this statement, "We need to advocate for ourselves now!  MLA is helpful and they will do what they humanly can to support us. But we need to stop looking to them to make everything all better, we need to get the message out in whatever way possible." (Kraft, 2014).  Kraft has proactive ideas about medical librarianship and how to promote the use of medical libraries.  She states, "we need to take our message out to our patrons" and "as much as I am in favor of our medical library journals, we need to stop publishing about the value of library services in them and start publishing those kind of studies in our patrons’ journals which is what they read.  Our patrons don’t read our professional journals." (Kraft, 2014).  This is an excellent point.
Kraft also addressed social media in the form of promoting your library services on Twitter.  She also included fun pop-culture videos and used them to how they relate to the world of medical library science.
Both blogs were excellent and presented many new ideas to me.  I will continue to follow them after this class ends.  They keep me informed about the world of medical libraries (one academic and one in a hospital), and will help me to steer my future LIS class selection.  I have already decided that I desire to take more LIS classes that will help me with social media and future technology (website building and data mining).