Annual MLA Meeting

Medical Library Association

On Sunday Jennifer presented a paper at the Annual Meeting of the MLA. The paper, co-authored by Jennifer, Sandy and Dr. Marion Slack from the College of Pharmacy, described a role-playing approach to teaching how to search scholarly literature. Jennifer spoke to a full house and answered several questions – a very successful presentation.

Brooke, Annabelle and Jeanette were co-authors, along with several other people, of a paper presented by Keith Cogdill from the University of Texas, San Antonio. This paper described the Frontera Collaboration, our collaborative project on border health information involving Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

Jennifer presented another paper on Tuesday, this one co-authored by Dr. Marie Chisholm-Burns, Sandy and several others. Her presentation described the process of carrying out a systematic review of the pharmacy literature looking for evidence of the effect of pharmacists as team members on patient care. Again this was a very full room and Jennifer answered several questions and spoke to some audience members after the talk.

Also spotted at MLA were Clinical Education Librarians Kathleen Carlson from ASU, Marni Ditmar from TMC, Sally Harvey from Good Samaritan/Banner Health and Kathy Zeblisky from Phoenix Children’s Hospital. (Please let me know if I missed anyone.)

The meeting included many interesting papers and plenary speakers. I hope that those who attended can share what they learned with everyone else. I think everyone who attended has returned with new ideas, new information and new energy!

MLA meeting (2)

Report from Washington (2)
This morning we heard the annual update from the National Library of Medicine. It’s a great reminder of the many programs and resources that they make available to the health sciences library community. We also heard the inaugural address of Ruth Holst, incoming president of the MLA, and were invited to attend next year’s meeting in Minneapolis. This afternoon Annabelle gave an invited presentation on AHSL’s collaboration with the College of Public Health, the Pima County Public Library, the Southwest Institute for Research on Women, and the UA Department of Women’s Studies to raise academic and community awareness of HPV (human papillomavirus).

Medical Library Association meeting

Report from Washington
I’m in Washington, DC at the Medical Library Association annual meeting. Others from HSL who are here are: Annabelle, Brooke, Carol, Mary R., Pat, and Sandy. At least three of our Clinical Education Librarians are here also: Becky Birr, Kathy Zeblisky and Marni Ditmar. Our three Knowledge River Interns, Azul, Iris and Ramona are also here and seem to be enjoying the conference. Yesterday Annabelle and Carol gave presentations as part of a half-day symposium called, “The Informationist in Practice.” The large room was packed and people were really interested in hearing what they had to report. Today we were well represented in the poster sessions. Annabelle, Brooke and Jeanette were co-authors on a poster about the Frontera Collaboration on border health and Jacque was a co-author on a poster about libraries on new health sciences campuses.

Election, Meeting

Special Election
President Shelton has outlined his plans if the one-penny sales tax does not pass. In an April email he explained the current one-year furlough plan and went on to say, “However, it is important to note that more extreme budget actions, including the prospect of additional furlough days, will become necessary if Proposition 100 fails at the ballot on May 18th. The State has approved two budgets for the coming year. The first is dependent on the passage of Proposition 100, which is a temporary three-year sales tax increase of 1 cent. There is a contingency budget that will go into effect if Proposition 100 fails, and that would result in an additional cut of $42 million to the University of Arizona.

To cut an additional $42 million from our budget would necessitate a substantial increase to the furloughs, along with a significant reduction in jobs and major cuts in other areas, including student financial aid. Obviously we will not know if these additional cuts will be required until after the May election.”

If you haven’t voted today I encourage you to vote before the polls close at 7 PM. Time away from work to vote is excused.

MLA Annual Meeting
Several librarians will be attending the Medical Library Association annual meeting in Washington, DC this week and next. There are committee meetings beginning on Thursday, continuing education classes on Saturday and the opening of the meeting on Sunday. The conference ends on Wednesday, May 26 but there are few more classes offered that day. Supported by the National Library of Medicine, our Knowledge River interns, Azul, Iris and Romona, will be attending the meeting.

Election, Discussion, Retrieval, Spirit

Brooke elected!
Brooke has been elected President of SABL (Southern Arizona Biomedical Librarians) for 2010. Congratulations Brooke!

Carol speaks!
Carol has been invited to participate in a panel discussion at a pre-conference symposium at the annual meeting of the Medical Library Association in Washington, DC in May. The symposium is about “informationist” programs – librarians with subject expertise who work closely with clients. Carol has been asked to take part in the panel on clinical informationists. Other panelists will represent Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt and the NIH library.

MeSH Rebounds!
Mary Holcomb has been working with UAL staff for over a year to get the MeSH headings in the Innovative catalog to function correctly. Finally the problem was identified and corrected and now MeSH headings can be used to search the catalog with reliable results. Mary has also had a new MeSH feature turned on in the Serials Solutions A-Z list. When you go to eJournals ( http://zp9vv3zm2k.search.serialssolutions.com/?V=1.0&L=ZP9VV3ZM2K&N=100&S=T_AZ&C=A ), you now have a choice of selecting " a subject category" or "a medical subject category," the latter of which uses broad MeSH headings to search the electronic journal holdings.

Go Cats!
No, we in the office are not too lazy to take down the ornaments hanging from the ceiling. If you look carefully, a small basketball and UA Wildcats basketball posters have joined the red and blue globes. Our holiday decorations have been converted to a show of team spirit and will stay up through basketball season.

Meeting, AZHIN contract

MLA Chapter Meeting
Several folks from AHSL are attending the joint meeting of two regional chapters of the Medical Library Association in Glendale, AZ. Mary Riordan, Brooke, Jacque and Lindsey all worked on various committees to organize this meeting. Clinical Education Librarians Becky Birr and Kathy Zeblisky are co-chairs of the entire meeting and Lora Robbins and April Aguinaga have also worked on committees. We also have several people presenting papers and posters. Jeanette presented both a paper and a poster, on behalf of her several co-authors from other libraries, reporting on our collaboration with the other libraries of the Tribal Connections Four Corners project. Annabelle presented a paper, on behalf of her co-author Martha Moore-Monroy from the U of A, on Information and Outreach about HPV and the HPV Vaccine. Jacque, Lindsey and Kathleen Carlson of ASU (one of our Clinical Education Librarians) presented a paper on the challenges of developing a new library. Carol presented a paper, on behalf of her co-authors Pat and Gary, on our process of supervisor evaluation.

AZHIN Contract
Sponsored Projects approved the AZHIN administrative contract this week. Although expected, this is always good news. AZHIN will pay the library over $100,000 during 2010 to handle its administrative and technical affairs; the amount includes salaries, technical support, travel, and various miscellaneous items. This is the 12th year that the library has managed this account.

Bookeye, MLA

Bookeye!
Recently ILL staff got some online training in the use of the new Bookeye scanner. This overhead scanner produces high quality images from an opened book or journal. Jennifer Lee will be happy to give you a demo. Just send her an email to reserve a time.

MLA
Several people from AHSL will be attending the annual meeting of the Medical Library Association. This year’s meeting is in Chicago and runs from Friday 5/16 to Wednesday 5/21.

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!

Window shades, MLA

Window shades
We now have adjustable window shades in the group study rooms on the 4th floor. Students have been asking for these for years and they seem to be making use of them. There is a lot less glare and the rooms look cooler.

MLA
Many folks in the library will be at the annual meeting of the Medical Library Association in Philadelphia over the next week. The office staff will know how to contact people if necessary.