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- An Informationist (or Information Specialist in Context) provides research and knowledge management services in the context of clinical care or biomedical research. Although there is no one educational pathway or formalized set of skills or knowledge for informationists, one way to think of the informationist is as one who possesses the knowledge and skill of a medical librarian with extensive research specialization and some formal clinical or public health education that goes beyond on-the-job osmosis . Medical librarians and other biomedical professional organizations have been exploring the possibilities for evaluating how informationists are being used and whether their activities supplement or replace medical library activity. The term was proposed in 2000 by Davidoff & Florance. [1] Their editorial suggested that physicians should be delegating their information needs to informationists, just as they currently order CT scans from radiologists or cardiac catheterizations from cardiologists. They conceived of an information professional who was embedded in (and indeed, supported by) the clinical departments. Supporters of the concept see it as a means for librarians to reinvigorate connections with the faculty/clinicians, as well as provide superior service by dint of informationists' biomedical training. Critics complain that the idea is nothing new (perhaps most famously in an article entitled So what are we? Chopped liver?): librarians already provide indepth, high quality information services and clinical medical librarians have been working alongside physicians, nurses and other clinicians for years. A growing number of other institutions are hiring people in this role although there is no universal definition or job description. Large informationist programs in the U.S. exist at the National Institutes of Health and at Vanderbilt University. Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) is developing an informationist service model in which its 10 clinical and public health librarians are moving from serving as liaison librarians for assigned departments toward becoming embedded informationists within their departments. To prepare for the embedded informationist role, Welch librarians are undertaking education as needed to supplement their backgrounds. For example, one Welch librarian has 15 years of behavior counseling clinical experience. As a result, her informationist training focuses on filling in gaps in research methods knowledge more so than on gaining additional clinical knowledge. Courses, seminars and workshops being undertaken include those covering systematic reviews, evidence-based medicine, critical appraisal, medical language, anatomy and physiology, biostatistics, and clinical research. In addition, through an affiliated division in the JHU School of the Medicine, the Division of Health Sciences Informatics, senior Welch staff help team-teach a course on informationist skills that is open to Welch librarians as well as JHU’s National Library of Medicine (NLM) informatics research training fellows and informatics master’s degree students. Entitled Informationist Seminar: Bringing Evidence to Practice [2], the 1.5 credit hour course requires students to analyze, critically appraise and then effectively present evidence to support decision-making in case scenarios drawn from clinical or public health practice. The term informationist should not be confused with informatician – also informaticist – although some informationists do possess skills in bioinformatics and biomedical informatics. Stanford University and University of Washington are examples of institutional libraries which have hired biology PhD's (but no library degree) to provide informatics support. Conversely, The MLS degree, along with a number of other non-clinical degrees, such as master’s or PhD degrees in computer science, is considered by many of the NLM biomedical informatics research training programs to be a desirable background for research training in biomedical informatics, the “information science of medicine. ” Welch Medical Library’s professional staff includes an MLS-degreed clinical librarian who graduated from the NLM’s informatics research training program through the University of Missouri. University of Pittsburgh and Oregon Science and Health University have had librarians matriculate through their informatics research fellowship programs as well. Accordingly, in these training programs, if an MLS-holder is not pursuing an informatics PhD concurrently, he or she is treated as equivalent to post-doctoral researchers for the training program. 1. Davidoff F. , Florance V. The informationist: A new health profession? Annals of Internal Medicine. 2000; 132(12): 996-998. 2. Oliver KB, Dalrymple P, Lehmann HP, McClellan DA, Robinson KA, Twose C. Bringing evidence to practice: a team approach to teaching skills required for an informationist role in evidence-based clinical and public health practice. Journal of the Medical Library Association. 2008 Jan. ; 96(1): 50-57.
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