Upcoming WHSLA Wisdom Chat July 25: Ebling Librarians will talk about Generative AI (including OpenEvidence)

Curious about generative AI? 

Attend the next WHSLA Wisdom Chat on 7/25/2025 at 1pm!

Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere these days. As librarians, navigating the AI landscape can seem overwhelming. This upcoming Wisdom Chat, presented by Ebling Librarians Leslie Christensen, Lia Vellardita, Susan Vandagriff, and Paije Wilson from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will provide a critical look at popular generative AI tools within the context of literature summarization and searching. Specifically, the chat will include:

• A brief overview of the different types of AI and how they relate to each other
• The benefits and limitations of summarizers for individual articles, with an example from Elicit
• The benefits and limitations of summarizers for a body of literature, with examples from Perplexity and OpenEvidence
• An in-depth, critical discussion of OpenEvidence
• The benefits and limitations of chatbots for the creation of PubMed search strategies, with an example from ChatGPT

Attendees will walk away with knowledge of the benefits and limitations of some available generative AI tools, awareness of these tools' potential applications, and fundamental skills on how to approach these tools using a critical lens.

Join us for this presentation, followed by our usual round of sharing.

When: 1 pm on July 25, 2025 via Zoom

WHSLA Wisdom Chats are open to all WHSLA members in good standing.  If you are a current member and did not receive an invitation, please contact Michele Matucheski, WHSLA Wisdom Chat Coordinator filling in for Barb Ruggieri this year.  

Trio of Library Initiatives to Integrate the Arts & Humanities into our Health Community: Ebling's

This lightning talk was presented at the virtual 2021 Midwest/MCMLA Joint Annual Meeting on October 15 by fellow Wisconsinites:   [Posted here with their permission.]

A Trio of Library Initiatives to Integrate the Arts & Humanities into our Health Community. 

Christopher Hooper-Lane, MA, AHIP, and Lia Vellardita, MA, Ebling Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison. [Midwest] [First-time Chapter Presenter] [Program Description]

BACKGROUND: There is a growing recognition of the benefits of expanding the arts/humanities in the health sciences. Recognizing this, school leadership tasked our library to develop initiatives to connect the arts and humanities to our patrons. As a result, our library launched three new programs to integrate the arts into our community. 

DESCRIPTION: Our library developed three arts initiatives for our health sciences community:

 (1) a book/film discussion club providing participants at all levels a venue to discuss relevant books and films; 

(2) an onsite recreational reading collection (and corresponding website) offering a browsable collection of popular non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and graphic medicine books with health themes and sub-collections on emergent topics; 

(3) an arts/humanities journal that for our health community to showcase a variety of arts including the written word, visual arts (2D and photos of 3D art), and multimedia audio/video.

CONCLUSION: All three initiatives have been successfully launched. The book/film club has administered 15 online book/film discussions with a total of 220 participants. Sessions are led by a variety of facilitators from our health community. The recreational reading collection now includes 1200 items and is expected to be fully on display and available for circulation summer 2021. A corresponding website is live using book cover images that can be sorted by sub-collections such as well-being, antiracism, etc. Three issues of our arts journal have successfully published 84 works of art from our health sciences community with 2,950 site hits recorded.

Art at Ebling:  Book Club  |  Corpus Callosum  |   Recreational Reading Collection

Link to Conference Papers and Posters

Contact Chris Hooper-Lane or Lia Vellardita for more information.