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Library Knowledge Services (North)

Redeployment reflections from northern LKS staff - part 1

The article below is the first of two in which LKS staff from across the north reflect upon their redeployment experiences. “I went in as ops manager and have never done that before and [it] wasn’t library related. We looked after the whole patient journey from an admin point of view from admission, discharge, and the patient flow.” Steve Glover: redeployed as Duty Ops Manager, NHS Nightingale North West…

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Redeployment reflections from northern LKS staff - introduction

Organising accommodation bookings for the hospital, coordinating, and distributing donations, operating a COVID-19 hotline, screening staff and patients on arrival to protect those at high risk, fit mask testing, working in the Nightingale hospital, or supporting staff welfare efforts managing bids to improve staff spaces were some of the roles our library and knowledge service (LKS) colleagues from across the North took on in 2020.…

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The last 20 years with David – a personal view.

In the year 2000, thankfully, we all survived the ‘millennium bug’ that was going to see off Y2K (as it was called).  The World Wide Web was about 10 years old and becoming known as the internet; Internet Explorer was about to launch as version 6.…

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From Aditus to Zoom

I started working in the Jefferson Library at what was then Central Manchester & Manchester Children’s Hospitals (CMMC), in May of 2005, I was employed as a part-time Library Assistant, and this was my first experience of working in a library, let alone a health library. I came from the world of import/export and dealing with TV infomercials, so this was very different!…

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I dream of a rising tide

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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Reflections on 24 years (and counting) in health libraries

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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North West Libraries in the last 20 years - A personal view

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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From Paper to Infinity….

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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