Medlibs Miscellany

NOTE: Apologies for the repost. We discovered a problem with our RSS feed. Hopefully this will fix things. -Tracy In this episode, Carrie and Tracy are joined by Zahra Premji, otherwise known as @ZapTheLibrarian if you are a part of the #medlibs community X, The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. Hear about Zahra’s path to medical librarianship and supporting evidence synthesis. She loved researc...

Happy holidays, medlibs! It’s time to stuff your stockings (not to be confused with "Stockings, Compression"[Mesh] ) with new "Medical Subject Headings"[Mesh] ! There’s a lot to cover here, and we don’t even really get into MeSH changes (like updates to scope notes, added entry terms, combined or merged terms, etc.), just the new terms. Take a look at NLM’s What’s New in MeSH page to see the curre...

In this episode, Carrie and Tracy answer some questions (and sometimes go a bit off track, but hey, if this isn’t your first listen to the pod, you should expect that). From our favorite question framework to GenX cereals to how to deal with misspelled words in searches to what’s the best eats in St. Mary’s County, Maryland (spoiler: *shrug*). Because we are over the place, here’s a hodgepodge of...

This episode was a bit unplanned (*ahem* not that we plan every episode), and arose after a brief text exchange where Carrie talked about an experience she had earlier in the day. We decided it was something that might be worth a broader discussion - and thus was this episode born! Carrie and Tracy chat about the problem of teaching evidence synthesis work. Carrie wrote a blog post for Covidence a...

This episode is part 2 of the conversation in MM.08 between friend-of-the-pod Jenn and Tracy. Carrie got the fun job of listening to all the messiness and making it into an episode. We touch on mentorship — formal and informal. Jenn mentions career contessa (not to be confused with the barefoot contessa , aka Ina Garten — Tracy is a big fan of her), that has a book and a podcast . Jenn also recomm...

As you may have heard, we’re not going to have a full August episode — Tracy and Carrie are taking a mini-summer break! But it’s far from a restful break. Here’s what we’ve been up to both inside and outside of our professional lives: Carrie I’m an academic librarian at a large, public university, and that means that August is my time to prepare for fall teaching sessions. I work with health profe...

Carrie (she/her) and Tracy (she/her) are joined in this episode by Marissa Testerman (she/her), We asked her what she wanted to talk about, and Marissa shares her experience as an early career medical librarian and path to #medlibs-land. (Yay for “be a librarian” as a plan B!) Marissa mentions how difficult it can be to find a library position (of any kind) when geographically limited and some rea...

This episode is a conversation between Tracy and friend of the pod and “omg what kind of group chat did I get myself into?!” participant, Jenn Monnin. We talk about how Jenn came to be a #medlibs after her experience in public libraries and transferrable skills. We also touch on collection development, mentoring and the value it has in professional development, and applying for jobs. In talking ab...

In this latest episode of Medlibs Miscellany, Carrie and Tracy discuss library instruction - how we teach, who we teach, and our experiences with teaching. Pedagogical (Tracy can’t say it, but she can sort of sometimes spell it) theories abound, but the big takeaway? Always have a backup plan . If things are going to go wrong, they will. Sometimes that mean no internet, or getting interrupted by a...

(A quick note about this episode: we are all using various devices for audio, and you’ll notice some differences in sound quality. We hope the content more than makes up for any problems you may hear.) Carrie and Tracy are joined by Katie Lobner to chat about what it’s like doing systematic reviews. Katie does a lot of systematic reviews, and has a lot of experience in searching. We talk about how...

In this episode, Tracy and Carrie (but mostly Tracy, because Carrie lets her talk more than she should) talk about searching. We don’t necessarily get into how to search. What we do talk about is how we think about searching, some minutiae of naming conventions for search documents, and some of our favorite searches. PubMed is probably where we search the most, for obvious reasons - medical librar...

In this episode, Carrie and Tracy chat with Peter Johnson (not Jackson, but he is a Tolkien nerd, so it’s close and more than a coincidence, right?). Peter is a new health sciences librarian, and he is kind enough to share how he ended up in libraryland. We have a great conversation touching on backgrounds, how to treat coworkers in public settings, keeping in touch as leaders, impact of mentoring...

In this episode (our third! we now have multiple episodes!), Carrie and Tracy chat about what brought them to this stage in their medical librarianship journey, agreeing that it seems many people come to this profession in a roundabout way. See the website for the full story and notes. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episode...

Carrie and Tracy chat about Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), and the 2023 update that was recently released. We cover a lot! Tracy was a bit off about the history of MeSH . What we know as MeSH today started in 1960. It evolved from Index Medicus , which was started by John Shaw Billings, head of the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, United States Army, in the 1940s. The Army’s Surgeon Gene...

We are starting a podcast! Listen to a quick introduction. More to come. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit medlibsmiscellany.substack.com