Blog post by Rita Mitchell! Moderating a table discussion at MLA ’26

Hi, this is Rita Mitchell, librarian at Aurora Sinai Medical Center in Milwaukee, WI and a recipient of a WHSLA professional development award. Back in September of 2025, I decided to reply to a call for volunteers for the MLA Living Book events organized by the MLA Community Building and Belonging Committee (CBB). I was interested in being a “book” for the live event being held at MLA ’26. The CBB committee was facing difficulties with having only 1 or 2 members able to attend the MLA ’26 conference in person, so fellow caucuses joined in to collaborate on a roundtable event. The Living Book event was not going to happen. The CBB committee decided to invite interested “books” who would be in Milwaukee at MLA ’26 to participate in the Storytelling Roundtable. This made the theme of the MLA ’26 Conference – Cultured Collaborations, very relevant. I volunteered, helped plan the details of the event, and participated as a moderator of a table.

Here is the description:

The Community Building and Belonging Committee along with Accessibility and Disability and Social Justice and Health Disparities Caucuses invite you to join us in sharing our stories of resilience, change, and confusion due to recent changes in our country and professional community. The hope is not only to have space for catharsis, but to share strategies for problem solving, working around, working through and resisting. An additional aim is to widen, strengthen or establish a network of support for members facing issues related to identity, community building, belonging, social justice, and/or accessibility.

Roundtables will have moderators to help guide conversation, some with defined topics for those that wish to focus on a particular issue, but others that are open for more mixed conversations. We will have a Padlet as a mechanism for recording discussions/reporting back which allows for both named and anonymous participation.

I was the moderator for one of the tables at the event: Later in Life Disabilities: Adapting to a disability later in life presents unique challenges. Join the conversation on how to manage this transition and provide meaningful support to others.

This allowed me a space to talk about my recently acquired disabilities – I suffered a Subdural Hematoma, a traumatic brain injury, in June of 2020. I spent June and July in the Neuro ICU and then went to a rehabilitation facility specifically for head injury patients. I didn’t return home until December and returned to work part time in January of 2021. I received exceptional support from my director, manager and teammates during my hospitalization/rehab and after my return to home and work. I thought sharing what this entailed might be helpful to others. What do you do when you or someone you work with “get hit by a bus”? Pardon the expression, but this is what we would say at a former job I had – be ready or have your job documented in case someone needs to take over when you “get hit by a bus”. Well, I did get “hit by a bus”, but I had the support of my colleagues and my family to pull me through.

I had a very engaging conversation at my “Later in Life Disabilities” table, and I hope I shared some pearls of wisdom with the participants.

Some pearls of wisdom for the manager/director of someone with a later-in-life disability:

• Be present for their family if it is welcomed – my husband appreciated the calls from my director about insurance and medical leave tasks that needed to be completed while I was in the hospital.

• Manage the person’s work email – I was gone for 7 months and having my important emails addressed and the “not so important” emails put in a folder was extremely helpful. Bonus – we didn’t lose any patrons or service requests because I was absent and couldn’t respond to an email.

• Accommodations/work restrictions – these are very important to have in place. Managers should be able to help direct the employee to the correct forms or HR contacts to have these in place.

Pearls for those living with a later-in-life disability:

• Life is too short to be miserable at work – find your support network, reach out and find those who have similar challenges or experiences.

• Ask for help when you need it and give yourself grace (Giving yourself grace means cutting yourself some slack. It’s about letting go of perfection, dropping the harsh inner critic, and allowing yourself to be human. Treat yourself with the same kindness, patience, and understanding you would offer a good friend – from Jenna Overbaugh).

• Be honest – if you are having a bad day, let it be, and let your manager know. Open communication is key to your success and happiness at work.

Helping with the planning process allowed me to meet some fantastic MLA members from different locations and different types of libraries. I get very nervous about presenting or speaking with peers, but this experience of moderating “difficult conversations” has helped me gain some confidence and provided the conference speaking engagement I needed. My biggest takeaway was that MLA is an organization for the profession, but also for people. The MLA Community Building and Belonging Committee is there to support inclusivity, fairness and belonging within the organization, at all levels. A huge thank you to WHSLA for the financial support provided to attend the conference in Milwaukee, and to the MLA CBB committee for inviting me to be part of the Storytelling Roundtable.

