This year the Health Libraries Group (HLG) celebrates its 75th birthday, and as part of their celebrations they hosted a poster competition in partnership with the campaign A Million Decisions. The posters were to be on the theme of the past, present and future of health libraries. The RCN Library’s entry to the competition shows a timeline of our history, as we're celebrating our centenary this year. Janan Nuri told HLG conference attendees about how the RCN Library’s history is closely linked to the evolution of the nursing profession.
Our first qualified and full-time librarian at the RCN was Alice Thompson, hired in 1949. She was a strong advocate for nursing libraries in hospitals, lamenting the fact that "nursing libraries" were often a pile of books in a locked cupboard, inaccessible to students.
As far as we know she was involved in the early days of the Health Libraries Group, trying to encourage the formation of these hospital libraries. Thompson also wrote that in its early days, nursing possessed few books as it was “essentially a practical skill … and those few [books] were usually written at an elementary level by doctors”.
How do you address that lack of literature? Well, Thompson was close to Marjorie Simpson. Not the yellow Marge Simpson with blue hair, but Marjorie Simpson who also worked at the RCN, who was in a leading position in the research department and helped establish the RCN’s Research Society.
So, imagine this power duo, if you will, a librarian and a nurse, with a goal to elevate nursing from a professional standpoint. The context here is: nursing was predominantly a women's profession, and even now about 90% of nurses in the UK are women. Nurses had been fighting for registration for decades, before it was finally codified in the Nurses’ Act in 1919 (just one year after some women got the right to vote).
Some Doctors and politicians at the time were writing that nursing shouldn't be taken seriously as a profession, that nurses certainly weren't on the same level as doctors. There was a fight for equality happening at this time between the medical professions, and nursing had to fight for validity.
By the 1960s, Simpson's work, supported by Thompson, enabled nursing research to become central to nursing practice. This helped show that nursing is not a phase of social work, or a lesser medicine, but valuable in itself.
All of this, the shift towards more research in nursing was imperative. This was an important and exciting time for the future of the RCN library. The idea of nursing centring around care and vocation evolved and strong foundations were established for it to be linked to the medical and academic spheres.
This led to more nurses getting higher university degrees, becoming lecturers, and specialising in different medical areas, and that in turn led to a boom in nursing literature, which obviously helped the RCN library grow.
To illustrate that point, in 1922 the library was formed with only 273 books, and even though that number had doubled within three months, only one or two were textbooks specifically for nursing. The shift to research, the evolution of the profession changed that. By the 1980s our collection became Europe's largest nursing specific collection.
In the 1980s more and more students began using the RCN Library, and the head of service Tony Shepherd really helped to ensure our collections and library offer helped students, developing literature search training sessions and working with other health libraries to make sure that librarianship could support this new education.
In 2016, our current heads of service advocated for a digital first collection policy in 2016 to properly serve our members across the country (and the world for defence nurses). So, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we found ourselves grateful that most of our services were already available online beforehand so we could continue serving our members.
Fast forward to today, we support nearly half a million RCN members across the UK throughout their nursing career. Our training sessions and events continue to have high booking rates, and the postal loan service we offered from the start in 1922 is still going strong in 2022.
Currently the RCN Library and Archive Service is actively helping members as they prepare to take part in industrial action on fair pay, whilst ensuring patient safety. This is the first time in the RCN's 106-year history that our members have voted for industrial action, so it's history in the making. We're proud to continue supporting nurses now and into the future.
You can view a copy of the poster on Twitter, and you can uncover more of our history by exploring the #RCNLibrary100 tag.
