The librarian Elissa Kinzelman

By David Steinkraus
Journal Times

Monday, September 24, 2007 12:38 PM CDT

Like many librarians, Elissa Kinzelman, 31, came to the profession later. She started in college by studying English and anthropology, and then went on to Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo for a master’s in anthropology. She intended to continue and complete a doctorate.

“It was an extremely rigorous program in anthropology, and after the first year I was beginning to feel burned out. I enjoyed anthropology but I wasn’t sure at that point if I wanted to make it a career choice.”

She finished her master’s and spent a year thinking about what she wanted to do. “But in the process of working on my master’s thesis for the anthropology program, I found I really like the research aspects. I had a knack for tracking things down, for finding research sources that weren’t necessarily obvious, and I really loved that challenge.”

So she began library training at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2004, and she was amazed at the leaps made in information retrieval in just a few years. “All of a sudden, full text articles were available online.”

Elissa Kinzelman, medical librarian. Photo by David Steinkraus

“And then, when I enrolled at UWM, I was amazed again at the remote access I had to the libraries and what I could obtain from sitting at my desk at home.”

She will graduate in the spring after taking classes part-time because she has also been working as the assistant librarian at St. Mary’s Medical Center in Racine. There her job involves helping citizens find information about diseases or treatments. That typically isn’t challenging because most people are looking for very basic information, she said.

“Whereas when physicians come running in and they say, ‘I’m doing surgery on a patient tomorrow who has this condition and I need to know how that affects anesthesia,’ in that case it becomes much more in-depth, much more focused. It’s a little stressful almost because you know that physician really needs a good article and he or she probably doesn’t have time to look through a bibliography that I put together. So it’s up to me to find the article that will inform this physicians on his or her actions on the surgery tomorrow.”

Hers is very much a people job. “I think people have a tendency to see librarians as antisocial, very introverted. I think the way people judge the service they receive at the library, the information they receive is secondary. What they’re looking for is to be treated as a human. … But if you provide information without personal skills, the person’s not going to want to go back.”

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