My goodness, Jan - - thank you for your kind words.  it's a privilege to be able to communicate with each other across the country and around the world on this forum.  

I was raised in two very small West Virginia towns by public schoolteacher parents and grandparents.  I still remember my first experience of going to a public library as a child, and memories of other libraries are also seared into my psyche.    

In the year 2000, I started doing the long commute into Washington, D.C. to work as an IBCLC.  It requires a certain amount of stubborn perseverance and probable insanity to negotiate the traffic yet again on one's day off, but the experience of going to the Library of Congress downtown, as well as the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in nearby Bethesda, Maryland on the campus of the National Institutes of Health, is such a thrill.  

I've been in Florida since 2013, and while I don't long for D.C. traffic, I do miss the NLM experience of sitting down at a computer terminal, searching for various articles, and VOILA! Full text suddenly and consistently appears! The nearest large university medical library here in north central Florida is at the University of Florida in Gainesville, an hour from here, so that's a blessing.  I often use PubMed for searches whether I'm working from home or in a library, and I occasionally use Google Scholar when full text isn't available through PubMed.  Google Scholar is very limited, but authors sometimes put up full text of their journal articles there, which is so wonderful to find without having to make the trek to a university library in order to obtain more than the abstract.  But I am not complaining - - there's an unspoken welcome that small and large libraries offer, and even the smell of libraries is comforting.  (Of course an IBCLC must refer to the importance of the sense of smell!)   

Enough of my rambling about libraries - - your kind words brought a tear or two.  Thank you again, Jan.   

Debbie   

Debra Swank, RN BSN IBCLC
Ocala, Florida USA
MoreThanReflexes Education
http://www.MoreThanReflexes.org

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