Contents:
Introduction | Personal Reasons | Professional Reasons | Tips on How to Get Involved | Three Examples of Participation | Conclusion | Appendix: Associations
Public health organizations tackle key political and social issues that impact the entire population. Joining these organizations allows you to participate in the myriad struggles conducted by public health activists, such as access to health care, police violence against people of color, environmental protections, war in Iraq, tobacco control, and scores of others. As the number of uninsured people increase, social disparities mount, and racist violence spreads, we need to join with thousands of others to build a movement for justice and health. Joining your public health associations provides that opportunity. If you'd like to know more, see the March 1999 issue of The American Journal of Public Health for the text of the public policy resolutions approved by the APHA last year and read The Nation's Health to learn more about national and grass-roots efforts.
In addition, two of the most important ways that people achieve happiness is through personal development and through contribution to the well-being of the world around them. Both of these methods are major benefits of participation in the societies of one's profession. They are also available, often to an even greater degree, through participation in the professional societies of one's professional clients. Here, we are speaking primarily of librarians involved with public health in the American Public Health Association.
The reasons for participation are enumerated under the two ways for achieving happiness mentioned above: personal development and professional contribution. These reasons overlap. We often achieve personal development while making a professional contribution. We certainly achieve professional recognition and advancement of our profession while making a contribution to our clients' societies. In a very real way, their societies become ours and we broaden our perspective by becoming members of their teams.
Recognizing the overlap in the reasons for participation, the two groups below are arbitrary, roughly bringing like concepts together. If some of the reasons seem repetitive, remember that our contributions result in benefits many times repeated.
Working with a related professional association shows you care! We need them; they need us. Together we can improve the quality of healthcare and expand the reach of public health.
Working with a professional association outside Library and Information Science has many personal benefits.
Achieve personal growth, improve your self-esteem, and gain a feeling of accomplishment. You will feel better about yourself; you will feel needed and feel like you are making a contribution each time something goes well in your work with public health practitioners.
Improve your leadership experience . As you help those in professional associations who need your expertise, you are developing your leadership skills.
Generate a new sense of adventure and challenge . Working with others is often challenging because of the element of uncertainty of moving outside the comfortable box you find yourself in every day. When you move outside the box, you are forced to learn new things.
Make new friends. Public health practitioners are more varied in their interests than many other groups because they come from so many different backgrounds. There are sure to be those among them with whom you have common interests
Improve interpersonal skills. Public health practitioners are ethnically diverse and intellectually varied. Working with different groups with different interests forces you to be flexible in your thinking and attitudes.
Gain confidence in your abilities to provide information through more in depth knowledge of the profession . Knowing how other professionals think helps you find the right words to use in consulting with and searching for them.
Open up new educational possibilities . Colleagues who have worked closely with public health practitioners have considered, and then gone on to take advanced degrees in the public health field. The field has been enriched by their special information handling skills.
Have fun . Perhaps you already know that public health practitioners are REALLY fun to be around.
Build a career . Working on special projects with public health practitioners will help you to build your resume. We've already discussed how working with others can help you develop or learn new skills. Interactions with public health practitioners also enables you to make career contacts. Some State Departments of Health have or are considering hiring librarians to provide public health information. Public health practitioners are good sources of letters of reference. There's nothing like a letter of reference from a practitioner in your portfolio when you're applying for a position in a library with public health content. This can be instrumental in improving your chances at getting an interview and in getting the job.
Help prevent burnout. Working with other professionals gives you a new viewpoint, new ideas and improves your quality of life. It's a change of pace from what you do all the time, day in and out; it is very rewarding.
Take pride in accomplishment. After all, you are doing your part to improve the practice of public health for the benefit of everyone.
In summary, working with public health practitioners will broaden your experience and understanding. To better understand the people and organization you serve and to better understand yourself, reach out to your user groups.
Give back something in exchange for the personal rewards. By giving back something to the community who uses your information, you gain a sense of satisfaction from knowing you've made a difference in the lives of other professionals.
It makes you smart! The professional association is a great place to learn the content with which the profession is dealing. Working with practitioners helps you identify the key questions being asked by your user group. And makes you better able to answer reference questions when you serve at the information/reference desk.
Learn more about public health policy, its problems and issues. Find out about important public health and policy issues before they hit the published literature. The political implications and concerns of the profession can also be best learned at their professional meetings. This is particularly important in the health field, which is everybody's concern.
Gain a stronger sense of cultural awareness. Working with other practitioners enables you to gain a sense of what the public health culture is like and how people working in the field think and work.
Think globally, act locally. In the global world of the Web, there is a great deal of overlap in all of our functions; this makes it important that we know people in many different fields, the professions we are serving being among the most important overlapping groups. Public health is a prime example of a field with variation in practitioners' roles and functions.
Getting advice on subject work from experts. A professional meeting is a good place to "hang out" with the professionals of your own as well as other schools in atmospheres that aren't usually possible when you're involved in the day-to-day duties at your library. These folks are goldmines of information.
Build diversity. The diversity in public health makes it more important to understand the association and its needs than if it were a more homogeneous group, easily understood through the members in the librarian's home organization. The diversity in public health adds to the alliances we can make with people involved in aspects of information not always handled by librarians.
Gain access to innovation and best practices. Working with public health practitioners enables you to identify best practices and innovation. You can also share information management best practices with them.
Build awareness of librarians as partners in improving healthcare and market the profession. When a client sees a librarian attending a meeting in which the client has primary interest, it increases the client's respect for the abilities and knowledge base of the librarian. Presenting at an annual meeting of a public health practitioner group demonstrates your skills, especially your teaching skills, and builds an awareness of how librarians and public health professionals can work together to produce a sum much greater than the parts. Working with public health practitioners builds loyalty of the practitioners to you and vice versa.
