I found my passion for reference and searching when I was searching with the purpose of buying my primary residence and subsequently looking for an investment rental home. I spent hours using search tools on real estate listing sites by filtering for neighborhoods, or price, or number of bedrooms and was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. And as if that wasn’t fun enough, I found that I could search county records through an interactive online mapping system to determine last sale, amount paid in taxes, and who the current owner of the home is. This may have been a clue that my destiny was to become a reference librarian, because I loved the search!
As a student volunteer I provided reference and research services to a diverse online clientele through the IPL2 digital reference service. Here is a reflection and transcript of the types of questions asked and the answers I was able to provide. What I learned from the IPL2 training is that the answers are only part of what the service provides; it is also a platform for teaching the user how to perform online searches and provides the tools for evaluation of sources.
As part of my MLIS training at the University of Washington I took several courses related to reference services. I learned ways to assess the purpose, scope, and range of academic databases. I familiarized myself with the sources available to students who are researching, including PubMed, PsycInfo, Academic Search Complete, LexisNexis Academic, and JSTOR. The University subscribes to thousands of journals and many are only available to students attending the university. So in addition, I learned to perform Internet searches and evaluate web sources for accuracy, authority, reliability, and bias. I learned many techniques to improve search results by combining Boolean logic, special operators, key terms, subject headings, and filtering results.
I took a specialized health information course which gave me training in searching PubMed. Unlike many databases, there is a special method to search PubMed. It is best to use the MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) which are structured in a hierarchical fashion. I learned that the using the MeSH terms yields the most pertinent information in terms of precision and recall. As part of the Health Information Course I assessed the information needs of pharmacists in relation to preventing adverse drug events. My findings resulted in recommending a checklist for hospital administrators to facilitate discussion of technologies and procedures which could improve hospital pharmacists’ best practices. The research report, Hospital Pharmacists’ Information Needs: Adoption of Best Practices is also available as a presentation.
For The Future
I will continue to build my reference skills by joining RUSA (Reference and User Association). They frequently offer online Webinars, and one that interests me is Genealogy 101. I think that many library users seek help in tracing their family roots, and that is one area that I would like to learn more about.