Note: Posted on behalf of Rita Mitchell 🌟

A bit of Cuteness for Your Week: Neil the Seal!

 

Take a minute  from your busy week to check out this adorable Australian news report on Neil the Seal, Tasmania's famous resident elephant seal, "breaking hearts...and everything else." 

Video embedded below.

Happy watching! ☕

No deaths from cervical cancer?!

Zero. That’s the Magic Number.

It is not very often that we get a piece of news so undeniably positive that it stops you in your tracks, but a landmark study covered by the BBC recently delivered exactly that.

According to data tracking public health in England between 2020 and 2024, zero women aged 20 to 24 died from cervical cancer. For the first time since records began, an entire age bracket saw absolutely zero deaths from a historically devastating disease. 

 

How the HPV vaccine provides broad defense against cancer-causing strains.. Source: Cleveland Clinic

What the Data Tells Us

The women in this 20-to-24 age bracket were offered the vaccine back when they were 12 and 13 years old. In England, roughly 90% of girls took it at that time.

Before this vaccination program rolled out in 2008, cervical cancer was a terrifyingly real threat to young women. Researchers calculated that without the routine vaccine, at least 23 young women in that specific cohort would have lost their lives to the disease over that four-year window. Instead? None did.

Globally, the impact is even wider. The study estimates that the vaccination initiative has prevented around 200 cervical cancer deaths across all age groups in England so far.

Why the Fight Isn't Over

As incredible as this milestone is, health experts are pairing their celebration with an urgent warning.

"It's essential that the UK Government and health systems urgently address this with targeted action to reach communities where uptake is the lowest." — Michelle Mitchell, Chief Executive of Cancer Research UK

While the early cohorts hit that brilliant 90% uptake mark, vaccination rates have begun to slip slightly in recent years. Furthermore, the vaccine works best when given before a person is exposed to the virus (which is passed easily through skin-to-skin contact). This is why catching kids around age 11–13 is so vital.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has set a global goal to completely eliminate cervical cancer as a public health issue. This study gives us the hard, undeniable proof that elimination isn't just a pipe dream—it is entirely possible if we keep vaccination rates high.

Where Does the U.S. Stand?

According to the CDC's National Immunization Survey, U.S. vaccination coverage tells us we still have quite a bit of ground to cover. While nearly 78% of American teens start the vaccine similar to the UK, only about 63% finish it. 

HPV Vaccination Status (U.S. Teens Aged 13–17)	National Average
Initiated the Series (Received ≥1 dose)	78.2%
Up-to-Date (Completed all recommended doses)	62.9%

Furthermore, U.S. progress has plateaued, showing no significant statistical increase for three consecutive years. The data also reveals massive geographic and structural disparities across the country:

• The State-by-State Divide: Immunization completion rates vary drastically depending on where you live. For instance, Massachusetts leads the nation with 79.8% of teens up-to-date, while Mississippi sits at the bottom at 39.1%.

• The Rural-Urban Gap: Teenagers living in rural areas are significantly less likely to be fully vaccinated against HPV than their peers in major urban centers—a gap that has stubbornly persisted for nearly a decade.

• The Power of a Recommendation: The CDC noted that when a pediatrician or healthcare provider explicitly recommends the vaccine, uptake jumps by roughly 20%.

For the whole article from the Lancet, visit here.

Article of Interest: Most arXiv papers contain information never meant to be shared

 

Image by geralt from Pixabay

An interesting read from Nature. A study by Pennekamp et al. (2026) (which is currently in the preprint stage) looked at over 2.7 million entries in the arXiv preprint server to see how many records may have unintentionally shared sensitive information. The authors of the study found that an astounding 88% of records appeared to have shared such information in their associated LaTeX files (being a software used to typeset documents), "from arguments between co-authors and to-do lists acknowledging weaknesses in the text, to passwords, GPS coordinates that can reveal a researcher’s home address, and application programming interface (API) keys — strings of characters that function like passwords for programmers."

As discussed in the feature from Nature, the accidental sharing of information via LaTeX files is not a new phenomenon. One study by Apruzzese and Fass (2026) even uncovered comments such as "WTF does this mean?" in their analysis of arXiv preprints (being a comment I think most academics can empathize with😄). 