Share your skills with others and learn new ones yourself. Build your own and public health professionals' desktop and Internet literacy skills. As a computer literate professional, you can share your expertise in information identification, organization, use, and dissemination. If you don't already know, you will gain a richer understanding of the desktop and Internet skills of the people you serve in their work. This would enable you to better target skills building training sessions, and would provide much needed advice and a wonderful learning experience for your public health colleagues. This is a clear case of "giving a person a fish or teaching them to fish." On the other hand, public health practitioners can share their statistical and research methodology skills with you.
Get help with grants and funding. Many of the granting agencies require partnerships. Where better to find potential partners than at association meetings?
Funding agencies will learn about you. Although awareness of librarians' value to public health practitioners is growing, those who work in funding agencies need to be constantly reminded of your presence. Visit funding agency booths at conferences and leave your card to be put on mailing lists to receive grant and contract notices.
Develop or improve your general management and project management skills. Sooner or later you'll want to participate in the workings of the association. There are always more problems that need solving than there are people to do the work. Just participating forces you to become more organized.
In the beginning you will want to spend time talking with members and listening to their interests, attending business meetings and showing that you care about what they are doing and the issues they are discussing. When asked for your opinion about issues, be honest. Many librarians share the same substantive goals and objectives of these organizations and are therefore partners in helping their associations reach those goals.
When you feel comfortable with your colleagues and an issue or work comes along that you feel passionate about, ask to be included. Many opportunities will occur in the process of discussion with members on mutual interests. These people may not be on governing boards, planning committees, special interest groups or other specialty areas within an association but will have projects or issues of interest that they could use some help with. When you do agree to do something, be sure to follow through. Your professional credibility depends on it.
Other ways to get involved include submitting abstracts for presentations at the scientific sessions at the meetings, participating with sections to plan programs, running for office, and attending local meetings to support advocacy issues pertinent to your region. Many local groups need librarians to establish and manage listservs and Web pages. For a list of local APHA affiliates, you can visit http://www.apha.org and offer your services to support their advocacy and communication efforts.
Other slightly easier ways to start could be to take your own needs under consideration. Look for continuing education courses or sessions within the annual meetings of an association of particular relevance to your reference services or collection development needs. Or, find local meetings that can provide avenues for your development. One possibility for librarian members of APHA would be to participate in one of its related associations such as SOPHE.
Win Sewell has been a member of the American Public Health Association since 1970. She was also a founding member of MLA's Public Health/Health Administration Section. When she was Chair of that Section she made a number of efforts to involve public health professionals, particularly health planners, with its activities. She was unsuccessful, but she began to observe successes within the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) when librarians joined that organization. This led over the past year to her urging participation of librarians in the activities of the APHA.
While the AACP story is a success story, it has taken place over nearly five decades. In 1951 the chairman of a bibliography committee within AACP approached the pharmacy sections of SLA and MLA requesting that they appoint two members each to a Joint Committee on Pharmacy College Libraries that also included two members from AACP. Win was a member of the first Joint Committee and at that time one of her colleagues was already advocating librarian participation in AACP. Over the years, this led to librarian attendance at the teachers' seminars and annual conferences and, in 1971, formation of a Library Section within the Association. Win has been Chair of that Section and active in several projects, including an ongoing Web page on Basic Resources in Pharmaceutical Education. At present, rotation of the Chairmanship of a Section Council among the various Section Chairs leads every few years to the Chair of the Library Section also being Chair of the Section Council and an Association Board member. The librarian incumbents as Council Chairs and Board members have received high compliments from their peers within other parts of the Association. In its Centennial year, 1999-2000, the AACP elected Win its Honorary President, the first woman, the first non-pharmacy educator, and only the sixth person since its establishment in 1980 to receive that honor.
The beginning link between a librarian and a client association can grow out of a need on either side. Larsson's participation in the Technology Center grew out of her desire to learn more about the information needs of state and local public health data users. As her interest in public health data grew and as it became clear that information technology training needs would continue to grow, she volunteered to set up a computer-based training center, later renamed the Technology Center, for the WSPHA annual meeting. As a result of Larsson's work running the Technology Center for the WSPHA, and for the work she did moderating four public health discussion groups, she was awarded the WSPHA President's Award in 1998. With several years experience at running the Technology Center program at the state level under her belt, Larsson volunteered to take over the running of the APHA's annual meeting Technology Center when the then manager withdrew from the position to take on other duties in her job. APHA was an association that needed to have someone who understood technology to run the Center; running the Technology Center and Lab for APHA also responded to a personal and professional commitment on Larsson's part to provide access to information and information technology to public health practitioners.
Pomerantz also began working with APHA's Technology Center demonstrating public health resources on the Internet at the annual conferences. Then as a public health student, she became active with the local affiliate, MWPHA, and became more involved in communication and policy activities within the organizations. As a long time activist in struggles against racism and capitalism, she views APHA as an organization of committed individuals who can advance a progressive political agenda to counter the increasing attacks on health. Karyn is the recent winner of the APHA Committee on Affiliates Chair's Citation for her continuing work assisting the Committee and other state affiliate organizations in public health education and advocacy.
Author Contacts:
Laura Larsson, University of Washington. Department of Health Services. larsson@u.washington.edu
Winifred Sewell, Consultant. winswll@erols.com
Karyn Pomerantz, George Washington University. School of Public Health and Health Services. kpomeran@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
American Public Health Association - see Sections and Affiliates http://www.apha.org
Association for Health Services Research: http://www.ahsr.org/
Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE): http://www.sophe.org/
American Nurses Association (ANA): http://www.nursingworld.org/ [Ed. note: Updated link 3/17/04]