tl;dr Started in public libraries, moved to hospital librarianship, and quickly leveled up in medical librarianship at WSU. Became an expert searcher at the Portland VA, balanced two roles after relocating to Boise, and transformed the collection at St. Luke’s. Landed an executive leadership role at NNLM Region 5 after becoming a mom, learning to juggle management and motherhood. After an unexpected layoff, landed a dream customer training role at EBSCO. Along the way, kept busy with part-time gigs to stay connected and diversify my skills.

My career in libraries began in 2016, when I graduated from San Jose State University with my MLIS at the same time I started my first library job at my local public library in Vancouver, WA. That year turned out to be a big year for me; shortly after graduation, I accepted a position at a hospital library as a library assistant in Spokane, WA.

Leaving the Nest

I left home for the first time to start a new life in a new city, working a job I thought would take me years to land. I learned how to provide reference services to healthcare providers, how to facilitate interlibrary loan, and how to search PubMed. My greatest achievement in this role was launching an informed consent review service, where I collaborated with researchers to improve the readability of their informed consent forms.

As fate would have it, I ended up leaving this job sooner than I thought, too. A new medical school was opening at Washington State University in Spokane, and they needed a librarian liaison. As a fun twist, the position was jointly funded by the Network of the National Library of Medicine and would also involve promoting a free health information resource (HEALWA) to Washington healthcare providers. I applied to this role, thinking the interview process might be a good opportunity to meet local colleagues. As you may have guessed, I landed this job and started working at WSU in August 2016.

Learning the Ropes

I worked at WSU for three years, during which I jumped at every opportunity to learn something new about librarianship. I gained experience in collection development, literature searching, scholarly publishing, research data management, grant writing, marketing, and project management.

I spent the first year or so traveling around Washington to different healthcare provider conferences to promote HEALWA as an exhibitor and occasionally as a presenter. I also developed a successful webinar tutorial for HEALWA that provided attendees with 1.0 CNE that was ultimately delivered to over 500 nurses. This was an especially sweet achievement since it was born out of the failure of my first idea: to provide in-person workshops around the state. It turns out that it’s very hard to get healthcare professionals in one place at the same time for training. The webinar format improved the accessibility of the workshop, and the continuing education credit made it more appealing to my target audience.

As the library liaison to the medical school, I did a lot of work that I’m proud of, but there are a few projects that stand out in my memory. I received grant funding to build a collaborative research space in the library and design accompanying workshops to teach researchers about data management best practices. I launched an interprofessional, short-story book club for health sciences students that sparked discussion around empathy and bias in healthcare. I developed positive and lasting relationships with medical school faculty that facilitated the inclusion of information literacy topics in the curriculum.

Expert Searcher

I loved working at WSU, but I missed my family in my hometown. So, in 2019, I accepted a position as an embedded librarian on an evidence synthesis team at the Portland VA. I collaborated with the team and our stakeholders to develop scoping searches for rapid review reports. I also occasionally assisted with article screening, data abstraction, and document formatting. This role kickstarted my journey to becoming an expert searcher, a journey that continues to this day.

I ultimately worked with this team until 2023; I was full-time staff through 2021 and part-time staff through 2023. What happened in 2023? To properly explain, I’ll need to back up a few years.

In 2020, my husband accepted a position in Boise, Idaho and we relocated in March of that year (yeah, I know). I continued to work remotely for the VA on a full-time basis up until April 2021, when I decided to take a job as a medical librarian at a hospital in Boise. I was offered the opportunity to continue my work with the VA on a part-time basis and decided it wouldn’t hurt to have two streams of income.

Information Curation

From 2021 to 2024, I worked at St. Luke’s Health System as one of two to three full-time librarians. My primary responsibility in this role was to manage the collection, although I also conducted upwards of 70 literature searches a month for healthcare providers and hospital staff. My crowning achievement was updating the incredibly out-of-date, print-heavy, and disorganized collection. I transformed it into a lean, browsable print collection combined with a growing selection of electronic resources. I also started two new and popular collections centered around DEI and Well-being, two major institutional priorities.

I also launched a customized literature search alert service as an add-on to our popular literature search service. Patrons could request that they receive monthly email updates with the latest literature on their initial search request. This was a huge hit, and by the time I left St. Luke’s in 2024, I was sending on average 60 search alert updates each month that received high satisfaction ratings.

Stepping Into Leadership

I was very happy in my role at St. Luke’s, but I ended up leaving this job at the spring of 2024. This is because my husband and I had our first child in December 2023 and quickly learned that we would need the support of our family and friends in our hometown to raise our son. It was incredibly lucky that around that same time, the position of Executive Director for NNLM Region 5 became available. I ended up interviewing for this position eight weeks after giving birth and received an offer when my son was three months old.

I was able to negotiate remote work as part of the offer, so my husband and I moved back to Vancouver, WA over the summer of 2024. I spent the rest of that year learning how to be a manager and a mother at the same time. Luckily, there’s more overlap between those two roles than you might think.

I quickly discovered that I enjoyed being a manager (and a mother) and developed a leadership style centered around transparency, trust, and creativity. I learned how to step outside of my introverted comfort zone to develop engaging relationships with existing and potential partners. I learned how to delegate, something that has always been a struggle for me but a necessity in this role. And I learned how to gently introduce new tools and procedures to workflows that had been largely static for years.

Gig Work is Work

Before we move to the present, I need to share a component of my experience I left out. I have held a series of part-time contract positions with various organizations, leveraging my expert search skills almost exclusively since 2021. I took these “gigs” for a few reasons: I felt more secure with multiple streams of income, no matter how small; I enjoyed the variation and creative opportunities these roles offered; and I was able to build additional connections beyond my existing network.

New Beginnings

Today, I am more grateful than ever to have held these gig roles over the years. In March 2025, I was laid off from my job with the NNLM and found myself without a W-2 job for the first time since I was 17. This was a devastating blow, especially since I have always taken great joy in my work.

It took me about a month, but I secured a new position at EBSCO as a Senior Customer Training Specialist. I was thrilled to land this job; I have been interested in moving into the corporate world for years, and the job is fully remote with a great team. I bring nearly 10 years of experience as a medical librarian to my training sessions and help other information professionals navigate EBSCO’s medical databases.

This last year has been challenging in ways I never could have imagined, and it has certainly tested my resilience. I’m so grateful for my wonderful support system, comprised of my family, friends, and colleagues, who helped me stay focused on the positive parts of my life. I made it through the storm, and now I get to enjoy the sunny days ahead doing the work I love: helping people find the information they need to achieve their goals and be successful.