Post by 2025 WHSLA Professional Development Grant Winner, Eileen Severson!

Guest post by WHSLA member, Eileen Severson

First, thank you for the boost of cash to attend MLA!  Here’s a bit about what I learned, and thought might be important for you all to know.

I took the CE entitled “Hospital Librarianship: Keeping Traditions and Bridging to Innovations: (Re)Vitalizing your Career and Your Library.”  The title of this course attracted me because there are times lately I’ve needed a bit of re-vitalizing around my career and library.  What I came away with the most was that I wasn’t alone.  I sat in a room of both exhausted but enthusiastic hospital librarians who shared their frustrations and problems as well as their successes.  We discussed creating a mission, vision and strategic plan for your library, and making sure they connected with the organization’s mission, vision, and strategic plan.   We brainstormed services and ways we could “get out of the library” and make our value known.  Some ideas were being on committees like continuing education, research, patient education, IRB, GME and grants.  Other ideas included attending grand rounds, morbidity and mortality conferences, and department meetings.  One of the librarians shared her email tag line that we all thought was spot on: “We use our expertise so you can focus on using yours”.  Through this course I met some creative and kind librarians with lots of ideas and feel more energized to try new things in my library.

I attended a variety of symposiums and poster presentations.  Some takeaways from these presentations:

• Take time to reflect on how you are hiring—is it inclusive? Where can you offer flexibility in the position description and job ad?  Do years of experience need to be in a library—what other experience does the candidate have?  Be more flexible in the interview—for example, give the candidate the questions before the interview, turn off the camera to give candidate time to think before answering a question.  Allow notes—this isn’t a test! 

•  Succession planning! This presentation hit home for me.  Basically, if you have someone retiring or moving to a different position—make sure to document, document, document all that they do.  The presenters suggested that the documents don’t have to be prescriptive but should describe the thought process when performing tasks.  They created flow-charts showing the thought process of several responsibilities of one of their retiring staff. 

•   How to highlight your library as a value driven partner: 
• Use data that means something to your leaders; align your data with organizational goals.   
• How much money does the library save?  How do we help meet strategic objectives of the organization?  What is the ROI of the library?
• Don’t just share the data, include narrative, stories.  Make sure to eliminate library jargon. 
• How do we provide a community benefit?
• Talk to people, attend events
• Connect work with incentives/reimbursement 

• AI is the new hottest topic—it was everywhere at MLA.  I have determined I need to learn more about it and our library needs to be a resource for understanding and teaching others about AI. 

I also networked with my fellow WHSLA Professional Development winner, Kathy Koch!!!

Before (left) and after (right) photos below:

 

The Nightmare of Plain Text Citations (and some potential workarounds!)

Picture this: A researcher contacts you. They're wanting to insert citations into a Word document, but the in-text citations and bibliography don't seem to be updating in the document when they insert citations using EndNote. They send the document to you, and you discover all the citations in the document are plain text citations. You follow up with the researcher, and receive the response you most dread: their colleagues added citations manually, without a citation manager.

As librarians, this scenario might seem all too familiar. While I don't have a quick solution for fixing the issue, I do have some workarounds I've employed to help streamline the process of replacing in-text citations with EndNote citations. These workarounds include generating PubMed DOI searches from a plain text reference list using Excel, automatically highlighting plain text superscripts in a Word document, and using the aforementioned Excel sheet as a "cheat sheet" for inserting citations into your document.

Just in case someone else might these workarounds helpful, I included these in the video below. The Excel codes I used for this video are included at the bottom of this post, along with a few notes for each of the codes.

As a note, if you're only interested in converting a plain text bibliography into an RIS, Citation Finder is another great option! If you do use this, however, I recommend using the "Find Reference Updates" option in EndNote, as this will help ensure your citations have more detailed and accurate metadata. 

 

Excel code for extracting DOIs:

=RIGHT(B1:B62,LEN(B1:B62)-SEARCH("doi:", B1:B62)-3)

*Make sure the highlighted ranges include the column that has your citation information. For example, if your citation information was in Column A, you will need to replace all instances of B with A in that Excel code. The "62" refers the last cell in the column that has information in it. You can adjust this number as needed (but be sure to do so for each instance of 62 in the code!). 

 

Excel code for creating PubMed search

=CHAR(34)&C1:C62&CHAR(34)&"[doi] OR “

*Make sure the highlighted range includes the Column that has your extracted DOI’s. The "62" refers to the last cell in the column that has information in it. You can adjust this number as needed (but be sure to do so for each instance of 62 in the code!). 

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend! 

NNLM Region 7 Presents: MLA Debrief for Hospital Librarians, June 6, 2025

NNLM Region 7 Presents: MLA Debrief for Hospital Librarians, June 6, 2025

For those of us who were not able to attend the MLA Conference in May, this was a welcome program hitting some of the highlights of interest to hospital librarians.

A few Hospital Librarians who presented at MLA 2025 presented again for this de-briefing.

