WASHINGTON Patricia Brennan, 63, is the first registered nurse to be the director of the National Library of Medicine. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Youre a nurse and a librarian.

Nope, Im a nurse and an engineer. I happen to be heading a library, but Im not a librarian.

How are you not a librarian?

You cant call yourself a librarian by nature of your job but by your training. The first month I was here I kept going to classes to learn what librarians do. The world is changing, and our substrate of knowledge is becoming data, not articles.

Go way, way back in medicine to the Greeks, and medicine was an experiential knowledge base. The early physicians didnt know why sunlight helped certain diseases. When you get into the 19th and 20th centuries, medicine was based on the results of experiments or answers to questions.

That mattered to the library because we went from having these beautifully illustrated volumes and discourses to having articles that reported experiments. In the 21st century were moving into data as the basis. Instead of an experiment simply answering a question, it also generates a data set. We dont have to repeat experiments to get more out of the data.

This idea of moving from experiments to data has a lot of implications for the library of the future. Which is why I am not a librarian.

This is where medicine is happening now. Not in a lab.

Well, my question was going to be: If youre a nurse and a librarian, how do you know which one to dress up as sexy for Halloween?

See, when youre an engineer you already have that decided. You wear your jeans.

What do you think the National Library of Medicine will look like in five years?

We will increasingly be experimenting with different kinds of information presentation.

One of our laboratories now uses virtual reality to provide experiential exposure to information so people actually get placed in a scenario with avatars, so they can rehearse getting ready, in this case, for disaster management. Im in the process of setting up my own laboratory here. I want to expand my use of virtual reality for information engagement. That will be largely for lay people.

Disseminating information in ways that do not require reading but allow people to interact with it in other ways is going to be very important.

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The director of the National Library of Medicine talks virtual reality - Greensboro News & Record