2003 Award Recipient Cherie Haitz

Cherie Haitz became a 'real librarian in 1976' , those are her exact words…..prior to that she worked at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center library, the Malcolm Bliss Mental Health Library in St. Louis, the University of Vermont Medical Library, CIR – Consortium for Information Resources. That's pretty impressive, considering she wasn't a real librarian yet.

Cherie completed her MLS at Simmons in 1976. She worked for the Office of Continuing Education at Tufts Medical with Dr. Norman Stearns on a project entitled, PCRR – Patient Care Related Reading. She wrote grants and articles and did a little grants administration. Then Cherie worked as the On-Line Coordinator/Technical Resource Person at the first New England RML at Countway from 1978 to 1981. This position sealed her love for computers and NLM. She was in a three week training class at NLM and at the time, NLM had just put MEDLINE on an IBM 360 with disk storage. Through this position she worked with many of the health science librarians who founded MASHLIN.

In 1981, she moved to her current position as Director of the Health Sciences Library at Mount Auburn Hospital. Cherie likes to point out that next to Beth Israel, Mount Auburn was the second site for the PAPERCHASE System grant developed by Dr. Howard Bleich. It was the first MEDLINE end-user system and way ahead of its time, to quote Cherie.

Cherie was also involved with the CHIN project – Community Health Information Project – for consumer and patient information that included outreach to the public libraries in Cambridge and surrounding towns. She likes to point out that once again they were ahead of times and that there was not a lot of consumer health literature available.

One could say that Cherie's career in health science librarianship mirrors the changes that have occurred in the field over the last 25 years. She has managed always to be on the cutting edge. We honor Cherie today with an acknowledgment of her long career in medical librarianship and the contributions she has made to the professional. Her keen wit and sense of humor have always kept us entertained as her dedication to the profession has also kept us inspired.


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