The Nature article cautions researchers to be careful to remove sensitive information from files before submitting them to preprint servers like arXiv, as such information can be difficult (if not impossible) to efface once posted, and can be potentially discovered by large language models.

Happy reading! ☕

Reflections from MLA '26 by Michele Matucheski

 

Michele Matucheski, MLIS, AHIP and Kellee Selden, MLIS at MLA'26 in Milwaukee. 

I was fortunate to receive a WHSLA Professional Grant to attend the MLA '26 Conference held in Milwaukee last May.   This post full fills the grant requirement to share what I learned with my WHSLA colleagues.

I was pleased to be able to attend MLA this year so close to home, and glad that WHSLA made it possible for so many of us to attend this year.   [THANK YOU, WHSLA!]  

Having attended several MLA Conferences over the last 25 years,  this one seemed much reduced in terms of attendance and vendors.  The first MLA conference I attended was in Chicago in 2000 (or so) and had roughly 5000 attendees in person.  This time, it was less than 1000 people, with some attending virtually.  Despite the reduced attendance, MLA still put on a great conference with many interesting presentation topics.  Many attendees gave multiple presentations.

I did appreciate all the gouda cheese puns woven throughout the conference.  Ha Ha!

This paper that stuck with me the most was:  

Beyond the Widget Count: Telling Our Story with Microsoft Loop and Co-Pilot by Katherine Staab, AHIP, of Kaiser-Permanente (KP) Libraries.  

Although I didn't know it when I sat in on this paper, it was a continuation of an older KP effort to show the value of libraries not just with statistics but also a narrative to explain the numbers.   Their efforts have evolved to incorporate some AI tools, specifically Microsoft Loop and Co-Pilot, to collect the monthly narratives from ALL the KP Librarians to help fill in the bigger story about How much did we do in the last month?  and What changed because of what we did?  They also made an effort to link it back to company goals and objectives, which translates the value of Library Services into the language organizational leaders will understand.   The tools make it much easier to gather the narratives from library staff so that 1 person can pull it into a collective report.

2026 NLM/MLA Joseph Leiter Lecture: How AI is Reshaping Biomedical Discovery

 

2026 NLM/MLA Joseph Leiter Lecture | How AI Is Reshaping Biomedical Discovery 

This session happened at 3 pm on Friday, the last day of MLA'26.  If you left to get ahead of traffic or to catch a plane on a holiday weekend before it happened, you are forgiven.  If you missed this session, or did not attend the conference, you can still watch the recording.  Since The National Library of Medicine is our tax dollars at work, NLM makes this lecture freely available for viewing.

 

Summary from YouTube: 

Today, major breakthroughs in understanding disease biology and developing treatments require significant wet lab exploration. Emerging AI algorithms for Electronic Health Records (EHR), image processing, and molecular modeling can potentially provide an alternative means for exploring a large space of possible solutions, enabling scientists to prioritize the most promising hypotheses for testing. These developments have significant implications for data management, curation, and stewardship. In this talk, the speaker will describe several examples illustrating the power and weaknesses of current AI technology in today’s data landscape. In the second half of the talk, she will focus on the impact of training data on the performance of AI models in this discovery context and on the ethics and reproducibility considerations. 

The Joseph Leiter NLM/MLA Lecture was established in 1983 to stimulate intellectual liaison between MLA and NLM. Leiter was a major contributor in cancer research at the National Cancer Institute and a leader at NLM as a champion of medical librarians and an informatics pioneer. He served as NLM Associate Director for Library Operations from 1965 to 1983. 

Regina Barzilay, PhD, a leading expert in artificial intelligence and health, will present the 2026 Joseph Leiter National Library of Medicine (NLM)/Medical Library Association (MLA) Lecture, highlighting the growing role of AI in biomedical discovery and its implications for libraries. 

Dr. Barzilay is a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of AI and Health in the Department of Computer Science at MIT and the AI Faculty Lead at the MIT Jameel Clinic. Named to Time’s 2025 TIME100 Most Influential People in AI, her research focuses on machine learning applications in drug discovery, clinical AI, and—earlier in her career—natural language processing. Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, the AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity, and the IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Check Out MLA's User Experience Caucus' Newest Tip on Wildcards!

