This month, NLM joins the Nation in celebrating Black History Month. Libraries play an important role in ensuring equity of access to information. From my career as a nurse, I know that libraries are important vehicles for delivering trusted information. To celebrate my dual allegiances to nursing and libraries, in this post, I am tuning into the voices of Black nurses to learn what libraries mean to them.

Black nurses have made huge contributions to the health and well-being of people and are foundational to the health care system as we know it today. Rhetaugh Dumas, PhD, RN, a psychiatric nurse and academic leader, once served as the deputy director of the NIH’s National Institutes of Mental health (1979-1981). Another psychiatric nurse, Chester A. Woffard, III, MSN, RN was a leading thinker in suicidology, particularly addressing the needs of nurses coping with suicide among colleagues. May L. Wykle, PhD, RN, devised critical intervention strategies for caregivers, with particular attention to self-care needs among minority elders. Loretta Sweet Jemmott, PhD, MSN, RN, is an expert in health promotion and created much of the evidence base for HIV risk-reduction interventions. I’ll bet every one of these nurses used (and still uses) the library often!

I asked some nurse colleagues to reflect on the role libraries have played in their professional and personal lives – and look what I learned!

Libraries have been my constant go-to place for knowledge and skills to support any task I took on. It was important to me to join a profession that would enable me to read, learn, and be of use to other humans — nursing was the answer to my prayers. Reading in the library and collecting journals from around the world was a way to learn about life, humans, and nurture my sense of purpose to be of use to others. Libraries are full of stories about human caring; they are a safe place to gain knowledge and to explore and imagine life’s possibilities. I treasure my memories of being in the aisles of public and private libraries in schools, after school, and now accessing the wise words and secrets held by libraries electronically.

As a healthcare professional who is also a researcher, educator, and health policy specialist, I have leveraged the resources of the NLM many times. As an HIV prevention research scientist, I rely heavily on the biomedical literature databases such as PubMed to keep up to date on the research literature and for dissemination of my own work. As a nursing educator, the NLM training resources and courses on how to use various databases, as well as resources such as MedlinePlus and DailyMed for drug information have been most beneficial in my work with nursing students. The NLM supported National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology is also a reliable source for all things health policy related. Having such reliable, up to date, and accessible resources from the NLM is critically important to all facets of my career. 

During my PhD program, I realized how critical the library and librarians were in my scientific journey. The librarian at the UPenn Biomedical Library — who was also a nurse — played a crucial role in my PhD trajectory. It was the first time I had met a nurse who was also a librarian, and her intimate knowledge of nursing and the scientific literature helped me a lot. In my role as Principal Investigator, the librarians at NIH have been integral to the development of my lab as I have developed my clinical protocols and conducted literature searches for systematic reviews and meta-analysis. I have even co-authored papers with them. In addition, they are always available to train and share new tools to streamline the research process. The librarians have been very helpful in teaching the fellows and students in my lab about databases and guidelines to conducting reviews. When COVID-19 started and reports about COVID’s toll on taste and smell began to emerge, the NIH librarian (who knew what my lab studied) reached out and helped us tremendously by curating the literature on that topic. I am still using those resources as I develop a COVID-19 taste and smell long-hauler study.

As a nurse working on my doctorate, I had the opportunity to spend a summer in Washington, DC working with a Senator on many health-related issues. During that time, the Library of Congress became my refuge as I worked on my dissertation section on leadership and mentoring. Resources from the Congressional Library helped me understand the power of mentoring and recognize that nurses were sometimes left behind in terms of the mentoring process. Throughout my career, I’ve been inspired by the graciousness and generosity of spirit in people saying, “I see something in you that perhaps you can’t see in yourself.” But I know that I have been able to recognize this through what I learned at that beautiful, wonderful place called the Congressional Library. The library is where the literature revealed secrets to say, “Look at how fortunate you are to have been mentored all of your life.”

I think back on my freshman year at Howard University and one of the most memorable moments occurred in the Founders Library. I remember the first time I walked through the doors I felt this incredible sense of belonging and history. The library was named Founders in honor of the 17 men that help to found Howard University. This building holds an incredible collection of history for African Americans, and I felt privileged to be able to sit down at the tables and walk through the stacks of books. I had an assignment to research how the African American community has interacted with the medical community. As I researched this topic and used the microfiche machine to view documents, papers, and letters, I remember feeling that I had access to history in a way that I never had before. I remember coming across a personal check signed by Ruby Dee and Ozzy Davis sent to the Howard University School of Medicine to support the students — a piece of history that still moves me so many years later. My experience that day has stayed with me and encourages me to continue the work I am doing in health care and for my community. I am a proud graduate of an Historically Black College and University and feel honored to be able to serve my community as a nurse.

