Connie Schardt, AHIP Medical Library Association 2009–2010

Constance Marie Bernadette Schardt grew up in Palo Alto, California, the second of six children at a time when there were still fruit orchards in the Santa Clara valley and cities had distinct borders. She earned a degree in art history from the University of California at Berkeley while dodging tear gas and National Guard soldiers sent to protect the university from the squatters in People's Park. Upon graduation in 1971, with no real career plans, she spent four months hitchhiking by herself through a kinder, gentler Europe. As part of that adventure, she spent the winter working in Israel at Kibbutz Evron on the Mediterranean Sea near the Lebanese border. This was in her pre-library days so she did not organize their library, or institute new education services, or implement Joint Commission standards for the kibbutz but, always in touch with the masses, washed dishes and picked avocados. The kibbutz offered a unique living experience and the chance to meet fellow travelers from around the world. One of those travelers would turn out to be her future husband, Andy Ribner.

Upon returning from abroad, Connie went back to the familiar territory of Berkeley to figure out her next move. To her total surprise, she ran into Andy, who was making his first trip to California to apply to library school. The irony is that Connie had convinced him that librarianship was the hot new profession, and although she was not quite sure what librarians actually did, she did have a cousin who was one. Nevertheless, they both needed work and decided to open a falafel cart on the Berkeley campus. So, for the next couple of years, Andy went to library school, while Connie ran the Evron Falafel Works from a cart on Telegraph Avenue and listened to the incessant chanting of Hare Krishna devotees. This was followed by an assortment of part-time jobs: repairing Volkswagens, operating a switchboard in a medical center, caring for livestock on a 50-acre farm, and analyzing market research for Gallo wineries. Looking for more meaningful employment, Connie decided to follow her own advice and go to library school. In 1978, she started taking night classes at San Jose State University. Mind you, this was 1978, and the only available computer was a TI Silent 700 with coupler muffs. Students were not allowed to touch it. After only one semester, Connie had had enough and was ready to try something else when she saw an announcement for a library internship at the Palo Alto VA Medical Library. She applied, interviewed, and then went off to visit her sister, a Peace Corp nurse working outside of Rio de Janeiro. When she returned, she was hired by Reese Gallimore, the VA chief librarian. He not only hired her but saw the energy and potential beneath her frustration. He became Connie's mentor and gave her the on-the-job training that showed her what librarians really did all day. While she was still a student, Reese sent her for Dialog training and allowed her not only to touch the VA's Silent 700, but to use it for searching and then to teach database searching to other VA medical librarians. The profession came dangerously close to losing this star player, but luckily Connie was now hooked.

After library school, Connie's first professional position was at the Idaho State Library. She arrived in September 1979 to take over as the health information coordinator for the Idaho Health Libraries Network, a National Library of Medicine (NLM)–funded network barely six months old. Idaho was very different from California. It was rural, was scarcely populated, had few major highways, and had no academic medical school, but it did have fifty-two hospitals scattered across the state that needed access to current information. Connie immediately assessed the situation and got down to work. She visited all fifty-two hospitals in the state and, working with the two established hospital libraries in Boise, began to strengthen the statewide health information network. She applied for NLM grants to set up small collections in local hospitals where no libraries had ever existed, obtained Library Services and Construction Act (LSCA) funding to pilot-test a circuit rider program at the small hospitals in Lewiston and Moscow, and coordinated the production of the statewide medical serials union list. She promoted the use of the new electronic mail technology and purchased the equipment needed to set up simultaneous remote searching (SRS), which brought expert searching to small rural hospitals. She also provided training for new library managers. In 1986, Connie wrote the Survival Manual for the New Hospital Library Manager, which is still available in libraries in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington [1].

Connie's introduction to the Medical Library Association (MLA) came at the annual meeting of the Pacific Northwest Chapter (PNC) of MLA, which met at Sun Valley, Idaho, in October 1979. She immediately saw the value of this group as a resource for professional networking and continuing education. She became a member of the PNC Governmental Relations Committee in 1980 and three years later wrote her first article for the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association on using that “new” electronic mail system to set up an online alert service for the committee [2]. In 1981, Connie was elected the first Chapter Council PNC representative, in 1984, she became the chapter recording secretary, and in 1985, she was elected in-coming chapter chair. In this latter, role she helped plan the first joint meeting with the Midcontinental Chapter, held in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in 1986. The meeting's keynote speaker, humorist C. W. Metcalfe, provided Connie with her first rule for a healthy career: “Take yourself lightly, take your job seriously.” To this day, Connie has maintained close friendships with many of the members of PNC, which she considers her “birth chapter.” They continue to meet annually at MLA as the very unofficial Charm and Beauty Special Interest Group (SIG).

Although Connie and Andy loved Boise and the Pacific Northwest, by 1990, they were ready for new job opportunities and a warmer climate. The family, including two-year-old Nathan and six-month-old twins Sarah and Rachael, moved to North Carolina, where Connie took a position as library director for Rowan Memorial Hospital in Salisbury. She now had her own library to promote and manage, while also providing services to six smaller hospitals. Her Idaho experience would serve her well. Having learned the value of networking and the importance of collaborating with colleagues, she immediately joined the Mid-Atlantic Chapter (MAC) and the Hospital Libraries Section (HLS) of MLA. As chair of the HLS Standards Committee from 1991 to 1994, she coordinated the revision of the Hospital Library Standards and later coauthored the chapter, “Standards for Health Science Libraries,” in volume 7 of the 1999 Current Practice in Health Sciences Librarianship [3]. By 1994, she was chair-elect of MAC and later in 1997, received the MAC Librarian of the Year Award.