Image from the blog post, "Searches Gone Wild! Popular Database Platforms and Their Wildcards"

Check out the latest User Experience (UX) Caucus Database Tips blog post by Hilary Kraus and Zahra Premji: "Searches Gone Wild! Popular Database Platforms and Their Wildcards." 

In addition to providing an introduction to how wildcards work, the post also discusses potential pitfalls of using them, and a detailed look into how to use them within popular databases (which they also present as a handy table). 

Happy wildcarding! ☕

Submit Your Research Proposal to the Midwest MLA 2026 Conference!

Image adapted from Markus Winkler's from Pixabay

*Note: The text below was pasted from an announcement made by the Members of the Research Subcommittee of the 2026 Midwest MLA Annual Conference.

The Annual Conference of the Midwest Chapter/MLA Research Committee invites proposals for contributed papers, posters, and lightning sessions for the 2026 Midwest Annual Meeting, themed “Care and Comfort.” Contributed content will be presented virtually on October 22nd and 23rd.
Papers presenters will have 15 minutes, and lightning talks presenters will have 5 minutes. Poster presenters will be asked to provide a 5-minute video or audio recording ahead of time about your poster. The posters and recordings will be made available to conference attendees in advance. More details to follow in August after presenters have been notified of acceptance.

Presentations from the 2026 MLA meeting in Milwaukee are welcome. Please consider presenting it again at the Midwest MLA 2026 conference!

The deadline for submissions is Thursday, July 30th. Notifications of acceptance or rejection will be made by Thursday, August 20th.

Please use this Qualtrics Form to submit your proposal. 

Happy submitting! ☕

Reflections from MLA ’26: Cultured Collaborations (a post by Karen L. Hanus!)

As a medical librarian in Wisconsin, I was thrilled to be an active planner and participant in the Medical Library Association Conference held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin! It was especially meaningful to connect with so many Wisconsin colleagues at a national conference. It was so fun to collaborate, learn, and eat together! I’m deeply grateful to the Wisconsin Health Science Library Association for its financial support for my and so many other WHSLA members’ conference experiences. Thank you!

One of the memorable aspects of the MLA ‘26 conference was how much conference coordinators and participants leaned into cheese puns to celebrate being in the Dairy State! Visitors to the Hospitality booth were welcomed to adopt their cheese name (based on the first initial of your real first and last name) and decorate their badge with cheesy stickers. But, all the “cultured” collaborations weren’t just about cheese. I especially liked the NLM Update where Ken Koyle, NNLM Program Director, said that he didn’t have any cheese puns, but the conference lacked beer puns and he didn’t want to “let that opportunity Pabst us by!”

Beyond the playful local puns, the conference also offered the kind of substantive professional learning that makes MLA a valuable learning experience. There was an opportunity to attend a wide variety of paper sessions; I’ll report on one. In “From Brie-f Comments to Lasting Revisions: Librarian Peer Review in Action” Melissa Rethlefsen from University of New Mexico and her colleagues reported on their project to assess the differences between librarians and non-librarians in their peer review comments and analyze the comparative impact of the comments on how authors decided to revise their manuscripts. They analyzed manuscripts with at least one librarian peer reviewer and that were ultimately published. They found that librarians tended to focus on the methodology piece and barely talked about the results and discussion in contrast to non-librarian reviewers. They found there was no significant difference between whether the comments were made by librarians or non-librarians on whether authors made changes to their manuscript. The project team hopes to continue their research by looking at articles that were rejected to see if there were significant differences in how the authors reacted to comments made by librarians vs. non-librarians.

MLA’s first-ever AI Prompt-a-Thon offered me a contrast from scholarly communication to emerging tools and skills for medical librarians. In the session, attendees worked in teams of 2-5. We worked through two scenarios and developed prompts using the CLEAR prompting framework to interact with a variety of AI products. Once developed, our prompts were submitted through a form and were scored in real-time based on the adherence to the CLEAR (Concise, Logical, Explicit, Adaptive, and Reflective) framework. For an added bit of fun, teams whose prompts scored highest won a prize. My team tied for first in the PubMed Search Strategy scenario and I was awarded an Ebola virus plush toy. That was a unique conference experience and I suspect the AI Prompt-a-Thon will be repeated! Just a little tip if you ever have the opportunity to attend: be sure to bring a laptop as working on a phone is challenging.

