Joint Chapter Meeting

Last week the California, Nevada and Arizona chapters of the Medical Library Association held their joint meeting in Las Vegas and Jacque, Pat and I attended. I think each of us found it to be a valuable and useful meeting. Pat presented a paper on her research into the actual reading levels of “easy-to-read” medical information. Five SIRLS Knowledge River students attended the meeting with partial support from AHSL via our NLM grant. They presented a poster on the WeSearch project, which involved local high school students. (Pat, Annabelle and Mari all helped to support the students with this project.) The students met librarians from all over the West and charmed everyone they met. Jacque and I both moderated sessions and found the papers presented to be educational and sometimes inspirational. Another SIRLS student presented a paper on “visual searching” which discussed and demonstrated web search engines that present results visually, and systems for searching visual images. Jacque moderated a panel discussion on the future of hospital librarianship.

As you can see this meeting packed a lot into two days. I won’t go into detail about the three plenary speakers; Jim Cimino, MD from NLM who spoke on “infobuttons” in electronic health records systems, Mary Guinan, MD, PhD who spoke on her varied life in public health or Tom Bassler, PhD from the Medical University of South Carolina who described their amazing outreach program.

Jeanette is going to see if we can bring a little of the meeting to AHSL by arranging for you to see one or two of the presentations. Unfortunately that is about all of Las Vegas that we can bring back to you!