Daniel Hooker's blog

The Medical Library Association (MLA) is holding its next annual conference in Seattle, May 18th – 23rd, 2012. Attend presentations, hear from experts, see the latest products and network with over 2000 librarians. Conferences require many hands, and we are recruiting MLA members and non-members for volunteer opportunities noted below. Shifts vary from 2-4 hours, between 7 am and 7 pm.

Not an MLA member? Have you dreamed of attending MLA but couldn’t stretch your budget? This is your opportunity!  In return for every four hours of service, you receive a one-day pass! Multiple days can be earned for multiple shifts.  MLA members are not eligible for passes, but karma points are plentiful.

Volunteer Opportunities

Hospitality Information Booth:

Exercise your customer service skills! Answer questions about the conference, including schedule changes, provide information about conference and emergency services, transportation, restaurants, and other Seattle-related fun facts.

Prepare Annual Meeting Bags:

This fun, one-time event will be, Thursday, May 17th, 2012 (mid-day). Rock out in your comfy shoes while you interact with other volunteers. Lunch provided.

Placement Center and Member Resource Room:

Meet and greet in a quiet environment while you monitor computers, equipment and other resources available for members. If business is slow, you may even have time to sneak in a little reading…

Interested? Please respond to Ann Whitney Gleason: amwhit24@u.washington.edu

Conference website: http://www.mlanet.org/am/am2012/index.html

In the past two weeks or so, we have been working to get a number of new resources made available on the website.

Most notably, we have begun to upload issues of the quarterly newsletter that many of you will remember, the HLABC Forum. So far we have issues dating back to 1997, and there are many gems in these issues, for example:

• In Winter 2006/2007, there is a guest column by Tracy Havlin, who at the time was the director of the National Medical Library in United Arab Emirates University.
• In Spring/Summer 2006, there is an early mention of social media and blogging, and some tips for how to get started.
• An early mention of eHLBC comes in Autumn 2003.
• In April 2003, still well over half of all reported journal subscriptions were coming in print.

Please enjoy browsing these archived issues, and there are still many more older issues to come, so in the comments, please keep us updated with the interesting tidbits you find in your exploration. All the issues are posted on SlideShare as well, so that they are easy to share and embed in your personal blogs and websites.

For members, we have added:

• Members List. I've had a number of requests for the member database that was previously available. For now, I've uploaded the old PDF file that has members up to May 2010. But we are hard at work compiling a more useful database that will be made available online soon.
• Meeting Minutes. Archived agendas and minutes from executive and general meetings are now being archived on the website. Those that are available are all listed, and if anyone has other minutes that are not currently online, please send them to daniel.h [at] ubc.ca.

Please note: you will need to have an account and be logged in to the website to view the members list and meeting minutes. If you are an HLABC member and do not have a website account, please register here.

Thanks to our colleague in Nova Scotia, Michelle Helliwell, for sharing this talk about "Battling Bad Science." In the talk, epidemiologist Ben Goldacre describes the astonishing speed with which scientific data and findings can be distored in the media.

As librarians, we deal with issues around evidence and information quality everyday. Do you agree with Dr. Goldacre? Do you think health librarians have a role to play in improving this information cycle?

An update on Year End Activities that may impact your searching from the National Library of Medicine:

On November 16, 2011, NLM® expects to temporarily halt the addition of fully-indexed MEDLINE citations to PubMed. NLM indexing staff will continue to index citations, but these completed records will be held and not added to PubMed until the normal update schedule resumes. Once the end-of-year activities are complete (tentatively targeted for mid-December 2011), the normal MEDLINE/PubMed update schedule will resume, and PubMed will use 2012 vocabulary in the MeSH® translation tables and MeSH database, as well as in the citation data.

Please visit the announcement page for more information. Share your thoughts: how will this impact the projects you're working on? And how do you plan to work around it?

Please pardon the dust while we finish completing site construction. This winter, the site will be completed, and will feature content for members including a news blog, events calendar, informational resources and membership renewal. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Thank you for your patience!
Sincerely, 2011-2012 HLABC executive committee