How a Hospital Librarian Spends Their Days

This week’s episode of The Culture Study Podcast is all about the connections between the manosphere, paleomasculinity, and CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL. It’ll piss you off and connect some dots and I can’t wait to hear your thoughts on it. Click the magic link to listen wherever you get your podcasts, and sign up to get new episode notifications below:

In response to my piece on how How I Write Culture Study, I asked readers if they’d want to participate in a series where people from various professions talk about their work lives, explaining how they organize their days and weeks, how they protect their time, when and how they do their work and how and when they attend to their inbox, etc. etc.

Our first entries in the series are from a freelance audiobook narrator, a gardening ceramacist, an engineering grad student, a hairstylist, and a collaborative pianist. Today, you’ll hear about what it’s like work as a hosptial librarian.

If you’d like to volunteer to talk about a day/week in your life for a potential interview — crucially, this work does not have to be for pay; I’d love to hear from caregivers — here’s the very simple sign-up.

Now, let’s hear from Carrie Grinstead about how she deals with AI bot creating trash citations, cleaning up robot work, and how she responds to people who say “but everything’s on the internet.” This one’s so fascinating!

Let’s start with how you described your work to me:

I’m a hospital librarian. I search databases and other sources for information to support nurses, doctors, dietitians, PTs, etc. with any number of tasks -- patient care, research, arguing with insurance companies. These days I also fight with all the AI bots that generate fake citations, spit out inaccurate evidence summaries, and do a terrible job of indexing articles. I work for a large health system and absolutely love my job, but it’s a terrifying time as hospitals lose funding and state-supported conspiracists dress up weird lies as scholarly evidence.

Because people will ask this immediately: how did you get this job?

I had pretty much decided on library school by my senior year of college. I was about to get a degree in history and planned to get an MFA, and I knew I wasn’t resourceful or clever or talented enough to turn either of