Speakers

Reference Tools for the Information Age: Consumer Medical Resources

Soaring to Excellence

Debra Kakuk

Debra earned a M.A. in English from the University of Minnesota in 1996, and her M.L.I.S. degree from Wayne State University in 1998. Since 2003, she has been a reference librarian at the College of DuPage Library, supporting the Health Sciences Division as well as the ESL, GED, and ABE programs. Previously, Debra spent five years as the Educational Technology Librarian for the Mayo Clinic Libraries in Rochester, MN, and also worked as a public librarian for Michigan’s Kent District Library System. Debra has traveled extensively teaching consumer health workshops to multi-type library staff. A summary of these workshops is provided in her article “Multi-type librarian workshops: a consumer health outreach project,” published in the Journal of Consumer Health on the Internet 7(3): 1-13, 2003. She also reviewed consumer health Web sites as the column editor of the “JCHI Editor’s Select Sites” column for two years. She has provided consumer health reference services to individuals in public, academic and medical libraries.

Michelle Kraft

Michelle obtained her Masters of Library Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia focusing primarily on medical librarianship. Currently she is the head medical librarian at South Pointe Hospital. Previously she was a medical librarian at the Cleveland Clinic in the Alumni Library. She has taught medical and health information retrieval classes to physicians and other health care personnel, emphasizing effective search strategies and evaluative techniques. She regularly teaches community health center classes on finding medical information on the Internet. She is a member of the Medical Library Association and she was a participant in Library Leadership Ohio 2002.

Kelly Watson

Kelly received her Masters of Library Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She has been an Adult Services Librarian for the Bensenville Community Public Library in Bensenville, Illinois since 1999. There she serves as both reference librarian and web developer. For the past five years she has also been an instructor for the Library Technical Assistant program at College of DuPage. Recently Kelly taught a class for the staff at the Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt.