Thursday, October 11, 2012

Medical Librarians: Your Best Return on Investment


October is National Medical Librarians Month, and this year's theme highlights that librarians are the best and most cost efficient way to obtain quality information. Read "Celebrating Medical Librarians," the Editor's Note from the October 2012 issue of The Nurse Practitioner:
"The truth is that most busy direct care providers do not have the time to conduct thorough searches, the skills to do the most effective and efficient search, or knowledge of all available resources and search options. Therefore, we waste a lot of time looking for information, and most of what we find is not useful and generally does not help to answer our clinical question."
@sk Your Medical Librarian
(859) 899-2953
librarian@frontier.edu
Our goal as librarians at Frontier is to reverse this trend for new nurse practitioners and nurse-midwives. We want you to be able to find information quickly and efficiently. The last thing we want is for you to waste your precious time. As you do your school assignments that require research, try to keep this in mind. Like anything else, research takes practice in order to be good at it. Developing good research skills now will benefit you enormously in practice.

Part of knowing how to find information quickly and efficiently is knowing when you need to consult an expert. Medical librarians are experts in searching, and you shouldn't have reservations about asking for their help. If your place of practice has a medical librarian, they will be more than happy to help find the information you need.  If you will be practicing without ready access to a librarian, however, we want you to be able to use the research skills developed while at Frontier to find quality health information.

Remember we are here to help, and we look forward to working with you.  See the Contact Us page on the library website for information on how to get in touch.