Director, Charlotte Edwards Maguire Medical Library
Florida State University College of Medicine
LinkedIn
“Every situation is an opportunity to learn.”
Our latest interview features Martin Wood, Director of the Charlotte Edwards Maguire Medical Library at FSU. With a 100% digital collection, Martin prioritizes equipping future clinicians and researchers with the latest evidence and supporting student success from orientation through Residency Preparation Boot Camp.
A champion of patient-centered care, he discusses how the library’s strategy is informed by the needs of the communities they serve. From navigating open access changes to fostering a culture of curiosity and teamwork, Martin works hard to ensure the library is an indispensable partner in the college’s mission. Learn more in this BMJ Insider interview.
BMJ: What are your top priorities as Director of the Charlotte Edwards Maguire Medical Library?Martin: My top priorities can vary by the day, but my focus is always on the needs of our patrons and on equipping our library team to deliver exceptional service. As a 100% digital medical library, prioritizing our e-resources collection and access to top-tier evidence is a necessity. We also support learning and the engagement of students, residents, and faculty in research, making sure that our collections connect to the real work that is taking place on campus and in the communities where we explore, teach, and learn together.
BMJ: Congratulations on more than 15 years of service at the library! Technology has significantly advanced during that time, from the move from print to digital resources, online classes, and now AI in the mainstream. How have you managed to stay ahead of developments and ensure that your library equips patrons with the resources and training necessary to adapt and thrive?
Martin: Be curious. Be open to new ideas. Every situation is an opportunity to learn. Carry a notepad or tablet everywhere you go and write down your questions and observations. Be willing to not know and be unwilling to stay that way. If you ever find that you are the smartest person in the room, go find a different room. Keep learning.
As librarians, we are frequently pushing the boundaries and engaging with emerging ideas and technology. Everything is a tool, including AI, and our jobs are to pair the problems with the tools to fix them. To do that, we must constantly talk to our patrons—our students, residents, faculty, researchers, and amazing staff —and learn from their perspectives. That requires getting into their environments and learning alongside them. We need to know: How is a clinical faculty member using, or not using, an evidence-based resource to teach an MD, PA, or nursing student how to be an exemplary clinician? What learning objectives can we use as an anchor to connect library-provided e-resources and expertise? Where can we position our vast collections to be as accessible as possible? Ultimately, how can we level up our patrons in exciting ways that make them look like the heroes that they are to their patients? What obstacles are keeping us from the changes we want to see in the world, and how do we partner people with processes to remove them?
We have to think bigger than we are. Libraries will never have enough support, funding, personnel, time, or get enough credit for the incredible things they do for people every day. So we must be strategic in what we put our effort into, and that strategy is constantly informed by our patrons and learning what they value most in their learning, research, and service to our shared communities.
BMJ: Your FSU profile mentions that you also serve as the Course Director for the Residency Preparation Boot Camp. Please describe this boot camp and how it helps to ensure students are ready to take the next step in their careers.
Martin: The Residency Preparation Boot Camp is a 3-week capstone course that fourth-year medical students take as their last course in medical school. By that point, students have matched into their residencies, and they know where they are going next. The RPBC is to prepare them for what comes next.
For many of our graduating students, residency will be their first full-time job where they focus solely on clinical service and daily engagement with patients, their caregivers, and other healthcare professionals, so we want to do everything we can to make sure they are prepared for success. This includes making sure their human subjects training is up to date so that they are ready to participate in clinical research when the opportunity presents. It also includes making sure they understand the intricacies of prescribing controlled substances, how to deal practically and emotionally with losing a patient, how to respond when a patient faints while on rounds or performing a physical exam, and other things of this nature that we know they will experience as practicing physicians in inpatient environments. We also host panel discussions with hospital leaders and residents, so students can ask the questions that they want to know about what comes next in a space that is safe, where no question is out of bounds, and no concern is too trivial.
The RPBC at FSU is co-directed by me and a physician faculty member. Where my colleague approaches the course through the lens of a clinician, I approach the course through the lens of an expert in evidence-based information, and most importantly as a patient and caregiver. These students are going to be the physicians who take care of all of us when we get sick and need their help, so what drives me is to make sure they remember to prioritize the chief concerns of their patients, and that they practice the patient-centered evidence-based care that we have taught them over the previous four years of medical school.
