I’ve been the Director of Library and Information Services at UHN for about a year and a half now. To many of you I’m the new guy, but for a fair number of you I may seem familiar. Here’s the thing you may not know – I was hired by a newly branded UHN back in 1999. Yes, on the eve of Y2K, I took job in the I.T. dept. of a large teaching hospital. It only dawned on me a couple weeks in that I might actually need to be on call for New Year’s Eve.
But what was a librarian doing in the I.T. department? Turns out the organization had embraced the concept of “evidence based medicine” and in the development of a clinical decision support strategy recognized that access to the evidence was a mandatory foundational element. So, a partnership between I.T. and the hospital libraries was born. An idea had been gestating around providing links to knowledge resources (databases, journals, books, etc.) on the desktops of every computer at UHN - the Virtual Library. I was recruited as the project manager to implement said Virtual Library, having that combination of web experience and project management from my time at Spar Aerospace, along with, well, being a librarian.
Those were heady days as the last millennium was coming to an end. The promise of fully networked resources and the demise of print, and a vision of being able to integrate knowledge into the electronic patient record in way that would actually be helpful to clinicians!
Plus ça change, non?
Fast forward a couple decades (well almost), and I’m returning to UHN. I only left for a few years and returning felt like coming home. Of course some things had changed. But some were very much the same. In fact the Virtual Library looked very much like it had when we first launched it in early 2000! Granted, tons of work had gone on underneath, but it was just the UX that hadn’t really changed. So one of my priorities for the team was to rebuild the Virtual Library on a platform that would be modern and mobile friendly. And they’ve done a fabulous job. It looks great, I think you’ll agree. And if you don’t agree, please tell us how we can improve it!
Oh, and that Y2K thing – when I brought up having to work New Year’s Eve in case of the apocalypse, my boss just laughed at me. I choose to believe that he knew it would be a non-event, rather than not seeing the need for a librarian in the event of an apocalypse.
 |
| I may be showing my age, but the Virtual Library's looking better than ever - whatever sized screen you're viewing it on! |
