I was asked to contribute a personal reflection of the role of clinical librarian over the last 20 years, with a nod towards possible future developments, and whilst it’s true I have been working as a health librarian in the NHS for two decades, clinical librarianship was not a feature of my early NHS career. I don’t pretend to be a historian of all matter clinical librarian-y, so instead I’ll comment on the things which made an impression on me during the first decade, led me towards taking up a clinical librarian role myself in the second, and what I hope will happen in the future.…

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Reflecting on the last twenty years, has been interesting and surprising when I realise just how much has changed for northwest health libraries.…

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I started my professional library career with a two year stint at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, before moving to work at Bradford Royal Infirmary (BRI) in 1996. I was fortunate to have Ian King as my manager at BRI, and even though I was only in that post for two years, he taught me a huge amount about health libraries (although memories of his “filing system” still make me shudder!)…

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In this article I will reflect and comment on how Clinical Librarians have developed in the last 20 years. The current state and future development.…

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As someone who has been in NW health libraries even longer than David, I’ve seen a lot of changes over the past 20+ years. In the years pre-HCLU (when we were still excited to receive our new Medline CD updates to use on our single computer) we had a Cheshire and Mersey Libraries Group. Online resources were unheard of in NHS libraries and we requested and supplied photocopied articles to each other by post. If we received them within a week, we thought we were doing well.…

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Look how far we’ve come. In the early 90’s, not too long before David Stewart’s arrival in the North-West, we remember using computers with DOS based operating systems and giant floppy disks! We had racks of printed Index Medicus. Working in a Postgraduate Medical Centre, we were told, ‘Don’t let Nurses in’. If a Doctor was willing to pay for a ‘speedy’ literature search, we dialled into Datastar’s Radio-Suisse via a modem. The printed Index Medicus quickly became redundant as word spread about this new-fangled gadget from the Swiss!…

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I’m Dan. I currently work as the Library Manager at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust. I’ve been asked to write a short piece on my experience as a new manager within the network. I’m really pleased to be contributing to this special edition Northern Lights.…

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I became Chair of the Yorkshire and Humber health Libraries Knowledge Network (YOHHLNet) in May 2020 after a period of co-Chairing with Becky Williams. YOHHLNet is a network of health library and information services across East Yorkshire, North Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.…

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David Stewart’s association with Health Libraries North (HLN) is relatively recent compared to his involvement with the North West but it is by no means less significant.…

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I started working in NHS libraries in 1997 as a volunteer at The Christie Hospital library following a placement from Manchester Metropolitan University.  What inspired me to volunteer at The Christie was a talk given to students about a typical day in an NHS library by Nigel Rainford, a “Systems Librarian” who did searches for medical and nursing staff.  Nigel eventually moved on to public libraries and I was fortunate to get the chance to be the full time Systems Librarian at The Christie in February 1999.  A lot has changed since then.…

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