This week’s episode of The Culture Study Podcast is all about the connections between the manosphere, paleomasculinity, and CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL. It’ll piss you off and connect some dots and I can’t wait to hear your thoughts on it. Click the magic link to listen wherever you get your podcasts, and sign up to get new episode notifications below:
In response to my piece on how How I Write Culture Study, I asked readers if they’d want to participate in a series where people from various professions talk about their work lives, explaining how they organize their days and weeks, how they protect their time, when and how they do their work and how and when they attend to their inbox, etc. etc.
Our first entries in the series are from a freelance audiobook narrator, a gardening ceramacist, an engineering grad student, a hairstylist, and a collaborative pianist. Today, you’ll hear about what it’s like work as a hosptial librarian.
If you’d like to volunteer to talk about a day/week in your life for a potential interview — crucially, this work does not have to be for pay; I’d love to hear from caregivers — here’s the very simple sign-up.
Now, let’s hear from Carrie Grinstead about how she deals with AI bot creating trash citations, cleaning up robot work, and how she responds to people who say “but everything’s on the internet.” This one’s so fascinating!
Let’s start with how you described your work to me:
I’m a hospital librarian. I search databases and other sources for information to support nurses, doctors, dietitians, PTs, etc. with any number of tasks -- patient care, research, arguing with insurance companies. These days I also fight with all the AI bots that generate fake citations, spit out inaccurate evidence summaries, and do a terrible job of indexing articles. I work for a large health system and absolutely love my job, but it’s a terrifying time as hospitals lose funding and state-supported conspiracists dress up weird lies as scholarly evidence.
Because people will ask this immediately: how did you get this job?
I had pretty much decided on library school by my senior year of college. I was about to get a degree in history and planned to get an MFA, and I knew I wasn’t resourceful or clever or talented enough to turn either of those things into a job. Then on the eve of library school I had a freaky medical event. I got shunted around to various specialists and had a bunch of tests that I didn’t understand. I remember standing on a dusty sidewalk in New Mexico, crying on the phone to my sister who was studying to be a nurse, asking her what an infarct was.
Anyway that all made me wildly curious about medical information, how it moved and why it was so hard to find when I needed it. I got to library school and learned that medical librarianship was one possible path, and so I focused on that. I took a couple of classes, joined a student branch of a professional organization, and had a few jobs. The best one, which stands as one of the best jobs of my life, was with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia. I loved getting questions from doctors and figuring out how to dig through databases for possible answers. When I graduated I really wanted to work somewhere like that and run advanced literature searches for healthcare professionals.
Tell me about how you organize your day — or your week. You can do it like I did (breaking down each day of the week) or you can just do a pretty typical day, whatever makes sense for you.
My day is mostly determined by what’s in my inbox at 8 am. I spend most of my time searching PubMed, and a lot of factors determine what I need to search for first: if it’s for direct patient care, if somebody’s got a meeting, if it’s in response to some larger-scale emergency. Last summer, Hurricane Helene flooded the place that manufactures most of the IV fluids in the country, and there was a frantic need for information about ways to conserve fluid without harming patients.
Most searches take me one to three hours. I first make sure I’m understanding what’s needed: asking clarifying questions, looking up terms. I figure out how to query the database, what words to search for and how to put them together. I review the titles, abstracts, and sometimes the full text of the articles that come up. I try to do some level of appraisal; ultimately, since I’m not a subject expert, I can’t make a final judgment of a study’s quality. But I can recognize some basic methodological flaws, possible shadiness of a publisher or author, etc., and at least flag that for the clinician.
Finally, I curate a list of results and send it in an email. Ideally, the results I’ve found will all be excellent, pertinent studies, and the email won’t say much except to wish the patron a nice day. Most of the time, though, I also have to figure out how to summarize what I did and didn’t find and what decisions I made.
If I can, I like to try to work on all of this in the morning and then, as the caffeine wears off, switch to stuff that requires a bit less brain, such as certain searches that I’m not designing fresh but just re-running to pick up the more recent publications.
I have meetings throughout the month. Pre-COVID, these were in person, but now they’re almost all on Microsoft Teams. I no longer spend much time driving from one hospital to another, or getting lost looking for distant conference rooms, or enjoying surprise snacks. If I were in charge it would be illegal to have meetings on Mondays or Fridays, or before 10 am or after 2 pm. But I’m not, and meetings happen when they happen, and I plan other tasks around them.
I do some teaching, again almost all on Teams and mostly for nurses. This is usually in the form of one-off sessions, orienting a group to library resources or demonstrating a particular task. My goal with these is always to try to provide some clear take-aways, some tools that overloaded people can hopefully use to make their jobs a bit easier.
How do you organize your digital life?
Probably not as thoroughly as I should? But I guess I’ve been plugged into screens log enough to have a decent sense of what makes me feel exhausted and anxious, and my digital organizing principles are based around not letting things build up. I can’t stand having a bunch of open tabs. And, to the extent that I’m able, I try to deal with things as they come in, to delete files and emails, to archive what I need to keep. I have some amount of data management skills, and I use those to make sure that files and folders have meaningful names.
