A retiring librarian?

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 51, No. 3, April 2009, Page 129 College Library
By: Karen MacDonell, PhD, MLIS Judy Neill

No one who has ever met Linda Clendenning would say that she is retiring. Her effervescence, intelligence, integrity, and com­passion mark a personality that has been a standard at the College Library for almost 40 years. Linda came to us as a newly minted graduate of the University of Alberta and the UBC School of Librarianship in 1969. The then BC Medical Library Service was a very different place from the College Library we have today: it was completely print-based (not a computer in sight); telephones, a telex machine, and Canada Post functioned as the chief communication tools; and the reference service was based on manually plowing through issues of Index Medicus.

Linda began her medical library career as the assistant librarian to director Bill Fraser, but she eventually moved on to become a co-manager. Her natural curiosity and broad knowledge base made her the “go to” person for sticky questions. Linda mentored many budding librarians and library technicians over the years and made a strong, positive impression on them. Prompt, organized, and thorough was her approach, and we still aspire to that standard today. Indeed, Linda’s abilities and charming sense of humor led one BC physician to refer to her as “the Oracle.”

Linda retired from the College Library on 31 December 2008 and will be missed by us all. We wish her well in her new endeavors, to which she will bring the same refreshing enthusiasm and energy with which she does everything. Retired, yes. But retiring? Never.

—Karen MacDonell
—Judy Neill
Librarians/Co-managers
CPSBC Library

Karen MacDonell, PhD, MLIS, Judy Neill. A retiring librarian?. BCMJ, Vol. 51, No. 3, April, 2009, Page(s) 129 - College Library.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
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For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

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