Work Challenges and Inspiration among WHSLA Members: Featuring Deb Knippel

  

Michele: In March, I participated in a listening session with Erica Lake from the NNLM Region 6.
In preparation, I asked a few WHSLA Members for their candid answers to the following questions:

1. What challenges do you face with work?
2. What inspires you at work?
3. What CE would you like to see the NNLM work up for us, esp. on the hospital side.

With their permission, I am sharing the responses here on the WHSLA Blog in a series with the hope that WHSLA Members will get to know each other better, share some great ideas and best practices, and realize that we may be facing a lot of the same challenges in a post- (Are we there yet?) pandemic world.

Deb Knippel, MS, is currently a Reference Librarian for Marshfield Clinic Health System in Wisconsin.

1) What challenges do you face with work?

• Promoting library resources and services across a large geographical area or having a presence when there is no physical library.  
• How to help employees understand how the library can support their work.  
• Keeping up with technology. 

2) What inspires you at work?

• Seeing projects you have assisted with come to fruition.   
• Working with a content expert to build a libguide
• Finding the perfect reference for a library user
• Corresponding with Authors
• Collaborating with a team
• Completing a challenging Lit Search or copyright permissions request
• Being part of a healthcare system full of so many talented people working together to keep people healthy

3) What CE would you like to see the NNLM work up for us, especially on the hospital side.  MLA seems to be doing more CE for the academic librarians these days, and NNLM is doing more outreach to public libraries now.  So what would be most helpful for those of us still working in hospital libraries?

• Anything copyright! Hospitals/healthcare systems do not have the same copyright protections as an Academic Health Science Library so tips for providing staff education content that complies with copyright law.  Other topics such as reusing YouTube videos for internal staff education, good sources of images, how hospitals are managing their copyright permissions, copyright and the electronic health record and/or creating electronic forms, etc. 
• A “New Hospital Librarian 101” type of online course or boot camp.  We have a new librarian and I have been coordinating her training but some of her responsibilities are in areas that I have limited skills myself. 

Thank you, Deb K., for sharing your work challenges and inspiration!

If you would like to participate and share your answers to these 3 questions in a similar post for the WHSLA Blog, email Michele Matucheski with your answers and I'll make sure it gets posted.