For the Mid-Atlantic,
New York/New Jersey, Philadelphia Regional, and Southern Chapters
Tremont Grand,
October 13-16, 2012
I’m just getting around to posting my summary of the MAC/MLA
Conference. It was actually a quad meeting, so four chapters all got together.
The conference ran from Saturday, October 13 to Tuesday,
October 16 at the Tremont Grand Hotel. I missed Saturday’s events, CE courses
and the Welcome Reception, but attended the other days.
Quick Summary Of Stuff To Follow Up On:
- Big Data and Health Sciences Librarians- tackling datasets surrounding Medical Literature, Hospital/Lab/Clinical Informatics, Personalized Medicine, and Wellness Informatics
- Fostering Institutional Connections by Tracking Faculty Publications: The Faculty Bibliography Project at the NYU School of Medicine
- Interesting Wellness Resources: 23 and Me personalized genetic sequencing, The Measured Man by Mark Bowden, FitBit, and Eulerian Magnification.
- Making Connections Through Outreach: Lessons Learned and Future Directions; Prudence Dalrymple of Drexel U
- Join a committee
Sunday, October 14
We opened at 8 am with committee meetings. I’m not on any
MAC committees, but I’m trying to join one for 2013.
The 9-10:30 am keynote speaker was Souzan Hawala-Druy. Her
“How to Strive, Survive, and Thrive: Interweaved Diverse ‘Connections and
Cultures’ was a discussion on embracing change, backing the new generation of
library, and basically being open, flexible, and creatively inventive. Those
themes were reverberated throughout the course of the conference.
Exhibitor sponsored beverage break from 10:30-11. Yes,
coffee J I
drink a lot of coffee during conferences. Mostly because it’s always free and
in my face--irresistible.
Paper sessions from 11-12:30. There were four simultaneous
sessions, each contained 5, 15-minute parts.
You could stay in one session the
entire time, or jump around to mix and match parts. I liked that idea, but
ended up staying in Session 4 the entire time—sessions were Connections for
Cultural Competency: Librarian Exploring Faculty Roles; Fostering Institutional Connections by
Tracking Faculty Publications: The Faculty Bibliography Project at the NYU
School of Medicine; Twitter, Scholarly Communication, and Evidence-Based Health
Information Access: How Major Medical Journals Have Been Using Social Media for
Information Dissemination, Crowdsourcing as a Tool for Rapid Library Data
Cleanup, Breaking Inertia: An Attempt to Increase Access to Resources During a
Period of Declining Budgets (One Year Later).
I love the idea of librarians as research faculty—it puts
you on level ground with teaching faculty, but still holds true to the more
traditional roles of librarian. I also liked observing how my colleagues are
building relationships with teaching faculty—from creating repositories to
promoting scholarly communication to working with a reduced budget. I’m still
on the fence about using social media as a means of communication. I wasn’t
completely won over in this session, and I think it would really have to be
used creatively to make an impact. I can’t deny its usefulness for
inter-professional communication, though. I’m learning that a good relationship
with teaching faculty creates a trickle-down effect to a great relationship
with students and is a great way to maximize the investment of library
resources.
At the 12:30 lunch break, I skipped out to meet a couple of
non-medical library librarians for brunch at City Café. I love playing lunch
hooky J
I was back from 2-3 to staff my poster, Using Multimedia to
Become A Better Teacher: The Power of Prezi. I met a lot of great people in the
course of the hour and actually got a couple of ideas and tips for improving my
Prezi experience.
Another beverage break from 3-3:30. It was a great time to
relax after going full blast all day.
There was another panel from 3:30 to 5, Connecting with
Technology Trends: ‘Connecting Physicians and iPads to Support Patient Care’,
‘Emerging Technologies and New Medical Libraries, ‘How Did I Become the
Computer Geek? The Impact of Social Media and Other Technologies on Library
Services’. Can’t get away from social media discussions…grrrr.
The day ended with Dine-Arounds, with a wide range of
restaurant choices. It was a long day.
Monday, October 15
My day started at 9 am with Keynote Speaker Jon Orwant’s Big
Data talk. A few take-away points: Google’s ‘site’ operator for Google
searching, the AROUND operator for proximity searching. I think his main point
was that librarians can serve as project managers, organizing insanely large
amounts of messy data. The project management/information architecture part of
me loves that idea, but it doesn’t seem like something I want to do all day,
every day. Orwant also listed the four largest datasets that would appeal to
medical librarians—Medical Literature, Hospital/Lab/Clinical Informatics, Personalized
Medicine, and Wellness Informatics.
On a personal note, he mentioned a few personal wellness
resources I’m interested in: 23 and Me personalized genetic sequencing, The
Measured Man by Mark Bowden, FitBit, and Eulerian Magnification.
From 10:30-11:30—beloved beverage break. And can I say these
were great because you could choose from coffee, coke products, and Perrier
sparkling water. And the coke bottles were sooo cute J
Paper Sessions from 11-12:15—Again, I stayed in the same
session the entire time, ‘Making Connections Through Outreach: Lessons Learned
and Future Directions’; ‘Connecting With
A Regional Public Health Workforce’, ‘Supporting An Evidence-Based Culture for
Public Health: Commitment to Stronger Transparent Science, and Disconnect From
Embarrasment: Older Adults and Incontinence, an Education Intervention.
At 12:30, there was a sponsored lunch. The food was good
(most important, lol) as were the people and conversation. There wasn’t a theme
surrounding the lunch, so it was a good time to meet and converse with new
people.
I browsed poster sessions from 2-3. The room was pretty
small and hard to navigate, something I didn’t notice when I was staffing my
poster. I waited until closer to 3 to visit the posters I was most interested
in.
A panel session from 3-5 on Connecting Users Through
Outreach; “Engaging Patients Through Health Literacy”, “Project SHARE
(Empowering Student Community Health Advocates) and the Logistics of
Implementing a Student Health Advocacy Program”, “Outreach Programs within Your
Own Institution.
I was most impressed by Project SHARE, collaboration between
UMD-B health sciences librarians and a local high school.
Tuesday, October 16
Each chapter conducted business breakfast meetings from
8-9:15.
NLM/NNLM Updates from 9:30-11. I seemed to have lost those
notes—will try to find them and summarize.
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