NCBI for Librarians training.

I am two days back from the week long NCBI for libraians training course at NIH. It was a fabulous experience being among so many librarians and scientists trying to get a handle on the some of the most complex repositories for biomedical data. The people there were wonderful. I recommend anyone with science liaisonship to take it.

The ultimate purpose of the course is to train the trainer. So part of my implementation will be to train fellow librarians on what these resources can do. And I will spend the next several months sketching out a plan for that. Our faculty are already lifting heavy loads in their tenure requirements and their liaison workloads, so I’m not sure how much traction I will get. But there is a large ptoential for interdisciplinary work outside of science to use these resources, so I have my work cut out for me. Expecially since I don’t think that anyone else will be partnering with me on this in the immediate future.

The other side of this is research support. I will need to get a quick start on figuring out how my current faculty and students are using these and where they are getting their training. My liaisonship partially consists of the graduate basic sciences, so they are the heavy users. Their curriculum is interesting in that the offer course modules in research methods. These modules are compartmentalized by topic so I expect that these resources are introduced there. I need to make appointments with each of the course directors to see if and how these are taught. I can make other decisions from there.

My institution gives me a lot of leeway in implementation and I have a lot of ideas about what could possibly be done. I do need to remember that I have a research agenda to develop as well. So hopefully one will grow into the other. Fortunately, the NCBI course doesn’t leave us stranded now that we are done. There are graduate forums to ask questions and to collaborate and they have online seminars for updates to resources, questions, and continued training. I plan to take advantage of that the best I can.

I think the best resource that I obtained from this class is the people. I have a starter network of librarians working toward similar goals and our instructors to lean on. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel to get stuff done. I made friends with man of my classmates and have an idea of their expertise that I can draw from. If all goes well, I will have a productive year.