Education & Reference Librarian Weill Cornell Medicine - Qatar Doha, Ad Dawhah, Qatar
Understanding the role and value of medical librarians within the institute is an important element for medical librarians in forming a coherent social identity. For many librarians, the pursuit of faculty status is a means of institutional validation, however it is often gained with the expectation to fulfill criteria that are mostly germane to academic faculty that may not be natural or valid for librarians who fulfill a different need and function in the institute. This study serves as an exploratory work into how librarians at US-based medical academic institutions formulate their identity and role within the institute. 64 Librarians and 19 clinical faculty at academic medical institutions completed surveys. Results suggest that both groups have, generally, good perceptions of the other, however librarians may be failing to expose outside groups to their research and utility and that faculty are largely unaware of the activities of librarians outside of their immediate interactions with individual librarians. Further, there is an exploration into the nature of librarian-faculty collaborations and the implications for productive relations between both groups.
