Faith A. Meakin, MLS, AHIP, FMLA, retired March 8, 2007, after 13 years as the Director of UF's Health Science Center Libraries and more than 40 years as a medical librarian.

    Faith worked many jobs in several prestigious libraries during her decades of service: a summer internship at Harvard's medical library; a postgraduate fellowship at UCLA’s Biomedical Library; 14 years at the medical school at UC-San Diego, first as a reference librarian and ending as head of Public Services, with a one-year National Library of Medicine fellowship at the University of Minnesota during that time. In 1983, Faith took a position at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, as Head of Reference and Readers’ Services, where she coordinated the headquarters library and the reference services in the six regional offices, and played a large role in the training program for librarians in developing countries, traveling extensively during her five years there. She spent the next five years after that as executive director with the Southeastern/Atlantic region of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine at the University of Maryland at Baltimore.

    In May 1994 Faith became director of the UF Health Science Center Libraries. Some of the Libraries’ accomplishments under her direction about which she is most proud include the following: an innovative Liaison Librarian program, begun in 1999 and a model for many other libraries; negotiating funding from the College of Nursing and the UF Genetics Institute to provide salaries for a dedicated Nursing and a dedicated Bioinformatics librarian; an expanded education program, which brings the library to the patrons, with librarians teaching course-integrated classes in collaboration with faculty; placing librarians on curriculum committees for the six HSC colleges; and integrating Jacksonville’s Borland Library, which provides services to UF's clinical and educational programs located there, into the HSC Libraries.

    During her tenure at the UF HSC Libraries, Faith was awarded many competitive fellowships in the field of medical librarianship and had a long career of service and scholarly contributions to the field. In 1997, she received the prestigious Woods Hole Informatics Fellowship sponsored by the National Library of Medicine. In May 2004 she was named a Fellow of the Medical Library Association in recognition of her outstanding and sustained contributions to the field, and was elected to MLA’s National Board of Directors the same year. Although Faith had many assignments in MLA, the AHIP program and MLA’S earlier medical librarian certification programs were of particular interest to her. In recent years she helped establish a Leadership and Management section, which she felt had been an area in MLA needing support and vision. Simultaneously she recognized the need for succession planning for academic library directors and is proud of the AAHSL Leadership programs that developed from that idea.

    Faith's post-retirement plans include traveling with her husband Skip, taking courses at the community college (especially digital photography), and getting back to gardening (especially her herbs and flowers). And she's looking forward to the three 'R's of Resting, Reading and Really getting in shape, so she and her husband can do some geocaching (an outdoor, worldwide treasure-hunting game).

    “The time has just flown by. I have loved being a medical librarian: it is the best profession in the world – never boring, and always with something new to learn or do. I will miss being part of team, and I'll miss the excitement, the joy and the sense of camaraderie. I've loved watching this new generation of professionals develop their own way to serve and demonstrate their passion for the profession. And I've always appreciated the paraprofessionals, systems and administrative staff that work every day to make sure the library stays open, that the digital library is always available, and that the bills get paid. It is always the people who make work a joy - thank you all for the contributions you have made to my tenure here!"

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