Cindy Schmidt’s librarian peers recognize the depth of her experience and the width of her wisdom. This year, the Midcontinental Chapter of the Medical Library Association (MCMLA) sounded its agreement, honoring Schmidt with its 2026 Outstanding Achievement Award.
The honor is both distinct and part of a pattern; MCMLA has acknowledged Schmidt three times for Best Research Poster Award (2005, 2008 and 2019) and valued her presence on the association’s programming and research committees.
First bestowed in 1983, the Outstanding Achievement Award honors an MCMLA member “for significant contributions to the chapter and its activities, and to health sciences libraries or organizations.”
A key part of McGoogan’s Education and Research Services Librarians team, Schmidt is known for her commitment to serving others through systematic reviews and interprofessional education, Associate Dean Katie Bishop noted.
The MCMLA also expressed appreciation for Schmidt’s close collaborations with the College of Pharmacy at UNMC and the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.
Bishop values Schmidt’s “willingness to share her vast expertise with her colleagues her at McGoogan and … the profession generally,” she said. Schmidt’s contributions to the field are “truly … outstanding,” Bishop added, underlining Schmidt’s “rare” background for a health sciences librarian.
Schmidt possesses a chemistry degree from UNO as well as an M.D. in education from UNMC. Before coming to McGoogan some 24 years ago, Schmidt worked as a pathology resident, postdoctoral associate and research associate at the University of Minnesota and taught at Indiana University School of Medicine.
Join the McGoogan staff and UNMC community in congratulating and thanking Cindy!
October isAmerican Archives Monthas well asNational Medical Librarians Month. To celebrate, we’re sharing conversations with just three of the staff members that make McGoogan a shining example of a medical library and an embodiment of the archivist’s job. Today, get to know Education and Research Services Librarian Danielle Westmark.
What drew Westmark to librarianship and McGoogan
Westmark’s path revolves around a common yet always distinct story about how one class changed everything.
Unsure about her future but interested in education and public service—maybe elementary education or social work?—she took her first library science course as an undergraduate at University of Nebraska-Omaha.
The class, Introduction to Library Services, offered an overview of librarianship from nearly every aspect and angle and explained how librarians support entire communities. Westmark felt the pull, changing her academic emphasis.
From there, her way to McGoogan is lined with right-place, right-time moments.
“My career has just been happy accidents—or happy incidents,” Westmark said.
A temporary role at McGoogan after graduation became part-time, then full-time. Her support of other librarians, work at the AskUs desk and increasing excitement about supporting literature searches, answering reference questions, and supporting student and faculty research cemented Westmark’s place at the library, where she’s now been for 12 years.
The greatness Westmark sees in medical librarianship
Working at McGoogan, Westmark recognizes the uniqueness of medical librarianship, in which librarians take on numerous diverse projects and touch topics affecting the entire community.
There’s a great scope to medical librarianship—and an intimate one, Westmark noted. Working closely with students, medical librarians help them “learn the tips and tricks to using the literature databases” as well as analyze the information they discover, she said.
Medical librarians like Westmark also encourage students to ask key follow-up questions, such as: Is this good information? What makes it important? And what makes this relevant to your patient?
“Each day is a bit different,” Westmark said, noting she might spend her time with library user consultations or speak in a class, might help users with questions about citation and research tools or work alongside a faculty member seeking journal articles to aid their manuscript.
Recent rewards
Westmark has worked alongside students in the course Evidence-Based Practice 3: Systematic Reviews for Occupational Therapy for the last four years. Going beyond the already rigorous standards of a literature review, a systematic review represents “an exhaustive search on a focused question” and an attempt to find all available literature, she said.
“It’s like a puzzle to me … taking pieces of something and trying to make the picture work,” Westmark said of her joy in the process.
Watching these students take her puzzle, then apply and present the findings is exciting, she said.
Occasionally, when searching on a student’s behalf, Westmark can convey this message: “Congratulations, you found a gap in the literature.” That is, the student’s query might have been talked about but not written or studied in a significant way.
“It’s a great way to continue the conversation on their research topic and build that relationship to help support them on their research journey,” Westmark said.
More often though, she watches students take the question further—such as in their systematic review class—or to their floor, as resident nurses improve care or processes in their department. Witnessing the knowing changes they make delights Westmark.
October is American Archives Month as well as National Medical Librarians Month. To celebrate, we’re sharing conversations with just three of the staff members that make McGoogan a shining example of a medical library and an embodiment of the archivist’s job. To begin, get to know Archives Specialist Kelly Gonzalez.
What drew Gonzalez to librarianship, and archives in particular
With overlapping passions for libraries and the study of history, Gonzalez spent time as an undergraduate at Vermont’s Norwich University exploring the possibilities housed in library and museum archive jobs. Her search didn’t, ultimately, help her pick one over the other.
“I didn’t really want to make up my mind—so I didn’t, really,” she said.
Through early jobs in Pennsylvania, Georgia and elsewhere, Gonzalez explored the overlap between types of archivist jobs, acting as a sort of “liaison,” she said.
