PHR or Something Like It

When I started library school at Drexel University in 2003, it rapidly became clear how well suited I could be to being a librarian.

This statement is a setup to what makes me who I am as an academic librarian, so it requires me to step back a bit and recount my background. (Incidentally, I hinted about planning to write this post back several months ago near the inception of this blog. Now is definitely the time to do it. Bear with me.)

Educational and Professional Background
When I was a student at the University of Chicago, my first campus job was in the catalog digitization unit of Regenstein Library. Throughout my 4 years at UC, I worked across the library system. I briefly considered getting a library degree, but really had my heart set on medical sculpting. I wanted to use my hands to make medical models. I attended graduate school at University of Illinois at Chicago which had a program called Biomedical Visualization (medical illustration). The mind I developed for imagining the physical, relationships, and ideas, I continue to use. I received a Master of Associated Medical Science degree and came to the Philadelphia area to pursue a profession in applied materials science developing molding and casting processes for contract research. Yeah, there's more to that, but that's enough for now.

After 10 years of contract research, I got downsized and decided to change tacks. I went into non-profit administration and learned a great deal about customer service. Four years into that line of work, I decided to reconsider my whole professional game plan. Reevaluating my science background, my customer service experience, and my past jobs in the academic library, I concluded that academic librarianship would be an ideal new course of study.

Faith Background
There is also an ecclesial component in all this. A believing Christian from childhood, I became heavily involved in the leadership of Chinese Christian Church and Center, a Chinese church in Philadelphia's Chinatown. In fact, several of my years in the non-profit sector I spent at this church working as the office administrator. As administrator, I refined my organizational, communication, and public relations skills. As a lay leader, I developed new settings for applying all those skills.

Synthesis
In library school at Drexel University, these disparate pieces began coming together. I began to realize that I like seeing the big picture behind anything I undertake. I began to observe connections that drew together my fantastic liberal arts education at University of Chicago, my medical sculpting training, my research work, my administrative work, my lay leadership work, and now my information science training. And I happily took all that into my first and current library job at Arcadia University.
End tangent. (Don't forget this background information, though; I will undoubtedly refer to it again and again.)

Patient Health Record
For many months my pastor has been discussing the idea of how to develop church members and regular attenders. I called him to toss around his ideas and began shaping the idea myself of how to evaluate members and attenders. I understood what he said about church leaders needing to assess people as soon as they showed some signs of commitment to the church. I thought that any kind of assessment would have to get logged on a standard form of some sort that the evaluating leader would be able to share with any other leader. My library school medical informatics class abruptly came to mind and I realized that I was describing a patient health record.

When patients first visit their primary care providers, their family physician must perform a medical evaluation to determine their present state of health and any medical needs they might have, known or unknown. When patients return, their physician must use their medical records to assess their continuing health and treat their developing conditions. They amend their records and add appropriate ongoing documentation. When physicians identify conditions that require the intervention of medical specialists, they obtain permission of their patients and forward the necessary documentation to the specialists.

Spiritual Health Record
In the faith setting, members and regular attenders become patient analogs. With their permission, pastors, lay leaders, fellowship leaders, and Sunday school teachers (all primary care providers in their own ways) must perform spiritual health evaluations. They must use standardized evaluation criteria and document their observations in conventional formats. With permission, they can share the information with other spiritual care providers. When members and regular attenders have needs that require the intervention of spiritual health specialists, e.g., marital counselors, those specialists can consult the spiritual health records generated from the PCPs.

In a variation that rather incongruously blends health records with medical training documentation, those same records can determine members' or regular attenders' fitness for special training so that they can themselves be equipped to become spiritual primary and specialty care providers.

Professional Health Record
This all has a connection to the professional world because of a conversation I had with my brother-in-law while on family vacation together. I was sharing with him the challenges of equipping my instructional technology lab student workers, i.e., the padawans, to function more professionally. I equated that to the challenge of myself developing and improving my professional managerial skills. And everything came together. Those patient records and spiritual health records became professional health records. Those patients and faith-community members became professional trainees. And it was good.

The challenge is how to craft a professional health record that standardizes professional health with the systemization of a patient health record. This will not happen overnight anymore than the development of the patient health record did. But once one does come into existence for my padawans or for me, whether because I find it or create it, I expect the merit to become as equally self-evident as for the now ubiquitous patient health record.

Going to a Lot of Trouble to Knockoff

My parents, repatriated American citizens, came to visit from China bearing gifts.

I received a Burberry pullover shirt of which I was immediately suspicious. China is known for being a haven for knockoff products (LaFranier). A look at the quality of the stitching helped to confirm my suspicion, but the clincher was to come only after a look on the Internet and a comparison of the labels. I like how the B for Burberry ended up as an R (for ripoff?).







(haganah)


What was more interesting to me was how the tag was attached to the shirt. Connecting the tag to the label was a plastic ornament injection-molded to nylon cord loops coming out both ends. The ornament was 1 1/4" long and 3/8" wide. The tag was on one loop and the other loop went through the fold of the label.



I could see that the ornament was not simply clamshell-clipped onto the cord. There were no knots of any sort. So how did the garment worker secure the ornament to the label and tag?

A study of the end of the ornament revealed that only one end of the loop of cord was molded into it. The other end looked to be molded into a very small piece of plastic inserted into the larger ornament.

I guessed that miniature piece to be a clip of some sort. It initially seemed like a lot of trouble to secure tag to label; but if it made the final product more convincing, so much the better. Anyway, the effort would have to be on the mold fabrication side. Once the ornament got molded, slipping the clip into the ornament would be a vast time savings over tying a knot.

I cracked the ornament open and found my suspicion confirmed about the nature of the ornament.



There were several elements I brought to this puzzle. One was curiosity. Another was intuition. And another was experience. (Perhaps you'll identify more.)

Wrapped in the curiosity was observation. I noticed something. I wondered about it.

The intuition about the ornament came partly from a former life as an applied materials research scientist.

The experience came from curiosity about other locking devices like nylon clips on backpacks.

Perhaps the real significance of this event is that those various elements make me a more involved academic librarian.

I wonder.

I intuit.

I draw on experience.

Works Cited
LaFranier, Sharon. "Facing Counterfeiting Crackdown, Beijing Vendors Fight Back." New York Times. 1 March 2009. 19 April 2009 <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/world/asia/02piracy.html>.

haganah. "Burberry Prorsum." Weblog comment. 2 April 2009. StyleForum. 19 April 2009 <http://www.styleforum.net/showthread.php?t=61518>.