Liz Kellermeyer presented Offline On Hand, describing an in print collection for emergencies or other situations when internet might not be available, such as ransomeware attacks, power outages, or even a vendor pulling content.  The collection includes directories, clinical guidelines, medical procedures, and drug info.  It doesn't circulate, and should be always available.  She also talked about

• Building the collection
• Funding the collection
• Usage stats
• Expect low circulation.  
• Focus is on readiness, not CPUs.  
• Success = availability in an emergency.

Carol Durst presented her poster entitled "MyChart: Hands On Help for Patients" in which she described her Library offering walk-in/onsite support for patients using the patient portal.  No virtual help.  She said it was more trouble-shooting than research.

Accessibility in the Arts with Bare Feet

Accessibility in the Arts - Bare Feet with Mickela Mallozzi

Watch the 28 min. video.

Mickela asks the question, “What does ACCESSIBILITY mean?” for disabled artists and audiences in the United States. She meets with pioneering artists including professional physically integrated dance companies and dance programs for children with disabilities.

I was watching PBS the other night and saw an episode of Bare Feet, by a woman who travels the world "one dance at a time."  This is one of my favorite shows on PBS, but this one seemed to tie in with work.  She did an episode on "Accessibility in the Arts."  Really moving stuff [Literally!], esp. because her own sister has cerebral palsy, and would have benefited from many of these programs growing up. 

In the introduction, Mallozzi says:

"The Disability Community is the only minority group that any one of us can become a member of at any point in our lives.  On July 26, 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (The ADA) was signed into law, protecting people with disabilities from discrimination from voting to parking and other aspects of public life. But is it enough?"

I hope you appreciate it as much as I did.  Share with your Rehab people!

Dancing Wheels: Art Motion Dance

MLA Takeaways: Day one

Day one: 

Forced myself out of bed in time to get coffee and meh pastries (we need protein) before the sessions. I'm a woman on a budget here. Wasn't enjoying the one hour time change at the moment. 

Subject Heading Revisions (Immersion Session)

• Group of librarians and interested individuals working to update medical subject headings with current terminology
• MeSH has 1 revision per year and Library of Congress has 1 revision per month
• Example of an outdated subject heading: Medical telematics
• Revising to Virtual Medical Health
• Interested? Join the Medical Subject Funnel
• cataloginglab.org/medical-funnel

Negotiating with Vendors [this was my favorite of the whole conference] (Symposium)

1. Have a plan
1. who are the stakeholders
2. what are the priorities
3. what is the timetable (contracts and redlining takes a long time)
4. Build a relationship, they are trying to help you (while also trying to make money)
2. Budget Sustainability
1. One director's rule of thumb was to ensure three years of funding to give a new resource a good try
2. You can just try asking for something to cost less
3. One way to save money can be to try for a multi-year agreement. This also saves your time and ensures the vendor will keep your business for a certain amount of time.
4. When starting a new resource, you could work with the department requesting the resource. For example, asking the department to fund the first three years and then the library will take over when they are sure that they really want to keep the resource long term. Or develop a cost sharing agreement
3. Remember that you are the driver of the call. Take a breath when you need to.
4. Get your own user statistics
1. Note from Kelly: Admittedly, I don't fully understand or have a grasp on my statistics yet. 
2. Look at multi-year trends, not just the recent year
3. What is going on in your institution?
4. What does your ILL data look like?
5. Cost per use trend? $50 per use was one figure put into the discussion

Communities Luncheon

I attended the MLA communities luncheon and ate with the Hospital Libraries Caucus. I met some interesting librarians, but didn't really connect with anyone. Most of the people at the table felt like they already knew each other. It was a little intimidating to put myself out there. The box lunch was quite nice though. I'd only been to conferences at the state level, so it was nice that some of the food was included in the registration fee. 

Took a short break for a power nap in my room. Did not regret booking the hotel attached to the conference site at all.

Opening Session

I enjoyed seeing most of the MLA attendees in one place. The MLA president, Brenda Linares, spoke and introduced her family who were attending. That was sweet. The keynote were medical students from University of Pittsburgh Medical School's Street Medicine group. It was interesting to hear their stories and the impact that the program has for the unhoused of Pittsburgh.

Welcome Reception

The last MLA event of day one was the Welcome Reception in the vendor hall. Food was great, featuring local favorites like pierogis (yum!) and Primanti Bros style sandwiches (meh) among other options. A particular hit were the made to order mini pies as well as the open bar. 😉 Vendors were doling out the swag and prizes. 

I actually had a bit of a challenging time trying to connect with a couple of new vendors that I was interested in. They really seemed to be more focused on their current clients. 🤷 One of the vendors did follow-up with me after the conference at least. 

My final event of this long day was a vendor dinner. I was invited to dinner with about 15 other librarians at Eleven. It was nice and the food was excellent. I enjoyed the smaller group setting to connect with other librarians and get to know my sales rep better. But still after about 2.5 hours of dinner and being stuffed full of food, I ducked out early when the group started ordering desserts. Whew!

Me at the airport at the end of the conference

Well I was going to make this a one post about the conference, but I'll have to split it up into multiples...