Highlighting the through lines themselves as she goes, Gonzalez appreciates any role that allows her to help people access information, regardless of collection or era.
“I like to enjoy people’s research and celebrate with them,” Gonzalez said.
She truly loves the process of undertaking the “treasure hunt,” then sending a patron off to the rest of their work and starting over with the next person, she said.
What makes medical libraries and librarianship significant
The work of a health sciences library matters, in part, because literally every person interacts with illness, doctors and health information in some way, Gonzalez said.
And though everyone needs good health information, not everyone can venture into the depths.
The terminology of bodies, ailments and cures can be intimidating, a vocabulary all their own, Gonzalez said. It truly helps to have an intermediary between medical professionals and laypeople; librarians can be these liaisons, leading patrons through big questions.
The ability to translate information across audiences, in this case everyone from students to doctors, researchers to patients, is a particular challenge for health sciences librarians—and commends their work.
“You have to be able to transform yourself, adjust how you communicate with people,” Gonzalez said. “I think I’m good at that.”
The rewards of a recent experience
Looking back at recent projects, Gonzalez relished her visit—alongside Special Collections Curator Darby Kurtz—to an iteration of this summer’s Highlander camp for elementary-aged children in North Omaha. As part of a weeklong focus on medicine, the pair presented on medical illustrations, bringing samples from the McGoogan collection such as models, porcelain doll sculptures, historical drawings, rare books and more.
Gonzalez and Kurtz discussed medical illustration as a form of communication and helped campers think through why an artist might make certain choices. They talked about historical and current developments in the field; the latter encompassing forms like holograms and other computer-designed works.
To work with an audience that would typically never enter the McGoogan space and to, once again, build bridges—between kids and their potential futures, between art and science—felt particularly rewarding to Gonzalez.
Furthering missions of preservation and especially access, McGoogan Library staff regularly digitizes materials within the library’s archives, ensuring touchpoints for generations.
Among their accomplishments, library staff recently digitized 65 historical medical films thanks to a Recordings at Risk grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). These films shed light on “mid-century psychiatry, medical education, and the use of film and media in healthcare training,” Digital Archivist Larissa Krayer wrote in a description.
Digitizing these films offers great potential value to researchers seeking to gauge how the healthcare field once understood and treated mental health.
An archivist’s approach
McGoogan archivists digitize everything from works on paper to works created with increasingly obsolete technologies such as 16mm film.
Digitized artifacts can then be used in research and teaching, displayed in online exhibits or on touch screens around campus.
Beyond materials like those covered by the CLIR grant, archivists often handle videos of groundbreakings and other moments now considered historically relevant to the UNMC community.
“If it’s on a screen, I’ve probably touched it,” Krayer said.
To complete this work, archivists familiarize themselves with technology old and new, Krayer said—and where it can be found. This might mean “scrounging” EBay, visiting the electronics section at a thrift store or absorbing knowledge from campus IT, she said.
Presented by: Dr. Amy Haddad, Professor Emerita in the School of Pharmacy and Health Professions at Creighton University
Writers who are also health care professionals and patients often draw from personal and clinical experiences. Turning observation and emotion into authentic writing can be complicated. Dr. Haddad, who is a nurse, patient and writer, will consider the ways her creative work gives voice to these roles as well as how health experiences shape content, insights and setting. Writing can be a way to work through complicated feelings brought on by traumatic events and diagnoses. She will read her poems and examine how an observation or experience makes it to the page in the form of verse. Participants will have an opportunity to reflect on and write some poetry.
Enter the drawing to receive a signed copy of The Most Potent Weapon. Copies will also be available for purchase and signing by Dr. Haddad at the in-person event. Cost is $10.
To attend the lecture via Zoom, please register here. Attend in person: MSC 2018
Dr. Amy Haddad Biography
Amy Haddad, PhD, MSN, MFA, FAAN, has educated nurses and pharmacists at Creighton University since 1988 where she also held the Dr. C.C. and Mabel L. Criss Endowed Chair in the Health Sciences. In addition, Amy served as Director of the Center for Health Policy and Ethics at Creighton from 2005-2018 and now holds the rank of Professor Emerita. She was selected in 2001 to be part of the Pew National Fellowship Program for Carnegie Scholars, studying the impact of patient simulations on health professional learning. She has also been a pioneer in the use of poetry, creative prose and narrative writing as approaches to teaching healthcare ethics.
Amy is the 2019 recipient of the Annals of Internal Medicine poetry prize for “Families Like This” for the best poem published in the journal. She won third place for the 2019 Kalanithi Writing Awards from Stanford University for her poem “Dark Rides.” Her chapbook, The Geography of Kitchens, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. Her first poetry collection, An Otherwise Healthy Woman, was published by Backwaters Press, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, in early 2022. An Otherwise Healthy Woman was awarded twice in the 2022 AJN Book of the Year Awards: first place in the Creative Works Category and second place in the Professional Issues Category. In 2025, her second chapbook, The Most Potent Weapon, was published by Bottlecap Press.
