Patricia Anderson here, one of the cohort of new writers for the Krafty Librarian blog, and delighted to be here. You might know me better as @pfanderson on Twitter (and many other places in social media), or as the person behind the ETechLib blog, or as Perplexity Peccable in Second Life. (I chose that name because both being perplexed and having a less-than-impeccable office are part of what I consider to be my natural condition!)
I am the Emerging Technologies Informationist at the newly renovated Taubman Health Sciences Library at the University of Michigan. I bet some of you will want to hear about our renovation, so I’ll try to touch on that before too long. Obviously, I have a strong focus on new technologies, and am the leader of the MLA Systematic Review team on emerging technologies. Reporting out on some of that work will also probably interest folk here. I was doing systematic reviews long before I was into emerging technologies, and have been thrilled to see the growth of the profession in that area, and the emerging respect for medical librarians that naturally derives from our inclusion as partners and methodology consultants in the design, data generation, and practice of research methods in information synthesis. Pretty darn cool, if you ask me. Before that, I did a lot of research and writing about search engines, online health information, and so forth. Did you realize that 2014 was the 20th anniversary of the founding of the HealthWeb project? There are still a lot of lessons we could learn from that.
Anyway, those are the types of topics I’m likely to write about — emerging tech or trends or events; research and methods; online health information and searching; and so forth. I am really looking forward to seeing what the other collaborators come up with, and learning from the truly incredible team that Michelle has assembled. Delighted to be here, and I hope you are, too.