BMJ: How has your library supported the need for researchers to publish open access?
Martin: Our medical library was the first at FSU to create a librarian position dedicated to scholarly communications and open access initiatives. At the time, the focus was almost solely on open access publishing of journal articles. Today, open access is just a piece of what we do in scholarly communications, in addition to work on developing open educational resources, populating and promoting FSU’s institutional repository, research impact initiatives, and our librarians serving as editors and curators for open access journals.
To support open access, we strive to frame our support in the context of the needs of the researcher and their target audiences. For example, it is incredibly important for research that impacts the community to be accessible by the community, whereas research that moves the science forward may be better for other scientists at universities who are doing complementary research. The former group needs a library and university that embraces open access so they can gain the community benefit of the research, while the latter may be fine with accessing the research through their institutional subscriptions. As a library, our job is to find the right fit for open access and help facilitate that access to those who the research will benefit the most.
BMJ: Part of the FSU College of Medicine’s mission is to “Lead the nation in preparing compassionate physicians to deliver the highest quality 21st Century patient-centered medicine to communities of greatest need.” Are there any specific programs or paths that encourage your graduates to work in underserved communities?
Martin: At the FSU College of Medicine, we have pipeline programs that draw students from Florida communities of need. Frequently, we see our FSU students go back to the communities where they grew up once they begin to practice medicine, giving back to those communities while also filling a dire need in healthcare throughout the state. To facilitate this, we have a distributed campus model of medical education comprised of regional campuses where our students do their clinical clerkship work with physicians practicing in underserved communities. This model gives our students an opportunity to see first-hand the needs of patients in communities where there are significant challenges to receiving quality care and do their part to support those communities while they are learning the art and science of practicing medicine and contributing to better health and care.
BMJ: How does the library introduce and promote library resources to new students?
Martin: We start with yes and go from there. We take every opportunity that is afforded to connect the library with our patrons. We provide orientations to students the very first week they get to campus, and again the first week of their 2nd year, encouraging them to use the medical library and seek information beyond just that of question banks they use for exam prep. Our medical librarians are also active participants in the curriculum of all academic programs of the College of Medicine, providing presentations of clinical tools, teaching cases, introducing students to evidence-based medicine and how to apply it in practice, how to approach a PICO question, how to critically appraise scientific literature, teaching and partnering with students on research, facilitating Small Group classroom discussions, supporting students in their Quality Improvement projects in the third year, and then of course the Residency Preparation Boot Camp. Our medical library touches every student every year that they are at the FSU College of Medicine, and that is a feat that I am incredibly proud of our library team for accomplishing and continuing to excel at each year.
BMJ: What are the main factors you consider when deciding to add or remove a title to a collection?
Martin: My collection development philosophy is that practicing clinicians should have the latest and greatest evidence when they need it the most: when they are providing exceptional patient care. It’s all about the communities we serve and the patients and caregivers our clinicians-to-be interact with. We strive to ensure our collections meet the needs of our patrons and align with the missions of the College of Medicine and FSU. I want our researchers to have access to the best information relevant and our learners to trust they have the most current evidence at their fingertips. Most importantly, I want the patients being treated by FSU health professionals to trust they are receiving the most well-informed care, and that their needs are the center of our attention.
BMJ: The world of scholarly communication is undergoing a lot of change right now; drivers of this change vary by the issue. What are the evolving issues or trends that you are most closely watching?
Martin: I’m watching the changes in expectations from the federal government for publications derived from federally funded research. In the past year, we saw the current U.S. administration order that all journal articles from research that is grant-funded by the federal government be made open access on day one. Figuring out how to do that is a challenge because most libraries are not funded to pay the author processing charges for our university researchers, and researchers typically have not included those fees in their budget planning. Thankfully, there is PubMed Central and institutional repositories, but that does not always suffice for research that needs a broader, more global audience. This is a challenge that libraries, publishers, and researchers are going to have to work together to figure out, and the solutions may not be one-size-fits-all.
