The Bioinformationista: New Roles and Responsibilities for a Bioinformationist

Abstract

The Health Sciences Libraries (HSL) collaborated with the National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI) to create an informationist position in 2007. Early responsibilities for the bioinformationist included many traditional library liaison services including expert searching and citation analysis. As the relationship has matured, new roles and responsibilities have developed outside of this traditional partnership. These new roles and responsibilities include but are not limited to copyright and intellectual property advisor, licensing contact, open access/ public access consultant, documentation expert, and research partner. With the ever increasing number of informationists supporting researchers and organizations such as the Clinical Translational Science Award recipients, it is likely that these roles and responsibilities will become more commonplace across many health sciences disciplines.