MLA 2007, Wednesday 23rd May

We attended the final plenary session, known as the Joseph Leiter NLM/MLA Lectureship presented by Kent Smith on "Law, Leaders, and Legends of the Modern NLM" on Wednesday. Kent gave a historical account of four major pieces of legislation; spanning the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Act of 1956 through to the creation of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Even though the topic was quite dry, Kent did a very entertaining job of covering the history. All of the key players were introduced and the presentation included their photos. The legendary people included Michael De Bakey, Senator Lister Hill and Senator Claude Petter. Many of the major reports, press releases and descriptions of the actions taken to lobby were detailed. So much has been achieved through the established of the NLM and the National Centre for Biotechnology. The rest of the world has a great deal to be greatful for these achivements, as where would we be without free resources, such as PubMed and NLM Human Genome Resources?
Lisa Kruesi & Mary Peterson

MLA 2007 Tuesday 22nd May

Tonight, we're summarising two days - the 7am starts plus jet lag equalled two tired ladies last night!

Monday.

Both of us went to the breakfast meeting hosted by BioMed Central on open access publishing. After an explanation of how BioMed Central operates, which I think is familiar territory for most of us, the attendees were split into three groups which discussed different aspects of open access publishing and how it could or was affecting library service:
a) How librarians could collaborate with research administration and funders to set up central university funds for open access charges;
b) Administering funds for open access publication charges: memberships, individual payments, reporting and accountability;
c) How could BioMed Central adapt open access payment models to meet the needs of the medical research community?
The first two questions generated lots of discussion. Essentially, publication of research always has a cost, and which of the two publication models will prove strongest is yet to be determined. However, the move towards more open access publishing will probably be driven by the degree to which it becomes mandatory for publically funded research to be freely available. The discussion also touched on the use of institutional repositories. A highlight of the session was a talk given by Ellen Finnie Duranceau from MIT on the role of the librarian in an open access world, and how we can become actively involved in the publication contiuum.

During the day, there was considerable interest shown at the ICML stand in the Exhibition hall.

The highlight for Mary was the Emerging Technologies panel discussion session in the afternoon. A selection of new technologies was discussed which included web 2.0 and the impact of tagging as a navigational tool - user generated taxonomies or folkonomies which are a form of self cataloguing (cataloguers were warned to block their ears!) with examples brought up by the session web jockey from sites such as del.ici.ous (see the Evergreen Pines catalogue as an example of these alternative possibilites for a catalogue): Mashups, which will be big ( see the Wall of Books). In 2006 OCLC held a contest for the best mashup called Mashing up the Library. Currently, mashups need some programming skills but will become easier as mashup software is developed : Virtual Worlds (see Second Life) which are increasingly being used to provide user education programs. There was a final wrap up discussion which gave the audience a chance to vote (with clickers) on what the thought the greatest technological challenge would be for them in the next year. Interestingly, there was no one issue which stood out, but web 2 and access issues were big ones.

Tuesday was the final day of the exhibition. After the exhibition closed, Lisa attended the International Cooperation Section meeting at the end of the day. Tony McSean gave his report and handed over to the new chairperson. Bruce Madge has taken over from Becky Lyon as the representative on EAHIL. Lisa gave a report on ICML 2009.

For the Chasing the Sun participants among us, Mary had a special all-day meeting with OCLC regarding the new Flash chat screens and their increased functionality, the administration behind the scenes and the streamlining of the international CTS service with the view to its expansion - hopefully after the training session to be held during next week's Canadian Health Libraries Association conference. (Yes, I'll be blogging that one, too.)

During the evening, Mary attended a dinner hosted by NEJM and Lisa attended two dinners, first with health librarians from New Jersey, followed by a second with some British colleagues. Lots of networking underway.

That's all for tonight folks! It's after midnight.

