Dean Giustini has a good post mentioning health librarians need to be leaders not glorified office managers. "Before health librarians can lead the charge into the brave new, evidence-based future, we need to build (and maintain) expertise in the principles and practice of health librarianship, as well as tracking and staying current with technological trends."

Dean is absolutely right. Too often hospital librarians (especially solos) can become mired in the every day paper work and grunt work of just running the library that it can be difficult to expand professionally. You don't have to become the absolute podcast/wiki/blogging/technology guru, but you need to look at ways of learning and expanding your library so that you are not left in the dust. If you are not looking at ways to expand your library or library services then you are on the slow train to being obsolete.

For example: I know of a librarian who took a new job at a hospital library. The previous (retiring) librarian was not up on technology and was unfamiliar with many common technological issues in librarianship. The new librarian sought to acquire new electronic databases and electronic journals, he asked IT about the IP ranges of the hospital so that he could establish IP authentication. IT was surprised that he was interested in knowing the IP ranges. The new librarian was surprised to learn from IT that the hospital shared IP ranges with other hospitals in the system. After many discussions he learned that IT did not know the impact it would have on the library and previous librarian had never contacted IT regarding the issue. Now this new librarian is stuck trying to convince IT to fix this problem (which he is told will cost a lot of money) and his goals and ideas for "expanding" the library and its services are drastically reduced. The librarian told me that one of the reasons he accepted the position was that he was excited to provide new services and resources to the library, but now he is frustrated that he may not be able to do that. He half jokingly said that perhaps he should have asked what their IP situation was when he first interviewed.

The thing I hear from many solo librarians is that they don't have the time. Perhaps get a little "wild" stop checking in and claiming those journals (which takes tons of staff time) and concentrate on providing more electronic access. That is where a lot of the patron demands are. Now if the idea of not checking in journals is just too "wild and crazy" of an idea for you to do, give the task to a volunteer. Why are you, a professional, spending your time essentially doing what the stock boy at the grocery store does when a new shipment of bread comes in?

The point is you don't have time not to learn, because if you don't take the time to at least be familiar with some technological trends and issues, it will eventually come back to bite you or your library. Be your library's leader not its office manager.