The library has helped shape my educational destiny in so many ways. I have appreciated the academic library both online and in-person throughout my undergraduate and graduate nursing programs. The library offers free educational resources, caters to specific research needs, provides space for meeting with others, and supports personal and professional growth. Having recently graduated with my master’s degree in nursing education, the library contributed to my success by providing access to a variety of education resources and online databases that supported my needs. The articles I chose were directed toward my learning styles, which had a positive impact on my academic achievements. As a novice nurse educator, the library continues to play an important resource in my career path and for my pediatric nurse residents.

What I always loved most about being in the library is the quiet and calm I felt as soon as I walked through the doors. During my senior year of college, my mentor (who was an employee within the University of Virginia Wise Library) heavily influenced my decision to use my bachelor’s degree in Biology to pursue Nursing instead of medicine. I spent many hours reading about healthcare careers, in various books and journals, reading articles using the microfiche machine, and concluded Nursing was the profession for me. I also spent a significant amount of my time at Marymount University’s Emerson G. Reinsch Library, where I was introduced to the Washington Research Library Consortium and benefitted from the ability to borrow materials from other academic libraries in the Washington, DC area. As I pursued my doctoral degree via online classes, I felt the same satisfaction with the electronic library format. Although I’m not physically in the library, whenever I log on to the electronic library, I still feel a sense of quiet calmness.

Those who knew me as a child can attest that I always wanted to be a nurse. My earliest professional inspiration was Florence Nightingale, whom I mimicked as I provided nursing care to my dolls and even tried to replicate her uniform by wearing a blanket that served as a cape. My information came from books through my neighborhood Bookmobile. An astute Bookmobile librarian noted my hunger for learning and encouraged me to explore more about nursing at the public library. That’s where I learned a more complete history about the nursing profession and discovered a wider representation of nurses, including some who looked like me. Learning about Mary Eliza Mahoney and Mary Elizabeth Carnegie, and later Hattie Bessent and Rhetaugh Dumas—along with other nurses of color whose footprints are evident in the profession—turned my emulation of the nurses I admired into a belief in the possibility for myself. Library resources have not only been invaluable to me throughout my education and career, but they helped me see myself on the “path we tread.”

I remember my parent’s library. It had encyclopedias, short stories, poems, and even medical books. Whenever any of us got sick, my mother would run to her medical books, and I took notice. All those books piqued my interest in becoming a nurse. Throughout my career, I’ve found that university libraries serve nurses very well because the librarians are good. I’ve been fortunate to frequent university libraries where librarians collaborate with the schools of nursing to set up library committees to review the library holdings in health care and related fields to make sure that their holdings are adequate and address the needs of nursing students. One library I have visited often throughout my career is NLM. I’d spend hours and hours at NLM; it’s a wonderful place. I also met some real scholars when I was at NLM. That’s what I miss most with the rise of the internet – because a library is also a community meeting place. It’s a place to meet other wonderful scholars and some of those scholars can end up being collaborators.

During my graduate education, particularly my doctoral program, libraries became my lifeline and my “go-to” place to help me problem solve and find resources that I couldn’t identify myself. Librarians gave me ideas that I hadn’t thought of and became my alternate support system outside of my department – and outside of my profession. Libraries have been very integrated into all the work I’ve done and the positions I’ve held throughout my career. Librarians deserve a lot of credit for my academic and professional success.

Libraries were a steady feature in my life. I spent childhood summers in the Brooklyn Public Library reading fiction; I worked as a clerk in the Cardozo Law Library as a teen; and decided on the sorority to join based on histories read at the Schomburg Library. The decision to change my college major from pre-medicine to nursing was made after poring over career data found in the health sciences library over 30 years ago. The importance of knowledge, as a nurse, has proven invaluable throughout my career. In most instances, my first instinct is to turn to a library.

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What a journey! Libraries are shaping the future of nursing and health care, and these nurses give us a glimpse into how all libraries, including the NLM, resonate with the dreams of nurses and provide support and skills to move forward in practice.

I am grateful to my colleagues for sharing their perspectives, and so proud of what the merging of these two forces — nursing and libraries — bring to the health of the world!

How have libraries influenced you and your career?