i’m looking for some research

the journey of a search request

I’m a librarian. If you’ve been reading this Substack for a while, you know this. If you know me in real life, you know this (hi meat space friends). If you work with me, you get a front row seat to this (hi Karen). I’ve been a librarian since 2015, when I finished my master of library and information studies, and stepped into my first official librarian job, a term position as a law librarian. For almost eight years, I’ve been a hospital librarian.

In the library world, we call those libraries which aren’t a part of universities or schools, or public libraries, “special libraries.” This is a large amorphous group of libraries and library workers who work in what could be considered non-traditional settings - or at least, are considered non-traditional settings by the general public. You know there are libraries in universities and schools, and that there are public libraries. You may not know there are hospital libraries, law firm libraries, company libraries. Disney has a library. There are comic book libraries and bank libraries.

I’ve always been a special librarian. I did a short practicum in a public library, and I did an internship at an academic library (admittedly it was the health sciences library at my university, blurring the line of special and university). But since I’ve been working as a fully-fledged librarian, I’ve been in special libraries. They do require specialized knowledge, of course. But they also require a very broad set of skills, because special libraries are so much smaller. You end up doing everything, and there is almost no aspect of library operations that I don’t have my hands in, because I have to. It makes you a very well-rounded library worker.

But the thing I am best at is searching. I am very, very good at finding information that answers your question. I am excellent at selecting the right article(s) for you. I can crawl the internet and pull out a white paper on your obscure topic. This is the thing for which people chase me down the hall or call me from Sri Lanka or email me from South Africa or wait for me to return from vacation. People call me from all over the province to find things - I mean, they do that for my colleagues too, but I know that I am particularly, strikingly good at searching, and it’s often the reason people seek me out, because someone mentioned I was excellent at getting them information.

I spend roughly half of all my working hours searching the literature on behalf of staff and physicians.

People don’t come to the library with their easy questions - they have Google and point of care tools, the latter of which we buy for them, for those. They come to the library with their tricky questions: complex, nebulous, hyper-specific. Or they want everything on a topic, and they trust us to parse out what “everything”’ actually means. They ask for a search because they don’t have time themselves, and that is why we exist, because we can do it faster and they can focus on patient care.

Search requests come to me all sorts of ways. Sometimes, they arrive in odd or memorable ways (I now have a personal policy of not taking requests in the washroom), but mostly they arrive in my inbox, forwarded from our central email, letting the librarians choose the requests for themselves. They arrive by phone, directly to me. They arrive tacked onto emails saying hi to me, they come through Teams messages and calls. They come via a drop-in, where I scribble notes on a lined yellow notepad, like a mini legal pad, and nod as someone talks. I’ll ask questions if I need to, but for many repeat requestors, I no longer need to ask for clarification. People have their patterns and preferences, and you get to know them, just as you know their specialty and the committees they’re on and the books they take out. I tuck all of these things inside my head and pull them out as needed, in order to search for what they need - and sometimes what they don’t quite know they need.

When a search arrives for me, I print off the email or tear the page from my notepad. I keep all of my requests in a physical form; so much of my work is online, I like to have something to represent what I did. A big fat file of printed requests at the end of the year. But also I use the request printouts as a place to scribble keywords down or write a PICO out. Before you start a search, you need to know what pieces of the question you need to search. I can look at most requests and pick out the needed parts, but sometimes I work through the kind of concept exercise I assign my residents in sessions on being better searchers, because something is so vague that I need to write it out myself.

Then I turn to my databases. The one I start with depends on the question and who it’s from, but most often I start with PubMed. Like many aspiring health sciences librarians, it’s what I first learned to use, and is still my preference when left to my own devices. Depending on the needs of the search itself, I may search PubMed and another database, and finish it off with a quick Google search to see if I’m missing anything.

The scariest thing I had to deal with when I started as a hospital librarian was actually picking the articles for my users. What if I got it wrong? They were going to use these things to help them make decisions about patient care! When I search, I design my string, then I go through the results to narrow down what I think are the best items to fit the question I was asked in the original request. I will wrap up a search by sending an email (almost always an email, though we have the rare requestor who still wants printouts delivered or faxed) with the results I found, with their title and abstracts available for the requestor to look at and decide which ones they want in full text.

Then I move onto the next one.

Rarely, though it seems to be more frequent as of late, do I ever find out what the requestor thought of the results: sometimes they’ll explicitly say, but more often than not, it feels like a search goes into the ether, and six months to a year later I might hear about what happened or run into the person who asked, who will then thank me. I read about the results of my searches in the paper and on CBC, in press releases and social media posts. I find out about them at Christmas, when a box of chocolates with a note arrives at my office door. I find out in meetings or from others that so-and-so was so pleased with my results, and it helped them do XYZ. When the work of the library is veiled by nature, it can make it hard to feel like you’re doing anything at all.

But where else would I get to tackle cannabis-induced psychosis, hospital parking problems, and guidelines for enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS)? The things I learn in a day often outweigh the praise my ego would like to get, though I recognize one of those things is more important to the senior-level leadership than the other, and it’s not the one that makes me a better librarian. For someone who loves an internet rabbit hole, the idea that I get to spend my time falling down them, in a practiced, systematic way (because I have learned to fall down my rabbit holes in the most efficient and expansive way possible) is fun. Not every day or every moment is fun. But enough of it is, to keep me going when I want to scream and storm out or when I’m gearing up for yet another blistering defense of the library.