I am also watching the increased demand on libraries for research services. More students in medicine and the health sciences are seeking research opportunities than I have ever seen in my career, and that is increasing demands on libraries to teach research methods, coach students through research and writing processes, partner in evidence synthesis research, and take on a significant yet under-credited role in research with students, residents, and faculty. I am concerned for our library professionals being inundated by teaching and research demands on top of their traditional job duties contributing to the operations of the library. While I don’t know a single librarian who doesn’t relish getting to participate in teaching and research, we must be cognizant of the fact that burnout is a growing problem in our profession, and something we must monitor carefully and safeguard against when possible.
BMJ: What sparked your interest in a library science career?
Martin: Like so many librarians, I got into this field because I wanted to help. I love interacting with people, learning with them, and helping them find success. I think the most successful librarians are those with a strong sense of curiosity and the ability to deploy creative solutions to address the problems they discover. When I hire library professionals, I am looking for those with these traits. You can be great at anything if you invest the time and effort into it. I want to see what problems librarians have encountered, how they understand them, and what they do with that knowledge. Expertise is only expertise if you share it; otherwise, it is just stuff you know. Showcasing our expertise is critical to our being included in critical conversations and serving our patrons, and that starts with curiosity and a desire to know more and do something with that knowledge.
BMJ: What is the most rewarding aspect of your career?
Martin: The people I work with. I am so proud of the people I have had the privilege of working with in my career and seeing how they have grown as librarians, professionals, and people over time. I strive to make our library an incubator for careers, whether that means someone starts with us and grows here at FSU over time, or if they spend time with us and move on to the next phase of their career somewhere else. I want people to appreciate the time they spent with usand trust that their efforts made a positive impact on our patrons, our team, and themselves. Like everyone in our College of Medicine, we are mission-focused, and serving people is in our DNA. The reward is in the doing, and it grows us personally, professionally and as leaders.
BMJ: What do you think are the biggest changes/challenges librarians are facing?
Martin: Visibility is an ongoing challenge for librarians. We see growth across academia, yet librarians are asked to envelop growing populations of patrons into work we are already doing rather than adding to the library personnel and funding needed to support that growth. The expertise and innovation that defines librarians is routinely untapped in circles outside of the library, and I look forward to library leaders being welcomed into higher levels of academic leadership and administration. Librarians are uniquely capable of using their knowledge and experience to raise the stature of all the amazing work going on across our universities in teaching, research, and service, and it is a missed opportunity to not include them at the tables where strategic decisions are happening.
BMJ: Anything else you’ve learned you’d like to share with your colleagues?
Martin: Teamwork is critical for success at every level. Librarians bring different ways of thinking about problems, fueled by exceptional training at bridging information gaps and considering alternative perspectives. Those who fail to work together fail to move forward. In my career, I have seen people gravitate toward teams, and I have seen people resist teamwork, and the outcomes are completely predictable. To my fellow librarians, go hustle and find yourself a seat at the table. Make it a point to work with your colleagues and learn from their perspectives. Offer to do that thing that your team members or your leadership in libraries are having a hard time getting to. Ask any library director, and they have a list of things that they want to do that they can never find the time to get to. Be curious, be intentional, be willing, and be the positive difference for your library, your colleagues, and especially for your patrons. Small acts by individuals toward the work of the team can make the biggest difference; make sure you don’t miss those opportunities!
BMJ: Tell us about yourself!
Martin: My wife, Amanda, and I both work in medical and health sciences education at FSU, and share a drive to support our budding clinicians from both the College of Medicine and the College of Nursing. I also love dogs, have two, and am always threatening to rescue more. I am an avid reader with at least three books going at any one time; one in print, one on Kindle, and an audiobook. I also enjoy traveling, cycling, music, and video games. I look forward to baseball and football seasons every year, and 23 days in July for the Tour de France. I’m also rarely where I am supposed to be and can often be found talking with someone and learning something new, especially if there is coffee involved.
Interviewed by Lauren Jones, Head of Marketing, BMJ Americas
