55 - Developing a Faculty Roles Crosswalk for Health Sciences Librarians

Objectives: Many academic and hospital Health Sciences Librarians (HSLs) affiliated with health sciences centers in the United States have faculty status. Faculty status enables HSLs to collaborate with their basic sciences or clinical sciences faculty colleagues as peers.

Translating HSL faculty responsibilities into terms that their faculty counterparts easily can understand represents an ongoing challenge for HSLs. This translation process comes into sharp relief when HSLs with faculty status need to seek a promotion or wish to secure tenure.

Research Question: What HSL professional roles align with or closely resemble basic sciences or clinical medical faculty activities?

Methods: Job Analysis. HSLs at University of New Mexico Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center (UNM HSLIC) wanted to clarify faculty roles for librarians and informaticists to upgrade a faculty promotion process policy. They consulted faculty guidelines available for university and the medical school’s departmental faculty. They requested policies from other health sciences libraries with similar faculty requirements. For each HSL role, the authors searched for an equivalent basic science or clinical faculty role. The authors used relevant Medical Library Association 2018 competencies and the criteria for promotion within the Academy of Health Information Professionals (AHIP). The HSL faculty list of roles grew throughout this process.

The authors organized their list into major Education, Research, and Service categories. They transformed this list of categories into a “Crosswalk” document, that enables the reader to identify an HSL role and find an equivalent basic science or clinical faculty role.

Results: The HSLs at UNM HSLIC developed a Crosswalk that listed HSL faculty roles under the major headings of Education, Research, and Service. The authors listed these HSL faculty roles in the left-hand column of a tripartite table. Basic sciences faculty equivalents of these roles appeared in the middle column and clinical sciences faculty equivalent roles occupied the right-hand column. The table revealed the breadth and depth of faculty roles filled by HSLs.

Conclusions: The Crosswalk will equip HSLs with an inventory of faculty roles. HSLs can employ this inventory to translate their job roles into easily-grasped faculty responsibilities. Hospital librarians affiliated with medical residencies also can advance their faculty roles using the Crosswalk.