Mapping Culture: Rural Circuit Medical Librarians' Information Systems - interview with librarian Jean Antes who helped to develop medical library services for rural hospitals, physicians and health care workers beginning in 1976

Library Trends, Wntr, 1999 by Elizabeth Gremore Figa

INTRODUCTION

   Begin at the beginning ... and go on till you come to the end: then stop.

      --Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

In affiliation with the Oral History Project of the Medical Library Association (MLA),(1) I conducted a series of interviews was conducted with Jean Antes,(2) a significant member of the library profession whose work impacted the profession of librarianship and specifically medical librarianship. Antes(3) was one of the first circuit rider medical librarians, the first in a rural setting. She was a pioneer among those who literally traveled to remote and underserved hospitals and clinics to deliver medical library and librarian services that were unavailable to physicians and other health care providers. Antes told me about the beginnings of this rural circuit librarian service launched in 1976.

   Dr. Beck(4) asked me how the doctors in rural areas, those in small
   hospitals and small towns in the area, got their information. He said, "Do
   you know any way we could get them information?" And because I had gone to
   Case Western Reserve and had kept in touch with Sylvia Feuer, [I was aware
   that] she had established a suburban circuit in which she went to suburban
   hospitals ... and let the hospital personnel know she was available to take
   requests. So I told Dr. Beck about that and he wondered whether we couldn't
   start something like that for the rural physicians, and he was willing to
   fund it. I was perfectly happy to go right along with it because I did know
   some of the doctors in the hinterlands and ... they wanted
   information--they just didn't know how to get it--because of course ...
   there was no Medline, there was no computer connection, there was nothing
   except the telephone.

The early circuit medical librarians were creative adventurer types who forged their own paths into a work culture and information system that had not been pre-tested by other librarians. Their work, and their documentation of it, created many new global opportunities for innovative roles within the profession of medical librarianship. The early rural circuit medical librarians found it necessary to develop creative methods for information needs assessment, searching and document delivery services, and systems development to serve clientele at the many and varied sites visited. Through the development of a new role and type of work, and through the expansion of creative and collaborative services, the circuit rider medical librarians established a new information system with its own organizational culture and work methodologies.

Over the course of the interviews, the passion and creativity of Antes and her enormous dedication to her profession became apparent. Her imagination and drive created many opportunities for operationalizing library work in innovative ways. Through the telling of her oral history, we can understand the work culture and the way she and her staff developed "systems" or workways and utilized mapping techniques to navigate the complexities of library work taking place both within the library and in the field.

METHODOLOGY

   Though this be madness, yet there is a method in't.

      --Hamlet, Shakespeare

In Fall 1997, I coordinated plans with the MLA Oral History Project Director to collect an oral history from Jean Antes via an in-person interview. Antes was asked to record her history because of her well-known contributions to the profession of medical librarianship. The interview expenses were funded by the MLA, and I otherwise volunteered my time for this project. At the end of the project, I delivered to the MLA Oral History Project the original tapes of the interviews, which became the property of the MLA. The MLA and Antes granted me permission to use her history for this research project.

In collaboration with Antes, I developed travel plans to go to Sayre, Pennsylvania, to interview her. During the pre-planning phase, Antes Pelley was asked to develop a resume and a brief biography. Simultaneously, I developed a series of interview questions that were sent to her in advance for review and feedback. These questions were based upon her personal information; information provided by the MLA Oral History Project (Zinn 1990; Pifalo & Flemming, 1997); and a literature search I conducted on circuit rider medical librarianship. I also reviewed the questions with Victoria Pifalo,(5) a former circuit medical librarian and one of the more prolific writers on this type of work. The MLA provided all the recording devices necessary to document the interviews and fieldwork experiences. The data from the recorded interviews were professionally transcribed, and the transcript of the interviews and my field notes were utilized in the writing of this article.

Antes and I began the thirty hours of interviews and field observations when she met me at the airport in Elmira, New York, just a short distance from the town in which the circuit rider medical librarian program she founded was located. Shortly after arriving for the interview, I asked her to sign the various human subject research release forms related to the project. Over the course of days, we would talk at the airport, in her car, at a site located on the library circuit, in her office, over meals, in the lobby of the bed-and-breakfast where I stayed, and at her home. There was nearly always some recording device in use, be it a high-end tape recorder or a pen in my hand with a green-covered notebook below it.