Our words, our story: a textual analysis of articles published in the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association/Journal of the Medical Library Association from 1961 to 2010.

Purpose: This lecture explores changes in the medical library profession over the last fifty years, as revealed by individual word usage in a body of literature.

Methods: I downloaded articles published in the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association and Journal of the Medical Library Association between 1961 and 2000 to create an electronic corpus and tracked annual frequency of individual word usage. I used frequency sparklines of words, matching one of four archetypal shapes (level, rise, fall, and rise-and-fall) to identify significant words.

Results: Most significant words fell into the categories of environment, management, technology, and research. Based on word usage changes, the following trends are revealed: Compared to 1961, today's medical librarians are more concerned with digital information, not physical packages. We prefer information to be evidence-based. We focus more on health than medicine. We are reaching out to new constituents, sometimes leaving our building to do so. Teaching has become important for us. We run our libraries more like businesses, using constantly changing technology. We are publishing more research articles.

Conclusions: Although these words were chosen by individual authors to tell their particular stories, in the aggregate, our words reveal our story of change in our profession.