Sunday, January 07, 2007

The Creative Librarian?

Shelley Hourston's "Creativity and the resilient health librarian" offers a fascinating look into one aspect of librarianship which is underappreciated: creativity. Librarians do a lot, especially with limited resources in health libraries, including cataloguing (descriptive and subject analysis); reference interviews; collection development; database searching; justifying the existence of the library, just to name a few.

Librarians are professional creative thinkers, from finding better ways to display new books on the shelves to adjusting to budget cuts. Well, then, how do you nurture creativity? It can be done, according to Hourston, as her interviews with working information professionals revealed that most creativity stems from recreational activities as writing, painting, drawing, sculpture, crafts, and knitting. It's worth a read!

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