Welcome to the first issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA). For eighty-nine volumes, covering a span of nearly ninety years, the Medical Library Association's premier peer-reviewed publication appeared as the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. In his 1986 article (reprinted in the April 1998 issue of the Bulletin), Beatty mentions that as far back as the 1960s the membership discussed changing the name [1]. But, in keeping with our professional obligation to preserve the past, we can be slow to change, and, not until their midwinter meeting in February of 2001, did the Board of Directors accept the recommendation of a special task force and vote to make the change [2].
The new name intends to better reflect common usage and to more accurately represent the nature of the publication. “Bulletin” has connotations of a time-sensitive, newsy sort of publication. It brings to mind something more like the MLA News—a very important vehicle, to be sure, but one that is intended to quickly disseminate information that has a relatively short lifespan. “Journal” identifies it more closely with the scholarly publications of other professional societies.
I take great delight in coincidences, and the one that places the informationist symposium, “Patient-Centered Librarianship: The Informationist and Beyond,” in this first issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association is a fine one. Many of us have avidly followed the discussions that have taken place in print and in person since June 2000, when the Davidoff and Florance editorial suggesting an enhanced role and possible new name for clinical information specialists appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine [3]. This symposium builds on the work that has been done so far, and I hope that it will add substantively to the discussions, although I certainly do not expect it to bring about the resolution of many questions.
Working with the editors and authors of the symposium has been one of the most challenging and inspiring opportunities I have had in my short tenure as editor. After the editors had sent the initial drafts of the articles to me, I sent them on to several members of the editorial board who had agreed to serve as reviewers. (You may be interested in the detail that the same three editorial board members reviewed all of the articles, so that they could view them in relationship. You, as readers, owe them great thanks). I found myself awaiting their reviews as eagerly as I had read the draft articles themselves. Did the reviewers agree with each of the authors? Did they agree with each other? Of course not! As the authors would attest, each set of reviews revealed nearly as much breadth of opinion over the issues put forth in the symposium as we can expect to find among the JMLA's readers.
When you have finished reading the symposium, I do not think you will have arrived at a clear definition or understanding of what “the informationist” is. In fact, if you thought you knew beforehand, you will likely find that you have grown more uncertain. You will find some authors with whom you agree and some with whom you disagree strongly. I hope that every article will have some sentences that resonate as true for you; and most likely you will shake your head in dismay at some sentences in each. But if the editors and authors have done their job well, you will think differently about our profession once you have finished reading them. You will think differently about your own roles and responsibilities, and perhaps you will find a new degree of excitement about the wondrous possibilities that the future holds for us.
In the October 2000 issue of the Bulletin, I called on our association to “not let one more year go by” without responding to the challenge to vigorously explore this provocative concept [4]. The Board of Directors agreed and established a task force charged with planning an invitational conference to explore the issues further. That conference will take place at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in April of 2002. The symposium in this issue of the JMLA will provide important background and food for thought for the participants of that conference.
One of the delights of editing the JMLA lies in the way that it represents the full range of our interests and activities. While the informationist symposium directs us to look to the future, McClure's memoir of Frank Bradway Rogers and Estelle Brodman, in this issue, reminds us to always keep an eye to the past. There was much discussion of mentors and mentoring at the annual meeting in Orlando last May. McClure reminds us of how important it is to learn from those who have led the way before us, as well as those who work with us now. It has never been easy to see into the future. We are all well aware of the foolish predictions that were once made with such confidence and that we read now with a haughty sense of our own greater knowledge. Certainly we risk hubris, though, if we think that we can do better.
It seems to me to be particularly so in these times. As tragic as the loss of a life was in the now well-reported Johns Hopkins incident, it raised, at least for a moment, the importance of good, solid library work to the research enterprise. The Medical Library Association leadership was quick to respond [5], and the article “1966 and All That—When Is a Literature Search Done?” that appeared in The Lancet [6] may have helped us to take advantage of, and perhaps do some good with, that brief moment of attention. Yet we all still hear stories from our colleagues about administrators who think that all of these old journals waste space and that a few subscriptions to commercial online information services will solve all of our information needs. I think I hear that less now that I did a few years ago—or is than only wishful thinking?