Connie's work with the MLA Hospital Library Standards put her on a collision course with the Joint Commission's library standards. By 1994, the Joint Commission had started a process of “streamlining” their standards, and many hospital librarians saw this as an attack on the library and a way to minimize the importance of the library in the hospital. Connie encouraged librarians to step back and look at the bigger picture, to review all of the Joint Commission standards for hospital departments, and then to identify ways that the library could assist other departments in meeting their standards. Thus, Connie's second rule for a healthy career, “Look at the bigger picture,” helped her change impediments into positive ideas and became one of her defining qualities. Her approach resulted in invitations to present workshops about using the Joint Commission standards for the benefit of libraries to librarians in Georgia, Idaho, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia.

In 1997, Connie accepted the position of education coordinator at Duke University Medical Center Library, and the family moved from Salisbury to Chapel Hill. Connie had excelled in coordinating library consortia and working with hospital libraries, and she now found a new niche. It began with a chance meeting with Sheri Keitz, who had come to Connie's Ovid class to learn how to teach online searching to interns as part of a new evidence-based medicine (EBM) curriculum. On the spot, Connie decided to take a chance and offered to teach the class with Keitz, even though she had never co-taught with a physician before and did not even really know what EBM was. Thus began the second great mentorship of Connie's career, an avalanche of new opportunities, and a good example of her third rule for a healthy career, “Take chances.” Connie was soon teaching effective searching skills at morning report for general medicine and pediatrics, collaborating with chief residents on information-related research projects, participating as a librarian-tutor in the prestigious “How to Teach Evidence Based Clinical Practice” annual workshop at McMaster University, and codirecting with Keitz “Teaching and Leading EBM: A Workshop for Teachers and Champions of Evidence-Based Medicine,” the Duke EBM workshop, now in its sixth year. In 2003, she was awarded the Outstanding Service Award from the Department of Medicine in recognition of her excellent contributions to the internal medicine residency program. This was the only time the award was given to a librarian.

Recognizing the enormous significance of EBM for the library, Connie also developed an MLA continuing education course to share this knowledge with her colleagues. The course was a great success, and Connie taught in such diverse locations as Cleveland, Detroit, Omaha, Phoenix, Portland, Puerto Rico, and Seattle. She was now firmly committed to her fourth rule for a healthy career, “Share what you know.” With Continuing Education Committee Members Julia Kochi and Julie Garrison, Connie developed content for one of the first MLA online distance education courses, “Evidence Based Medicine and the Medical Librarian.” Working with Connie on this and other projects prompted Julie Garrison to comment:

Connie is a great person to work with on any project. She always does her research, comes prepared to accomplish any task, and never shies away from hard work. The best thing about working with Connie though is the sense of perspective and humor she brings to the project. She always has a positive attitude about getting things done and makes sure everyone involved is enjoying themselves, even when the task at hand is stressful and difficult. I have learned so much about professionalism working with Connie. She is an accomplished leader, teacher, mentor, and commensurate lifelong learner.

The new EBM course was innovative in that it took an MLA continuing education course offered to MLA members and modified it so that it also met academic requirements for the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. Joanne Marshall, FMLA, dean of the school in 1998, remembers:

When I was dean, [Connie] approached me with a proposition—would the SILS at UNC Chapel Hill like to offer the course “Evidence Based Medicine for the Medical Librarian” as an online course? [W]e jumped at the opportunity. The course became available to SILS students, and we found a way to register students who wanted to take the course for continuing education credit only. The course is a wonderful opportunity for SILS students to learn alongside librarians and health professionals from all over the world. This began over [nine] years ago, and the course is still going strong—a true testament to Connie's excellent teaching skills [and] the continuing relevance of her work on evidence-based medicine.

The course has reached a global audience with students enrolled from Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, Iceland, Egypt, India, Kenya, Singapore, and the United Kingdom, as well as the United States.

At the same time that Connie was working on EBM, she was also expanding her MLA activities. She thinks of MLA as a wonderful collection of colleagues who share their professional and personal lives. She served on the MLANET Editorial Board, chairing the MLANET editor search committee in 1998; on the 1988 MLA Nominating Committee; and on the 1998 National Program Committee. From 2002–2005, she was chair of the Task Force to Develop MLA's Center of Research and Education (CORE) that developed the CORE Toolkit, MLA's web repository for educational and research materials. In 2005, Connie was elected to the MLA Board of Directors for a three-year term.

But it's not all work and no play for Connie. Her personal interests include Chicago South Side Blues, art museums (remember, she has a degree in art history), all things Elvis, antique malls, and the high style of art deco. Connie's longtime MLA roommate Susan Schweinsberg Long, AHIP, also points to Connie's “lust for junking, her great finds, her eye for the unusual and knowledge of all things retro” and to her “ability to find extraordinary places in any city—places you will not find in a guidebook.” Connie never misses an opportunity to visit Memphis and recently took her daughters there as a final precollege mother-daughter bonding trip. Her sport is football, her team is the San Francisco 49ers, and, yes, she is patiently waiting for the team to rebuild. In the meantime, Connie traded in her Stella scooter for a Honda Rebel motorcycle to further reduce her carbon footprint, while having a little more fun on the short commute to work.

In his 1977 oral history interview, William D. Postell Sr. commented on the important quality needed in an MLA president; it describes Connie well: “I think you have to, more or less, give of yourself to something else. To my mind that would be the best type of president: doing it for the good of everybody” [4].