A blog from WHSLA (Wisconsin Health Sciences Library Association) featuring posts on medical and health science libraries, NLM, and learning opportunities for medical and health science librarians and library staff.
Zapping parts of the brain to know where to cut, operating a mouth-controlled microscope that's worth more than a house, and carrying the weight of life-or-death decisions with Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, a brain surgeon at the Mayo Clinic. How do you preserve a mathematician's expertise when removing tumors? And how did he go from picking tomatoes to performing brain surgery?
Dr. Q wrote about his remarkable journey to the operating room in the book:
An article from Becker's Clinical News caught my eye this morning and sparked a discussion with my husband about what the numbers meant.
The states with the most and the least number of nurses matched the populations/relative size of the state. California and Texas with the most and Wyoming and Vermont at the bottom.
When they calculate it per 100,000 people, however, the results are a bit unexpected. Washington DC tops the list with New York in second with the most per capita, but North Dakota, Alaska, and Montana also make the top 10 per capita.
Bringing up the bottom is Utah followed by California, which surprised me. Texas also was in the bottom 10 per 100,000.
Wisconsin wasn't on either list coming in at 2,188 per 100,000 (per my calculations).
My first inclination was this data wasn't telling us much of anything. My husband's takeaway was about the relative demand for nurses in various places like California. Thoughts?
Midwest Chapter/Medical Library Association 2025 Annual Conference
Tuesday, October 14th through Friday, October 17th
Join your health sciences library colleagues from the Midwest and beyond to explore this year’s theme: Imagination & Co-Creation
Attendance Options: This year we are piloting a conference format that is simultaneously familiar and new: virtually via Zoom, or in-person at an official host site for a group viewing of the virtual program.
Conference activities will be primarily virtual, with a full day of virtual continuing education (October 14th) and two full days of virtual conference programming (October 16th-17th) that is accessible to all online.
Attendees are invited to join other conference-goers at one of two official host sites in the region! Official host sites will provide a half day of specialized in-person programming for attendees on October 15th, and they will provide food, hospitality, and group viewing of the virtual conference program on October 16th and 17th.
The official host sites are:
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Western Michigan University Homer Stryker MD School of Medicine, Kalamazoo, Michigan
Official host sites will be part of the conference program as options for attendees to elect to view the virtual conference in person with a group, and to take part in an additional half-day of in-person site-specific activities before/after the virtual conference. There is no additional registration cost to the attendees to join an official host site.
According to the NIH's overview and FAQ pages, this policy applies to "any manuscript accepted for publication in a journal, on or
after July 1, 2025, that is the result of funding by NIH in whole or in
part" and "requires that author accepted manuscripts accepted for publication in a journal, on or after July 1, 2025, to be submitted to PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication, for public availability without embargo upon the Official Date of Publication."
For librarians interested in learning more about this policy, the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) released a free, self-paced course that walks you through:
The basics of the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy
The manuscript submission process
How to track compliance
Potential roles for librarians
You will need a free NNLM account to register. MLA members are eligible to receive 2 continuing education credits upon completion of the course.
Thanks for reading, and I hope everyone has a great day!
A 40 minute lecture and ensuing discussion by Tom Mustill on his experiences translating the world of animal communications through film, communications and emerging technologies.
In 2015, wildlife filmmaker Tom Mustill was whale-watching when a humpback breached onto his kayak and nearly killed him. After a video clip of the event went viral, scientists used AI to discover who the whale was, reconstruct its life story and demonstrate that it wasn't trying to harm him. Fascinated, Tom spent 4 years meeting the pioneers in a new age of discovery, whose cutting-edge developments in natural science and technology are taking us to the brink of decoding animal communication using remote sensors, big data and machine intelligence.
In this talk Tom discussing his personal experience documenting the natural world and the emerging technologies that have allowed us to progress animal communications. He questions how can we protect the living world from these new powers and make sure that if we make contact through technology we do not harm or exploit them?
This video is part of the Interspecies Conversations lecture series. A regular online lecture series that invites leading professors, scientists, researchers, and students to share and present their work around interspecies communication and approaches to deciphering the signals of other animals. It aims to showcase emerging ideas and discoveries and include open discussions where the community can join the conversation with ideas and feedback.
One of the books I read this summer was How to Speak Whale by Tom Mustill. I'd seen a PBS documentary (Nature: The Whale Detective) about some of this story, but the focus was on identifying the whale who breeched onto his kayak. He learned to not take it personally and realized it was a young-ish whale who didn't mean to hurt him -- The whales were busy feeding and the humans got in the way, but I don't remember the focus of that show being so much about interspecies communication or the blossoming of data science. That's a big focus in his book. And now with advances in AI, machine learning and large language models, we might actually make some progress on interspecies communication! Maybe ...
Here are some of the apps and projects mentioned in the book and the talk above:
Project CETI - What would it mean to understand what whales are saying?
The HappyWhale Database is a crowd-sourced by whale lovers and tourists (not just scientists) to identify and track whales worldwide.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming every aspect of healthcare and pharmaceuticals, from diagnostics and drug discovery to clinical workflows and administrative operations. As AI reshapes the field, questions around trust, transparency, equity, and the evolving role of healthcare professionals remain critical.
Here's a juicy quote by Dr. Sonnenberg that sums up the session -- and gives me hope for the future:
Here are my final thoughts: AI won't replace clinical judgement or human connection. What it will do is challenge us to be more intentional -- about how we listen, how we learn, how we lead, and how we build trust.
As an educator, I see this as a teaching moment, one where we model curiosity, courage, and care. Our job isn't to resist change, but to steward it ethically, relationally, and with equity at the core.
This isn't about what we're leaving behind. It's about what we're building --and who we're building it for.
And at the center of it all is trust, because no matter how powerful the technology, its impact depends on the character of those who guide its use.
Or as we wrote in our CARE-AI book, 'Technology is only as ethical as the hands, and hearts, that guide it."
This one is sponsored by The Medical Library Association.
As trusted guides in healthcare information, you understand the importance of rigorous evaluation when it comes to clinical resources.
Join Amanda Barry, MPH, Principal Clinical Analyst and AI Ethics at Elsevier, who has been at the forefront of developing evaluation protocols for generative AI tools since October 2023. Her work with Elsevier Health's AI evaluation team focuses on accuracy, safety, and mitigating demographic bias in healthcare AI systems like ClinicalKey AI and Sherpath AI.
This webinar is particularly relevant for medical librarians who are increasingly asked about AI tools by healthcare providers. Amanda's epidemiological background and 11+ years in clinical decision support allow her to provide unique insights into what makes AI tools truly reliable for clinical use. Her team's research methodology, recently published in JAMIA Open, offers a "clinician-in-the-loop approach" that ensures AI evaluation assesses what matters most to clinicians.
Don't miss this opportunity to enhance your ability to guide healthcare professionals toward trustworthy AI resources on Thursday, August 2025, at 1:00 p.m., central time.
Tuberculosis is often thought of as an old-timey disease, but in reality, it continues to kill over a million and a half people per year, despite its known cure. How did we get here, to a world where decades of work toward a cure stalled in its dissemination around the globe? And how can understanding the history of TB point us toward a different future? If you’ve been following author and TB-hater John Green in any way for the last year or so, this video is the deep dive you’ve been waiting for…
This is a fascinating interview with John Green about TB, "and how the world’s deadliest curable disease still thrives—and why everything, from [Taylor Swift] and cowboy hats to colonial borders, traces back to tuberculosis."
