Author: Hope Leman

I am at my computer keyboard as the sun is coming up on this May morning. I am thinking that it probably will be a beautiful day and that I hope next Wednesday will also be such. For on that day friends, family and colleagues will gather in the pretty back yard of the home of a much loved member of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Medical Library Association after a service to honor her life and mourn her death. My former boss, Dorothy O’Brien, former head of library services at Samaritan Health Services died May 12, 2010. I would like to discuss here what we can learn from Dorothy’s life about the importance of medical libraries, what medical librarians do and what it means to live a life of service by serving in that profession.

I have already written a bit about Dorothy and her good humor, grace and valor in the face of illness. Here I would like to reflect on what I learned by watching Dorothy up close as a complete novice to medical librarianship when I had the great good fortune to land a position as library technical specialist under Dorothy at Murray Memorial Library at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis, Oregon in 2004.

Dorothy was responsible for all library services at Samaritan, but she was headquartered at Murray Memorial Library and it is there that I got to learn from her about what makes a good medical librarian and the amazingly broad set of skills she possessed and how she employed them to make medical care better in our community.

First of all, here is an obvious point: a good medical librarian should be likable, personable, friendly and approachable. Medical libraries are sometimes somewhat mysterious to visitors to hospitals and to staff alike if they come from hospitals that don’t have them (and that, lamentably, is more and more the case). Patients and the family members of such sometimes don’t realize that many medical libraries are open to the public and often either don’t venture in or stand uncertainly in the doorway in the hope that someone will notice them and make clear that they are indeed welcome.

Dorothy’s office was directly by the library entrance and her office door was open almost all of the time and she was the personification of graciousness to the deeply shy and the self-assured alike. I remember well as a medical records clerk coming in and asking if would be okay to simply sit and read on my breaks in one of the big comfy chairs by the windows. This very warm, beautifully dressed woman named Dorothy was soon one of my very favorite people in the hospital. And that was true of many, many others. I graduated from library school in 2009 and I wish there had been coursework on “Fundamentals of Charm and Charisma for Health Science Librarians.”  Dorothy would have been a great visiting professor on such topics.

But there was far more to Dorothy than merely the fact that she was able to generate support for the library simply by being an unusually lovable person. She also provided services that enabled doctors and other medical to ensure the very best care was delivered, from the latest pharmacological treatments for various forms of cancer to the intricacies of surgery of the hand.

Dorothy’s ability to find, sometimes under very short notice, a key sentence among dozens of pages of a plethora of articles found via very sophisticated medical literature search methods that I only half understood myself was an endless source of wonder to me.

And I know Dorothy’s talent for helping providers was much appreciated because one of my jobs was sorting and opening the mail. Among the piles of medical journals that arrived each day were thank-you notes from surgeons, physical therapists, pharmacists, nurse managers, oncology nurses, wound care nurses, doctors engaged in research projects or book writing, SHS employees earning master’s degrees in public health or other fields thanking Dorothy for finding just what they needed. Dorothy was extremely modest and did not trumpet her own accomplishments. She simply wanted to help doctors and other medical people alleviate pain and cure disease and to help members of the public gain a better grasp of their own health situations. But I know that the “library services appreciation file” was getting so bulky as to be getting to the point of making the drawer in which it was kept very difficult to get closed by the time she retired. It had to be treated with great force. 1-2-3—shove with the shoulder! That is the mark of a great medical librarian.

I could go on and on about how Dorothy personified the best of medical librarianship. So far, I have mentioned that Dorothy was a likable person and that she also employed her superb search skills in the medical field to the very best effect on behalf of a wide array of providers and patients (as an example of her service to the latter group she excelled at helping those newly diagnosed with diabetes, guiding them through their initial bewilderment about dietary matters). What else?

Well, she was an absolute master at collection development for medical libraries, ensuring that we had all the core texts in the major fields of medicine. She knew precisely what a well stocked medical library should possess. And what is more, she was a shrewd bargainer with vendors and careful steward of library funds and always got the very best deal. I would not have dreamed of attempting to ever try to best her in any sort of monetary transaction. She was a sweet-natured person, but she also was responsible and careful with library money and yet managed to be much liked by vendors and the purchasing departments in the institutions she served alike. Sometimes relations between librarians and vendors can be either adversarial or overly cozy. Dorothy managed to be both pleasant and hard-nosed when necessary. And what a model of professional integrity in all things she was. I learned a lot about probity and ethics from her. She was one smart cookie and this applied not only to paper-based resources but to electronic resources.

And the mention of the word “electronic” brings to mind another thing Dorothy’s career can teach us about medical librarianship. She adjusted with remarkable flexibility to the incredible number of changes that occurred in library technology in medical librarianship that our colleague Maryanne Blake has chronicled so memorably.

Just in the few years that I worked under Dorothy from 2004-2007 we saw the rise of RSS, Library 2.0, Web 2.0 and the steady erosion of print as the primary medium in libraries. Dorothy never stopped learning and made sure that she kept up professionally so that she was able to provide the highest level of service and provide as many resources to our patrons as possible in a rapidly changing world. She didn’t grouse about change; neither did she fall for techno-hype. She looked at each technology to determine what value it was to the library and its users and was an astute judge of what was significant and what was merely a bright shiny object of no real value in a medical library. She was very patient with me as I raved about the latest Web 2.0 doodad that I see now in retrospect Dorothy was right to dismiss as silly and to try to redirect me to something of more importance, like honing my search skills.

Finally, I learned from Dorothy the importance of professional organizations such as the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Medical Library Association and of the services of the Pacific Northwest Regional Medical Library of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine.

For after Dorothy had to retire quite suddenly our library suddenly was without the expertise, steadiness and guidance she had provided. Luckily, Dorothy was so well liked in our region that many people from both the PNC/MLA and the RML were able to provide answers to the many questions that people like Dorothy handle so expertly. I am very grateful for Dorothy to introducing me to the world of medical librarianship and to the world of the MLA. After I wrote about Dorothy’s death I received many touching notes from librarians who had known her and admired her. And, very movingly, I received many from librarians who had not known her but who wished they had and they all stressed that in their notes that she embodied all that they strive to be in their professional lives: competent providers of health information and upstanding individuals. That is what Dorothy meant to me and what our profession means to all of us.