Of Poets and Busboys

Poet Langston Hughes was once a bus boy here. Now a hip coffee shop; in his honor, we stopped for a photo.

As all of us are nurses gifted with wonderful educations, it is so easy to take the library for granted.

Certainly, we've all been in libraries and we've come to trust them as a source of information.

How would it feel to send your child to an inner city school where the library books were so out of date that texts suggested depression is an STD?!

We stopped for a day to work in small groups at an inner city junior high. Recently moved to a new location, the librarian was hoping we'd help 'prune the collections' which were essentially given to him in giant packing boxes when the school's location moved. This job was probably the most challenging and by far the most surprising of any of the immersion activities we have participated in to date.

As nurses and evidence-based practitioners, the librarian was interested in our knowledge of "the evidence". We found many health books in dire need of updated information. In the 1950's, for example, some medical journals advocated smoking to "clear the lungs"!

It was surprising that so many of the texts were dated. Some had statistics from the 1980's (and those were among the more up-to-date) on the shelves.