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luciabI don't understand why my grasp of this project for Health Science Resources seems to come and go at will. Sometimes I think I get it, sometimes I'm totally bewildered by the whole thing. I think part of the problem is the design of the class-- it's supposed to teach us, as librarians, how to find information for our patrons, and it's supposed to cover both medical libraries and public libraries. Except the teacher is much more interested in medical libraries than public libraries, so she's really focused on how to help all those docs and nurses and med school students running around out there, and oh, yeah, by the way, there are some public librarians in here too. We are definitely an afterthought. I do understand that this is a small program and there can't be a complete different set of classes for each group, but damn, her assignments are designed for the medical librarians so much it makes it hard for the others of us to even complete the damn thing with realistic answers.
The point of this assignment is to find out how much information is available for a client group, for want of a better word (I picked "the patient" and not "the doctor"-- go figure) about a specific health condition. I picked "elevated LDL-C levels" (popularly known as high cholesterol, for you non-health-geeks out there.) First we are supposed to figure out what they would need to know about said problem, which I've managed to do with suitable research. Now we are supposed to figure out how best to meet those needs-- where to find this information that the hypothetical patron will want. Okay, sounds reasonable. Except she wants us to do this using secondary sources, ie, medical databases, instead of primary sources like the website that any normal person would go to and be able to understand. How many patients are going to understand the articles in a nursing journal? Which articles, BTW, are mostly about studies about how to communicate the necessary information to the patient, and not about what that information is. Does this make sense to you? Becuase if it does, I wish you'd explain it to me.
Frustration not only abounds, it leaps and cavorts and tap-dances on my face.
The point of this assignment is to find out how much information is available for a client group, for want of a better word (I picked "the patient" and not "the doctor"-- go figure) about a specific health condition. I picked "elevated LDL-C levels" (popularly known as high cholesterol, for you non-health-geeks out there.) First we are supposed to figure out what they would need to know about said problem, which I've managed to do with suitable research. Now we are supposed to figure out how best to meet those needs-- where to find this information that the hypothetical patron will want. Okay, sounds reasonable. Except she wants us to do this using secondary sources, ie, medical databases, instead of primary sources like the website that any normal person would go to and be able to understand. How many patients are going to understand the articles in a nursing journal? Which articles, BTW, are mostly about studies about how to communicate the necessary information to the patient, and not about what that information is. Does this make sense to you? Becuase if it does, I wish you'd explain it to me.
Frustration not only abounds, it leaps and cavorts and tap-dances on my face.