What I am quite sure about is that we need to consider the ideas and points of view that all of us bring to bear on the questions of our profession more than ever. McClure reminds us of how she learns from the words and writings of her elders, and certainly she herself has been a mentor to many, many librarians through the years. At its best, mentoring is a very personal relationship. Perhaps the single most important mentoring experience of my career (if only because it was such a turning point for the choices that I made further on) occurred during a week I spent in Omaha, Nebraska, as a guest of Robert Braude, Ph.D. I was an NLM associate at the time and part of the program included a week of field experience observing library life in the real world. I was sent to the McGoogan Library of Medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. I stayed at Braude's house. In the morning, when I got up and stumbled to the kitchen looking for coffee, Braude would make breakfast and talk about libraries and the joys and challenges of managing them. He went on all day long. Those readers who know him will laugh at these lines, knowing what that must have been like! They will also be able to imagine just how much I learned, and how it changed my view of myself and my own possibilities forever. For those readers who do not know him well, I can only wish that relationships like that come to them in their own ways and at the times they need them.
The challenge to all of us is to be both mentor and mentee, whenever the chance arises. You may be younger and older than the authors of the symposium articles, but they have important things to share. You may disagree with some of what they have to say, but they can still mentor you in some part as you work your own way, as each of us must, through the issues with which the informationist challenge presents us.
At the panel discussion, “Making the Magic: Essentials of Leadership,” sponsored by the Leadership and Management Section during MLA 2001 in Orlando, Logan Ludwig, Ph.D., made the very important point that he now finds that many of his most important mentors are former students and younger colleagues [7]. He was candid about the areas in which he still sought to learn and explore and struggled to improve his own skills. As the members of the section have been at pains to emphasize, we never grow out of the need to learn more about how to perform in the roles that we have chosen, and we need to seek out all those from whom we can learn.
I will admit to a certain contrarian skepticism about the potential for success of any mentoring “program.” My own experience leads me to believe that the best mentoring relationships come out of the unbidden, unlooked for, unplanned relationships that we fall into, if only we have the wit and attention to tend to them. It is crucial for the association to do what it can to facilitate these relationships, but the real onus is on each of us individually.
By the time these lines see print, Braude will be officially retired for somewhat more than two months from the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. This is inconceivable to me. With his retirement (and that of each of the treasured colleagues of recent years), my personal professional world changes significantly. At MLA 2001 in Orlando, I realized that I was spending quite a bit of time with “younger” librarians. This was a puzzle—how could there be that many librarians younger than I, when I still have accomplished so little and have so much to do and to learn? It is natural to feel that, but now I find that I am in a position where the responsibility is upon me to try to give back, pass on, return in some fashion, some of what Braude and McClure and so many others have done for me. A dean of medicine told me one time that “free advice is worth what you pay for it” and that is a caution worth keeping, but even if we question the value of our own advice, part of participating in a professional community is for us to share what we know as well as to seek answers for what we do not.
Reminded of Ludwig's comment about former students, I find now, somewhere in the middle of my career, that those younger librarians are as important to me as mentors as those older than I, whom I have looked up to over the years. They have a technical savvy and a managerial sophistication very rare among my peers twenty years ago, and I learn a great deal from them. Maybe that is really the very best type of mentoring—when both parties learn, share, and engage with colleagues and are engaged with the issues that are important to our profession and to our lives.
So while the association works to develop appropriate vehicles to improve the quality of mentoring, remember that ultimately it is your responsibility to make it happen. It is your responsibility to seek out those who have ideas and experiences that you think you can learn from, no matter how long you have been in the profession and how much you think you know. It is equally, and perhaps even more importantly, your responsibility to share what you can with those around you. Do it in your workplace, do it at local, regional, and national meetings. Do it by email, on discussion lists, and in the pages of our professional journals, including this new—and old—Journal of the Medical Library Association. With a little luck, some ninety volumes hence (whatever a “volume” will mean near the end of the next century), someone of equal stature to McClure will exhort younger colleagues to go back to what has been written here, perhaps in this very issue. “Mentoring takes place in different ways,” McClure says. “They can be your mentors if you read their words. You can be guided by their examples, and you can learn from their achievements” [8]. To become someone from whom others can learn—perhaps this should be our highest goal.
References
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