Medical Librarian

A Medical Librarian is almost exactly what it sounds like. In this career, you help people, like Doctors and patients, find the medical information they are looking for. You need the skills of a Research Librarian to do this, but you also need a very specific set of medical and science-based skills so you can navigate the medical and science-based resources in the library.

You could be working in all sorts of environs, too, not just a library. Insurance companies, research facilities, schools, and hospitals all employ Medical Librarians to extract, explain and distribute their records. You might look up patient histories for the insurance company, the nature of clinical trials for a patient in a hospital, or a series of studies on particular drugs for a research facility. There’s a lot of variety in the material and responsibilities for you – this is one of the most diverse medical careers out there.

The modern Medical Librarian needs more skills, too, than they used to. After all, there isn’t exactly a card catalogue anymore. These days you need to be able to not only get books for Physicians, researchers, and patients, but you also need to be fluent in a variety of other media. You’ll be locating and distributing web sites, videos, digital archives, audio files, podcasts – you get the idea.