Hi Bryan,
It is really going to vary a lot by size of the library how this plays out. For hospital-based libraries, all those roles are often the responsibility of a single person or maybe a single librarian and a few library assistants. For academic health sciences libraries, it can be as you noted - director, reference/instruction folks, circulation/access staff, and student workers, but it can also get more specialized depending on staff and community size.
Here at Countway for example (https://countway.harvard.edu/people) we have a number of different departments, most of which have multiple staff within them, and those individuals may have further specializations and special projects. In addition to the roles mentioned above, we have a team dedicated to scholarly communication and the science lifecycle (publishing and data department), our archives and museum folks, and me with a position dedicated solely to collection development (rare in health sciences now). Using me as an example, I also specialize in graphic medicine and conduct outreach, programming, and provide reference/research support for that topic - tasks that usually belong to other departments, but that I take on for a specific subject. Our R&I team also has folks with their own specializations, with some spending nearly all of their time on systematic review work while others do some of that but primarily focus on teaching and other reference responsibilities.
All that to say: there is specialization as in specific positions or departments that focus on more narrow work and then there are subject or skill based specializations that staff may have or seek out. There are some MLA specialization competencies out there, where you take x number of continuing ed courses to be considered certified, that fall into this later category.
I hope this helps?
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Matthew Noe
Lead Collection and Knowledge Management Librarian
Countway Library of Medicine
matthew_noe@hms.harvard.edu | @NoetheMatt
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Original Message:
Sent: Apr 16, 2024 06:13 PM
From: Bryan Gonzalez
Subject: Question - Specialties within Medical Library
Hi Health Sciences Interest Group,
I had posted a question before and someone mentioned about the specialties within medical library. May someone elaborate about the various specialties within medical library? I thought the structure of a medical library in terms of jobs consist library admin/director/manager, reference librarians, research librarians, interlibrary loan specialist(s), and library assistants.
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Bryan Gonzalez
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