Volunteer at MLA 2026: Give Back and Get Involved!

 

The Call for Volunteers for MLA 2026 in Milwaukee is officially open! Whether you are a seasoned medical librarian or new to the field, we need your energy to make this year’s conference a success.

Why Join Us? Volunteering is the best way to see the "behind-the-scenes" of our association, an easy way to meet new peers, and contribute to our professional community.

Available Opportunities:

• Tuesday: Help us get things started with bag stuffing and hospitality.
• Wednesday – Friday: Support the hospitality desk or assist in the Speaker/Member Resource Room.
• Wednesday Special Project: Join our local service project in partnership with My Very Own Blanket. Help us create no-sew blankets to bring comfort to children in foster care. Learn more about the project here.

The Volunteer Perk: Commit to 6 hours of volunteer service and receive one day of conference registration for free! This is a fantastic way to offset professional development costs while networking with colleagues from across the country.

Sign up now to secure your preferred shifts! Sign Up Genius

We look forward to seeing you there!

 

Join the committee to promote medical librarianship in Wisconsin’s information schools!

WHSLA is looking for volunteers to participate in a committee interested in outreach to the UW-Madison iSchool and UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies. The goal of this committee is to develop a connection between Wisconsin’s information schools and WHSLA for the promotion of job shadowing opportunities, practicum/fieldwork placements, and interest in medical librarianship as a profession.

If you are interested in participating, please email Barb Ruggeri (barbara dot ruggeri at aah dot org) or Hayley Severson (hseveron at mcw dot edu) by April 10^th. 

The Librarian Reserve Corps

I've been fascinated with The Librarian Reserve Corps ever since I first heard about it sometime last year.  It showed the value and solutions Health Science Librarians brought to the pandemic.  It made me proud to be part of this profession!

The Librarian Reserve Corps formed as a volunteer organization in response to the Covid pandemic and the World Health Organization (WHO) needing the expert skills of Librarians to help search, organize, and manage the unprecedented onslaught of new data that was coming out on the topic.

2 recent articles have been published about The Librarian Reserve Corps:

Librarian Reserve Corps: Literature indexing and metadata enhancement (LIME) observations from a year in the field

Jessica Callaway

Journal of Health Information and Libraries Australiasia; April 2021: 2(1); 35-45.

The Librarian Reserve Corps: An Emergency Response.

Callaway J.    Med Ref Serv Q. 2021 Jan-Mar;40(1):90-102. doi: 10.1080/02763869.2021.1873627.PMID: 33625329.  

If you want to learn more, check out the following webinar, and find out how you can get involved and be part of The Librarian Reserve Corps, too!

Evidence-Based Librarianship: Building the Base as We Respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic / Infodemic.  

Webinar for IFLA posted to YouTube on June 11, 2021.  

The Librarian Reserve Corps is an international volunteer network of over 140 medical and public health librarians from 14 countries, working in partnership with the World Health Organization in response to public health emergencies.

The COVID-19 pandemic sparked a dramatic increase in publishing, including the dissemination of scientific research in preprints, press releases and news stories, as well as the creation of new and specialized databases and search portals. This challenged traditional systems and standards for organization and searching.

This webinar will describe the primary initiatives undertaken by the Librarian Reserve Corps to streamline efforts and encourage sharing and collaboration among partners to inform the evidence-base health information response to COVID-19, focusing on the evolution and preliminary results of two key projects

1) A database validation study of specialized COVID-19 literature databases, jointly led with the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technology in Health.

2) The development of best practices for searching during public health emergencies.