Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now

I’m just passing the one-year mark in my tenure as Director of the National Library of Medicine. It has been an exciting year for me, filled with many learnings and lessons, and with each week I grow more delighted with this outstanding organization. I have the great good fortune of having taken a leap into an uncertain-but-promising opportunity and finding it to be more rewarding, more delightful, and more engaging than I had anticipated—and I took this position with very high hopes!

I have grown a lot since I arrived here in August 2016, and as the master balladeer Bob Dylan noted, “I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.” A deep passion for NLM, its mission, its resources, and the people who work here replaces the early hope and excitement that accompanied me on my move to Bethesda. The bravado of vision is supplanted by the realities of working in the federal system. Acronyms and abbreviations now evoke people and processes for me. I have learned to appreciate the rich tapestry of scholarship, service, citations, and collections that make up the NLM. I have met many of our stakeholders and have come to see them as collaborators. And I’ve developed a new appreciation of the Library, not simply as a collection of resources, but also as a dynamic interaction of health and information.

Here are some surprises. I am struck by a sense of patriotism I found resting quietly deep in my soul. As the director of the only federally funded health library, I am responsible for ensuring our resources are expended in support of the public’s health—supporting discovery, knowledge delivery, and personal health management. I am proud of the 1,700 women and men who choose to work here, applying their knowledge and talents in service of society. And I am committed to weaving the tenets of open science through the mantle of government service.

I am amazed at how big the Library is—not just our buildings, with their byzantine hallways and underground spaces, but the human and electronic reach. Because of our 6,500-member National Network of Libraries of Medicine, the NLM has a footprint in almost every single county, and in American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. There is no country in the world that our resources can’t touch. We have 26 million citations in our PubMed bibliographic repositories, and petabytes of data moving in and out of our NCBI resources EVERY DAY!

And I am grateful—to the security guards who help protect our precious holdings, to our scientists who are finding ways to use literature and data to help our nation meet health crises such as the opioid epidemic, to our technical services team who keep our resources available 24 hours a day. I am grateful to the staff who have greeted me with welcome and patiently reminded me of their names. I am making progress, but I’ve still got a lot to learn.

Dylan’s words appeal to me because they characterize the arch of a journey, from initial awareness through growing familiarity to deep realization that the National Library of Medicine is truly a national treasure, and I am both humbled and proud to be guiding it towards its third century of service.