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