MLA 2007 Sunday, 20th May

The MLA conference starts in earnest! That means 7am breakfast sessions, even on Sunday mornings. Mary went to hear about the latest coming up with the EndNote bibliography program and ISI's Web of Science. The next version, EndNote X1, will be coming out in the middle of the year, and includes several improvements on the EndNote X version. EndNote web has been developed for use with the Web of Science - it enables students to start learning about the techniques of researching and maintaining records of their references. For those of you who use / teach EndNote, watch out for the announcements of the new version.Lisa went to the Ovid breakfast (7 am) it gave a general update of developments in store: contextual design - Ovid SP. Watch out for more LWW backfiles; in particular nursing, psychology and psychiatry. CINAHL is definitely going from the Ovid platform. New journal titles to come include Disaster Medicine & Public Health Prepardness to help us deal with the next tsunami, 9/11, Sars etc... American Medical News (health press coverage) (we will need to compile the Australian equivalent) and others! EBM will link directly with Cochrane. Our favourite Anatomy.tv (known in the USA as Primal Pictures) now has Neuroanatomy and Anatomy for Acupuncture. It was worth getting up and I really enjoyed my blue-berry bagel. The plenary session covered peer review. The consensus seems to be that the speaker was good, but covered a lot of ground with which we as an occupational group are already familiar. There were special group / section meetings for most of the afternoon, which meant that we had time to visit some of the other exhibitors' stands.This evening was filled by an International Delegates' Reception, the Ovid party on the banks of the Delaware River and finished in one of the ballrooms with classic rock provided by the Bearded Pigs band. Who? Well, here's a hint. One of the guitars is played by Bruce Madge, formerly of the British Medical Association library and President Elect of CILIP. They're all librarians - and they weren't bad!We're posting this before we turn into pumpkins. There's another 7am meeting tomorrow!

MLA 2007 Saturday 19th - Exhibition

Koala frenzy! THe MLA trade exhibition opened on Saturday 19th May, and the stand for ICML Brisbane 2009 was a big hit! Already at least 300 of the 500 koalas have found good homes. What we're doing is attaching baby koalas to delegates' lanyards to help promote ICML Brisbane 2009 at this meeting. This is working! In addition, we're giving our calendars to start the planning process, as the US delegates need time to put away funds for the big trip. Excitement is in the air as they all consider the possibility of coming to a destination many have only dreamed about. Otherwise, there's a real buzz of activity. For us, it's exciting to be around health information professionals en masse.

Saturday, 19th May

Continuing education course: Statistics for the Statistically Challenged presented by Dr Ann McKibbon, Associate Professor, Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Health Information Research Unit, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada.The goal of the course - to show what we already know about statistics in our daily workplace; to present statistics in healthcare papers in such a way that are understandable; and to remove the stigma of statistics. This might look boring but in fact it was a whole lot of fun, stimulating and understandable. What's even more exciting is that she's coming to Brisbane to attend the informatics conference. She's indicated that she'd be willing to run the course in Brisbane. Are you interested? Please blog! We need to know! We'll organise it. You'd need to come to Brisbane as she's only here for a short time.

MLA and CHLA

Watch this space over the next few weeks for postings from the Medical Libraries Association meeting in Philadelphia and the Canadian Health Libraries Association meeting in Ottawa. Lisa Kruesi will be at MLA promoting the Brisbane ICML so we hope to attract many delegates to our shores! A training session for the Chasing the Sun after-hours virtual reference service is planned after the CHLA conference, so we might have some participants in the service from North America joining us.
Mary Peterson, HLS Secretary.

Your input needed...does health librarianship need a recognised specialist qualification at the tertiary level?

Recently a post went out on aliaHEALTH advertising units in Law Librarianship which can be undertaken in 'intensive' mode as part of QUT's Graduate Certificate in Information Management (Library Studies), its Master of Information Management program, by cross-institutional or visiting students, or as a single unit.

This has reignited discussion among the HLA Executive about exploring a similar course for health librarianship. I say reignited because the HLA strategic plan for 01/02 notes:

...it is intended that HLA will seek to influence curriculum development at the tertiary level in order to provide a recognised specialist qualification (at least one unit) at the tertiary level.

I show my personal bias here but a specialist tertiary level course would:

• provide a benchmark in 'best practice' - currently young librarians learn on the job primarily from their seniors
• make the newly qualified more 'job ready' for the specialist environment
• give recognition to the specialist skills and knowledge required of a health/medical librarian
• increase exposure to health/medical librarianship as a career option to young, up and coming librarians, of which we so urgently need in our greying profession

among other benefits.

Over to you. What to you think? Leave a comment.

Librarian presents at RACP Congress

This week Austin Health librarian, Dominique Collins, presented a session on Online Clinical Resources at the Professional Skills Day, held as part of the The Royal Australasian College of Physicians Congress.

A link to Dominique's presentation can be found on the Austin Library website.

It's great to see librarians involved in such a notable event. Well done Dominique and the Austin Health Library team!