Do you ever forget how good you are at your job?

I do. But today I had a nice little reminder.

A researcher needed help to locate a health questionnaire that had been published in a journal. She'd made some headway, but was stumped when it came to finding the full-text. I took her through a few steps about finding out which database holds a particular journal in full-text, how to navigate through a journal's archive to find an article, using the reference list in an article to locate source documents, and using citation linking features in a database to identify more recent work that cited the article we were looking at.

To be honest, it was all pretty simple stuff. For me, the real work is in explaining what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and how the researcher can do it themselves in future.

We found the questionnaire (happy ending!) and the researcher was so pleased. She'd spent many hours trying to do what we accomplished in that session. And it reminded me - I'm actually really good at my job. I'm awesome at finding information. I'm excellent at talking people through steps in a way that makes sense and that will make their jobs easier. I haz skillz.

FIGJAM.