Thursday, November 17, 2016

2016 WHSLA CE stipend winner report - Elissa Kinzelman-Vesely

WHSLA awarded two $500 CE stipends in 2016. Winners are asked to submit a report of a conference/course that they attended with the funds. Here is our first report from Elissa Kinselman-Vesely. 

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On Friday, May 13th, I attended the CE course, “Leading the Way: Preparing for and Enhancing Your Leadership Role.”  The facilitators talked about different leadership styles, attendees rated themselves to assign a predominant leadership style, and using that framework, participants set 2 month, 6 month, and 1 year goals for themselves.

On Saturday, May 14th, I attended the CE course, “Literature Surveillance Apps: Tools for the Next Generation of Table of Contents Notification Services.”  The course highlighted 4 apps that are currently available for monitoring, reading, and sharing current literature: BrowZine, Docphin, Read by QxMD, and ReadCube.  I really liked this 2-hour course.

I attended the Wolters Kluwer Sunrise Seminar on Sunday, May 15th.  Ovid is now offering a web scale discovery platform for medical libraries, but like all existing discovery tools does not include the Wolters Kluwer product, UpToDate, in their central index.

Following the Sunrise Seminar, I went to first Plenary Session: Welcome and Presidential Address, followed immediately by the second Plenary Session: John P. McGovern Award Lecture given by Dr. Ben Goldacre.  Dr. Goldacre is a leader in the movement to make clinical trials publications more transparent.  Dr. Goldacre is an epidemiologist who has a much firmer understanding of statistics and scientific methodology than I have.  Using various arguments, he criticized The New England Journal of Medicine for its editorial review process and publication bias; the editor of NEJM responded to Dr. Goldacre’s statements a couple of weeks later with an email to MLA participants.  After lunch, I went to the EBSCO technology showcase for PlumX, because I was curious about the PlumX icon I’ve seen while using CINAHL.  It is really just a method of altmetrics, useful in environments where scholarly communications are tracked and measured.  Not particularly helpful in the community hospital library setting.  But at least now I know!  Following the technology showcase in the hall of exhibitors, I spent the rest of the afternoon at paper sessions: Bibliotherapy in a Hospital Setting: Promoting Health and Well-Being to Health Care Providers; Implementing an Evidence-Based Decision-Making Model in a Health Care System; Did you Remember to Wipe? An Exploration of the Attitudes of Clinical Staff and Patients Toward Library-Supported, Shared Mobile Devices in Hospitals; Merger Mosaic: The Impact of Mergers Among Health Care Institutions on Their Medical Libraries: Best Case: Multiple Libraries Meld into Single Mosaic.

Monday, May 16th started again with another Sunrise Seminar from EBSCO: “Solving the Findability Conundrum in Medical Research.”  They were talking about their web-scale discovery platform, Discovery Health.  I had to leave the seminar early to meet with my EBSCO representative in the coffee shop.  Following coffee, I attended the Janet Doe lecture by MJ Tooey.  Tooey’s lecture was titled, “We Can Be Heroes: MLA’s Leadership Journey(s).  After the Janet Doe lecture, I attended more paper sessions: “Act Like a Librarian, Think Like an Administrator”: Using Data to Communicate with Administration ( I really liked this presentation); Medical Library Marketing: An Investigation of Current Definitions and Practices; Understanding User Needs Through Focus Groups; A Five-Year Information Technology (IT) Roadmap for a Health Sciences Library; Exploring Tomorrow: Development of a New Technology Exploration Program and Space.  Following the morning paper sessions, I attended the EBSCO Medical Librarian Luncheon, and then spent some time in the Hall of Exhibitors.  I then sat in on the Hospital Libraries Section Business Meeting and Ice Cream Social.  Awards were presented and announcements were made.

I spent Tuesday morning exploring downtown Toronto.  The weather was sunny, but quite chilly, and I walked around, visited Kensington Market, had lunch, and then returned to the Toronto Convention Center for afternoon paper sessions.  I listened to the following presentations: Teaching Pharmacy Students How to Help Consumers Navigate and Select the Best Medicare Plans; Collaborative Collection Development: Building a Patient-Driven Consumer Health Library; Get Appy! A Mosaic of Personnel Offer an App Bar for Patients to Apply Apps to Their Health; Perceived eHealth Literacy and Information Behavior of Older Adults Enrolled in a Health Information Outreach Program; Libraries as Publishers: Creating an Open Access Journal to Connect Patients and Providers.  The evening closed with the President’s Awards Dinner.

On the final morning of the conference, Wednesday, May 18, I sat in on Plenary Session 4: Ellen Jorgensen.  I’m not sure whether the lecture had an official title, but it focused on the citizen science movement.  Jorgensen is the founder of a New York lab called Genspace, a place where biotech hobbyists could engage in science.  While interesting, I didn’t really see how Jorgensen’s talk on “home-grown” biotech experimentation applied to medical libraries, hospital libraries in particular. 


At the end of Jorgensen’s talk, I was eager to hit the road, so I headed back to Wisconsin.  It never ceases to amaze me how much I learn at MLA, but likewise, I always seem to forget how exhausting the conference can be.  I’m always “conferenced-out” at the end of MLA!  Thank you, WHSLA!

-Elissa Kinzelman-Vesely

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