work experience early on as it helped me better understand the direction I wanted to take my career in and I would really encourage others to take on any placement or shadowing opportunities where possible.
Getting involved As a health librarian, my role involves making sure health and social care staff and students can access the high quality evidence and information they need for their clinical practice, service devel- opment, studies, research, and CPD. The ‘day-to-day’ tasks include carrying out literature searches on behalf of colleagues, providing training on using library resources, and managing the collection. Since starting my role, I’ve been working on promoting the service which has led me to employ some of the comms skills I developed during my time at CILIPS such as web editing and creating a Library Services newsletter. Additionally, I’ve recently been working on our leisure reading collection, encour- aging use of this as a way to unwind, and also have been collaborating with Occupational Health to add a number of mental health and wellbeing books to the collection. In my opinion, health libraries are some of the most interesting places to work. There is so much you can get involved with and I get to do a bit of everything which keeps the role really varied.
At the moment, my main goal is to continue improving my skills and learning about how I can apply these in new ways. I want to keep advancing the library service where I work and know that this goes hand-in-hand with my own
July-August 2021
Elizabeth helped to organise the 2019 CILIPS Conference.
professional development. I’m particularly interested in developing my teaching skills so that I can deliver the best possible train- ing sessions for our users. Additionally, my dissertation focused on the idea of ‘Library Anxiety’ – the fact that people may not feel confident using libraries – and looked at barriers to library use within the health setting. I found that lack of time and also lack of awareness of what a health library does can lead to some staff believing the library is not ‘for them’. I am interested in learning more about how to tackle these issues through outreach work and promo- tional activities.
Chartership goals To reach these goals, I have been under- taking professional registration. After
graduating, I had a solid grounding on which to base my career but was aware that I would need to continue to build on what I had learned. For this reason, I registered for Chartership as I felt it would help me stay focused in my commitment to professional development. Going into lockdown not long after I’d enrolled and also starting a new role in the middle of the process has made the road to Chartership a bit of a bumpy one for me and I have had to reassess some of the CPD activities I’d planned. However, with everything moving online during the pandemic, it has been easier to attend training and events where distance or cost would previously have been an issue. This means I’ve been able to continue building up evidence for my portfolio
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL DIGITAL 25
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