Harvard Medical School’s Countway library aims to become the bioinformatics hub for the Longwood area.

Robin Orwant

As I stepped into the cool, quiet interior of Harvard Medical School’s Countway Library, I wondered what the chief reference librarian, David Osterbur, might look like. After all, Osterbur doesn’t fit the stereotype of a university librarian. In addition to his training in library science, he has a Ph.D. in genetics and held a faculty research position for seven years. What’s more, he knows more about bioinformatics—mostly learned on this own—than the average librarian or biologist.

So I was surprised to find him sitting where librarians often sit: at the information desk almost directly in front of the main entrance. I wondered how many visitors at Countway walk right by Osterbur without any inkling of the unique set of skills he possesses.

Osterbur embodies the evolving role of the Countway at Harvard and, more broadly, of medical libraries across the country. Over the past two decades, as academic research literature and tools have moved online, medical libraries have shifted focus in an attempt to stay relevant in a high-tech world.

This trend is apparent at Harvard Medical School, where renovations underway on the fourth floor of its library will create a home next year for the new Center for Biomedical Informatics.

The center will pool and augment the efforts of existing biomedical informatics groups sprinkled throughout the campus and at the Harvard-affiliated hospitals. Its goal will be to create new biomedical informatics tools to aid in clinical and basic research at Harvard and beyond.

But if these tools are to have any impact, the center will have to convince researchers to use them. That’s where Osterbur comes in. His job will be to lure scientists back into the library where he and other specially trained librarians will teach researchers how to effectively use the center’s new tools. For this to work, scientists must recognize that, even in an age when most scientific journals are just a mouse click away, the library still has something to offer.

Beyond the bookshelf

In the growing field of biomedical informatics, libraries have a role to play, says Isaac Kohane, the director of Countway, co-director of the new center, and chair of the informatics program at Children’s Hospital Boston. “Libraries are about taking information, curating it, making it available and distributing it, and keeping it for the ages.”

This fits well with the goals of bioinformatics, he says: aggregating, storing, disseminating, and extracting useful knowledge from vast databases.

He points to a well established precedent for establishing the library as a place where biomedical informatics tools, such as GenBank, the genetic sequence database, are developed and managed: the National Library of Medicine (NLM).

Indeed, the NLM in Bethesda, MD, is inspiration for the new center. The center’s other co-director, Alexa McCray, spent nearly 20 years at the NLM as director of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications. She helped create tools such as clinicaltrials.gov, a searchable database of ongoing U.S. clinical trials. She and Kohane plan to direct similar projects at Harvard’s new center.

Since Kohane and McCray were appointed last year to lead the Countway’s transformation, they have hired a dozen or so people and plan to hire 20 more over the next two years. The new hires include bioinformatics experts as well as what McCray calls “a new breed of librarian,” of which Osterbur is a prime example.

As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Osterbur loved being the guy with all the answers. “I read all the papers. People in my class would always come to me if they knew there was a paper out there and they couldn’t find it,” he recalls. “I spent a lot of time in libraries.”

After earning his Ph.D. in genetics, Osterbur did postdoctoral work at Indiana University and later got a faculty position at the University of Kansas Medical Center, where he helped set up a core bioinformatics facility. Eventually, though, his love of libraries drew him to Simmons College in Boston, where he earned a master’s degree in library science.

With this unique combination of skills, Osterbur intends to bridge the gap between biomedical informatics specialists at the new center and researchers in the broader Harvard community. Such a bridge is sorely needed, he says. Many scientists never really learn how to use informatics tools effectively, he says. “People who run bioinformatics centers generally are the ones who develop the tools. They’re not there to provide training.” Librarians can fill that role, he adds.

That’s why it’s important, he says, to house the bioinformatics center in the library—so that specially trained librarians and the bioinformatics experts can work side by side to coordinate their efforts in developing new tools and training researchers to use them.

Changing minds

The main challenge for the library and its new center will be marketing. Many scientists never think that answers to their research problems might be in a library. “Libraries have always had a bad image,” Osterbur says. “People imagine a place with little old ladies going around shushing people all the time.” He and Kohane will have to first change old notions of what libraries are for and what librarians can do to help scientists.

How successful they’ll be is unclear, given experiences at other universities. At Oregon Health and Science University, the informatics department is in the same building as the library.

“We do interact some, but I am not sure the physical proximity is truly going to accomplish synergy,” says Bill Hersh, chair of the university’s medical informatics department. “The problem these days is that few people go to the physical library any more. Despite being two floors above the library, I enter it no more than a few times a year.”

Osterbur, Kohane, and McCray all recognize that attracting scientists to the library will be challenging. They’ve organized a large number of symposia, classes, and special events in an effort to entice researchers to come through their doors.

But this isn’t the best approach, says T. Scott Plutchak, director of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at the University of Alabama, Birmingham and former editor of the Journal of the Medical Library Association. “If the goal is to get people into the library, it will go nowhere,” he says. “For it to be successful, the goal must be to put tools and expertise and resources in the hands of people where they work.”

While Plutchak says that Harvard is moving in the right direction by placing the informatics center in the library, he cautions against placing too much emphasis on the building itself.

Rather, he believes Harvard and other institutions need to see the librarians as the most valuable resource. At University of Alabama, Birmingham, librarians are found throughout the campus, teaching students how to use informational resource tools in courses that students are required to take.

Osterbur is already starting to do this kind of outreach—he attends lab meetings and teaches some classes on location within various departments at the medical school. But if Plutchak is right, Osterbur may need to get out from behind the library’s information desk more often if he wants to ensure he isn’t so easily overlooked.