Work Challenges and Inspiration among WHSLA Members: Featuring Kellee Selden

  

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.

Kellee Selden, MLIS, is currently Library Manager at Ascension Health Care in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

1) What challenges do you face with work?

• Finding the right person to get the job done.  For example, we need to locate an updated list of IPs for Ascension WI.  We have so many IT people and so much turnover that getting to the right person that has this information is a challenge.
• Communication flow.  We have a lot of great information that needs to get to the associates.  Finding the right avenues and getting it to flow properly is difficult.  It may work for a while but if someone leaves, the chain can be broken and disrupt the whole flow.
• Time for contract purchases and renewals.  Library contracts have to go through so many departments (Acquisitions, Contracting, IT, Admin, etc.) before it can be approved.  If it gets stuck in one department it can slow everything down and delay signature for weeks.

2) What inspires you at work?

• Finding the right information that helps an associate treat a patient, do a presentation, or answer a question.
• Merging contracts for the Ascension Librarians.  Getting better terms and conditions, making sure they are beneficial to us and saving money so we have the resources we need to treat patients, educate each other and provide the best service to everyone.
• I love working with students, interns and residents.  When I teach them they generally get excited to learn how to find information that will help them with a project or their practice.  They have such interesting topics and I learn from them too.
• The comradery with the other Ascension Librarians.  Before we merged into a national group, each librarian was on their own locally.  I was fortunate enough to work with Michele Matucheski before we went national.  Now we have over 20 librarians nationwide that collaborate.  We have regular meetings, share resources, help each other with projects etc.
• Having a voice at the table. Our Vice President, Michelle Heavens, works closely with me and the other co-manager to keep us relevant and involved with leadership on our behalf.  We have been invited to be a part of national Ascension Nursing Pillars programs, deciding on enterprise-wide Point-of-Care tools etc.  She is embedding us in Ascension on local, regional and national levels.  We are more powerful as a group versus individual librarians across the country.

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?

• This is not a CE, but a discussion I would appreciate.  How can hospital librarians and MLA work together to not just retain our jobs, but make executive leadership understand our value now and in the future.   As hospitals have lost money during the pandemic they will be making cuts.  MLA needs to help us make executive leadership understand that we don't just manage space but do value added research,
  save money on contract negotiations, right size budgets, do training so associates are using the resources efficiently, obtain ebooks, ejournals and other resources that are EBP for their departments, troubleshoot technology etc. If we collaborate and create a document that points all of this out perhaps we can release it to hospital leadership across the country.  This way they know our value and understand what we do for them, instead of them having misinformation and thinking we just take care of space and books.

Thank you, Kellee Selden, 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.