Now that they are here – Equipping New Librarians to Deliver Their Elevator Speech!
Now that they are here – Equipping New Librarians to Deliver Their Elevator Speech!
Shannon D. Jones, Associate Director, Research and Education, Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences, VCU Libraries, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA
The Medical Library Association, Inc. (MLA), held its 113th Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, MN, May 14–26, 2011 at the Hilton Minneapolis. The meeting theme was Rethink.
Section Program: Revitalize Your Message | Date: Monday, May 16, 2011 | View the Presentation
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe the training program that our library developed to prepare newly hired librarians to become liaisons.
Setting: An urban academic health sciences library serving the schools of allied health professions, dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy.
Description: The literature suggests that it takes six to twelve months for a new employee to learn an organization’s culture and their role within that organization. In the fast-paced health sciences environment, we don’t always have the luxury of an extended orientation period. Our constituents don’t differentiate between seasoned and new librarians; they just want information quickly, to the point, and at the point of need. They expect us of to know the answers they need. Embracing the idea that one must possess the ability to promote the library at a moment’s notice, librarians must always be prepared to deliver an elevator speech regardless of the time, location, or target audience. This task is especially hard when you are still learning your job, the organization, and its people. In late 2010, we hired several new librarians within months of each other. Due to staffing shortages and competing priorities, we needed these individuals to be ready to assume liaison responsibilities in a relatively short amount of time. To shorten their orientation period, “seasoned” librarians developed a formal training program to bring these new librarians on board. Our goal for the training was for our new staff to learn as much about our library’s collections, services, and their assigned liaison school as quickly as possible. This training emphasized the need to gain an understanding of the library’s mission, the schools and programs we serve, and in-depth information about their individual liaison schools including curricula expectations, identify the school’s key players, faculty research interests, and how well the library’s collection supported the discipline.