While I appreciated the opportunity to learn as an attendee, I was also grateful to contribute to the program as a panelist at Adaptation and Navigation: Collections in a Time of Change, one of the Collection Development symposia. My co-panelists and I first outlined the content of two executive orders which revoked previous executive orders and align with a shift away from diversity-focused programs to merit-based opportunities. Then we demonstrated how ACGME and LCME accreditation requirements have evolved in response to state laws and federal actions. Nicole Thies-Mahon, Meredith Solomon and I then spoke about our different organizations’ experiences on how federal and state policy changes related to DEI have impacted our collections and practices. Each librarian had a different perspective and reflected on the different cultures in their organizations in how they are adapting.

My individual participation was just one part of a larger Wisconsin librarian presence throughout MLA ’26. I want to take this opportunity to recognize and thank all the Wisconsin librarians who helped with the planning and execution of MLA ‘26! The Local Assistance Committee (LAC) participated in various conference planning aspects including developing the Dining Guide, writing blog posts, coordinating volunteers and hospitality, planning the local service project, and highlighting museums and libraries in the area.

One of the LAC’s accomplishments was planning an awesome presentation at the J.R.R. Tolkien archives at Marquette University! The Tolkien archives tour was “sold out” quickly, but a few registrants had to cancel last minute due to flight delays. Fortunately, we were able to fill their spots to maximize participation for a fantastic event! Prior to the tour, I didn’t ever consider why the Tolkien manuscripts are at Marquette University. William Ready, library director from 1956 to 1963 had a vision to collect Catholic authors’ manuscripts for the new library. Soon after it was published, he recognized that The Lord of the Rings was a work of genius and he contacted Tolkien, a life-long Catholic, with what we now know to be a relatively modest offer to purchase the manuscripts (less than $5,000). Ready was the first to reach out with an offer and Tolkien thought it was best he’d ever get. How astounding, but how fortunate for Marquette University!

I was also pleased to have a role in the planning and execution of the My Very Own Blanket Local Service Project. MLA conference attendees came together at a blanket-making party and created 75 no-sew fleece blankets. An additional five blankets crafted by members prior to the conference raised the total to 80 hand-made blankets that were donated to Robyn’s Nest, a core support program of Children’s Wisconsin that provides essential resources to families involved in foster care. MLA’s presence positively impacted on the community in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and left tangible reminders for children in foster care. I thank WHSLA also for the generous donation to the cause, having supported 10 blanket kits for the event!

Next year’s MLA conference is going to be in Denver, CO and their convention center has a 40-foot blue bear peering in through the windows. MLA ’26 conference attendees found a “growing bear” promotional item in their conference bags. That little blue bear was a fun reminder that MLA conferences often leave us with both professional inspiration and memorable moments of joviality. So, for one last bit of fun from MLA ’26, I put my Denver blue bear in a two-gallon container of water for a couple of weeks. The package promised that the approximately two-inch bear could grow up to 600% depending on how big a container of water you’d put it in, but mine only grew to about four inches. I wonder if I put it in a swimming pool how big it would get!

The MLA ‘26 conference was a joyous and engaging experience! I am grateful for the opportunity to represent Wisconsin, learn from colleagues across the profession, and bring the inspiration of MLA ’26 back to WHSLA. Thank you again, WHSLA, for your support!

 Note: Posted on behalf of Karen L. Hanus 🌟

Article of Interest: Limitations of Open Evidence (by PAIJE!)

Congratulations to Paije Wilson and her four colleagues from UW–Madison on their recent publication in the Journal of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy!

Their article tackles the critical topic of AI accuracy in healthcare, providing a thorough review of current literature on OpenEvidence. By running specific pharmacotherapeutic queries, the team effectively demonstrated inaccuracies in how the tool generates responses and summarizes its sources. Crucially, the authors delve into source summarization inaccuracies—a nuance in AI performance that has largely been overlooked in current research.

Link to study: https://accpjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jac5.70237