Editor’s Note: Every other month, we publish the profile of a member of Doody’s Library Board of Advisors (LBA). The LBA has guided the development of our company’s library services since our inception. With gratitude, this month we present the profile of Kristen DeSanto of the Health Sciences Library at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

Since May 2015, I have worked at the Health Sciences Library at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus as a clinical librarian and assistant professor. Our library’s mission is to link people, reliable health sciences knowledge, and technology in support of effective learning, quality healthcare, vital research, and engaging community service. I work with people on campus involved in direct patient care, including attending physicians, residency and fellowship programs, and clinical staff at the University of Colorado Hospital. I teach classes on searching for the evidence and answering clinical questions, and enjoy demonstrating the resources available through the library that can help clinicians provide their patients with the best care possible. For the past three years, I have taught at Supporting Clinical Care: An Institute in Evidence-based Practice for Medical Librarians, hosted each summer at the Health Sciences Library. I find it rewarding to work with other medical librarians and teach them effective strategies for supporting their own patrons on evidence-based practice principles.

In my first career, I was a registered dietitian and worked for 10 years in a hospital setting. My specialty was intensive care nutrition support, which is the provision of nutrition through gastrointestinal tube feeding or intravenous routes. I enjoyed healthcare, but was interested in making a career change that would allow me to focus on the information side rather than patient care. I was working at Parkland Hospital in Dallas at the time and was pleased to discover that the University of North Texas, only 40 miles away, had one of the top-ranked programs in medical librarianship. I began classes in 2007 and was immediately convinced that I had made the right career move. After graduating with my master’s in 2009, my first job was at the Family Resource Library at Children’s Medical Center Dallas, across the street from the hospital where I previously worked. My job responsibilities changed, but not my commute! I worked with a great group of librarians and assisted parents in finding reliable health information to help them learn about their child’s conditions.

I have served on Doody’s Library Board of Advisors since 2015 and enjoy being part of an organization of professionals who are passionate about high quality health resources. Our bottom line is making sure patrons have access to the best possible information. Just as librarians like to advertise our services as helping patrons save time, using Doody’s services is a smart strategy to help librarians save time, as well as money. The extensive and thorough reviews each year of such a large number of titles could not be undertaken by a library staff alone.