Work Challenges and Inspiration among WHSLA Members: Featuring Brenda Fay

  

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.

Brenda Fay, MLIS, is currently Library Manager at Advocate Aurora Health Care in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 

and one of our WHSLA Bloggers.

1) What challenges do you face with work?

• I worry  about the next merger…whenever it comes. Our health care system leadership has made it clear that there will be more, and while merging to lower costs for physical items/machines make sense, this rarely (if ever) translates into lower library resource costs. It’s always more, which means cuts invariably happen. Budget pressures are so very real and this is another thing I worry about. Do you cut people or resources when push comes to shove? 

2) What inspires you at work?

• Working with Residents and other learners. It’s really gratifying to teach someone a skill and see them applying it, or sharing it with their colleagues.  

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?

• I’d love to see a CE about hospital and library mergers. What to do when your hospital system merges? Who should you reach out to, how do you find out about new stakeholders, how to present a case for your library/staff to remain because of the services and resources you provide.  

• Another CE topic that would be great is How to Prepare a one-page infographic/annual report about your library. Things like this always fall to the wayside it seems, because hospital librarians are busy helping clinicians or other immediate work like getting the journals back up after an IP change, but you and I know that when someone questions the value of your department, you need to have a one-pager or quick thing to tell them/show them. I’d love more practical CEs like that. I could care less about data since it has nothing to do with my job and I’d guess many other hospital librarians feel the same. 

•  Finally we’ve been getting a lot of questions from Residents and MDs looking for financial support to publish in open access journals. This just makes me so mad that publishers are making money of these authors. We have started compiling a list of free journals to publish in, but many clinicians want the prestige of a certain journal, even if they have to pay $1,500-$3,000 to publish. I’d love NNLM to address this and give us boots on the ground librarians resources to help our people publish. 

Thank you, Brenda Fay, 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.