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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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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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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A personal view of the development of health libraries over the last twenty years? As it happens, I joined the NHS in spring 2000, so the development of health libraries and my career have travelled in parallel. Let me say now, I came into health libraries by accident; only moving across from business support because the DTI decided to close the Business Link network, and I needed a job. What that meant was that I came in as an experienced manager, but with no knowledge of or experience in health, and equally no baggage or preconceptions.…

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At the heart of the modern library service are information sharing and collaboration. We may think that modern IT infrastructure and the migration of evidence to an online environment is what really drives this forward. But is this right? Is the 21st century approach really that different from the experience of our library colleagues of days past?…

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