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Library Knowledge Services (North)

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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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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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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Healthier Together: A Greater Manchester librarian’s view

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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Development of health libraries over the past 20 years: a highly personal view

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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The more things change the more they stay the same – a library view

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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