One area that I’ve been meaning for years to try to organize more is my team’s shared OneDrive folder, which has become a bit of a junk drawer. It’s hard to find the bandwidth to do that, especially since it needs to work for a group. I’d love it if we could develop a set of policies around what goes where, what gets saved and for how long, etc. But we’re a pretty small crew and I can’t imagine there will be much capacity for that anytime soon.
When I think about organizing my digital life, my mind goes to the things I do to try to protect and preserve my analog life. I’m as distracted by my phone as the next guy, but I’m not on any socials and don’t plan to be, even though I know there are some robust medical library communities out there.
How do you think about “coworkers?”
Fondly! My team has gotten smaller and smaller since I started my job ten years ago. We had I think fifteen library staff at one point, and now we’re down to eleven. I used to be one of three in my service area, and now I’m alone. We work for a large health system, over fifty hospitals, and we’re dispersed across multiple states. Some of my colleagues, I’ve never met in person, but I do think we all get along quite well and support each other effectively. We’re understaffed compared to comparable health system libraries, but I’ve never felt like I can’t take a vacation or like things will fall apart if, say, covid finally gets me after five years of dodging.
I met one of my best friends in a previous job. We bonded for life over our shared suffering in our toxic workplace. In my job now, I’m not suffering, and maybe that plus the geographic distance is why I haven’t developed such close friendships with current coworkers. To be clear, I like them all very much and am open if they need someone to talk to about anything, work or not-work. I trust them with my stuff and am not opposed to having work relationships grow into something more personal. At the same time, there’s something comforting and stabilizing about having “coworker” and “friend” be two separate categories and two bright spots in my life.
What’s the most challenging part of your work right now?
Right now, with everything burning down, my work is a solace. I care about what I do and feel productive and helpful. So I guess in a way the hardest thing currently is the looming dread that it could be gone. The threats to healthcare, to hospitals in this country, are just unfathomable and overwhelming. And of course bots are actively being developed to do what I do. They do it badly, but I don’t know how much that will matter in the end.
There’s the existential terror of gen AI, and also the constant frustration. One of the first things I learned about in library school was controlled vocabularies. There’s a set of defined words that are used to tag things in a database and make it possible to search for concepts instead of just for terms. When I was starting out as a librarian, there were people at the National Library of Medicine who applied these controlled terms to most of what’s in PubMed. Now that’s all done by algorithms, and the results are pretty terrible. Key concepts are missed, irrelevant tags are applied. Running a literature search is more complicated, takes longer, and in the end I never feel as confident that I’ve found everything I need to.
When I find some particularly egregious indexing, I can write to NLM, and there are still people there who respond, who will clean up the robot’s work if I or another librarian ask them to. But my goodness, it was infinitely better when there was a whole team of highly trained and experienced folks whose job it was to get it right on the front end.
I could go on about this all day, but one other piece that’s important to mention is that it’s so, so much harder now to know what’s real and what isn’t. I spend my entire working life looking at citations of medical literature, but even I can’t tell a fake one without doing some digging.
What’s the thing people misunderstand about how your life and work, well, work?
People don’t know that a hospital librarian is a thing. Which isn’t surprising—it’s a niche thing and it makes sense that you wouldn’t have heard of it, unless you are one or you know one. When I tell someone new that that’s what I do, they think, reasonably, that I work in a library. That my wrist tendinitis must be from lifting big books and not from mousing and typing all day. Or, they think that libraries, especially of this highly specialized sort, are just outdated now. That everything is on the internet, and there’s no role and no need for humans.
One of my colleagues, when she hears the “but everything is on the internet” line, responds that it’s on the internet because she put it there. I didn’t put it there, myself, but I do have some understanding of how it gets there and what it takes to get it back out.
For every “Day in the Life” interview like this we publish on Culture Study, I’m donating $500 to a non-profit organization of the author’s choice. What organization are we supporting with this interview, and why does their work matter to you?
I’d love to support the radio station — The SoCal Sound — that I started listening to when I first moved to California for this job. They’re wonderful company through and beyond the work day, and, like a lot of public media, they are struggling.
Free Subscribers: If you liked that and want access to all the other good stuff (the sprawling surprising comments sections, the weekly threads, the summer book recs!) and the knowledge that you’re helping fund the stuff that makes your life more interesting — consider funneling less than the cost of a cup of coffee into a subscription:
And if you have questions for Carrie about her work, schedule, training….she’ll be watching the comments and attempt to answer what she can! And you can find more about her and work here.
This is a technical thing rather than a comment on the interview - but it came up in my inbox as weird. The sender was listed as "Trezor", rather than Culture Study; and there were some ads for crypto etc. in the body of the text. I didn't click on any links, I just came to substack to access because my first thought was maybe you were hacked? I am so paranoid about phishing scams etc. So I wanted to let you know.
As a former hospital librarian/current academic librarian: just, yes. Yes. Thanks Carrie for talking about this work! I loved being a hospital librarian, but my god it’s tough work (I was also solo, and did that for eight years).