President’s Welcome

Hello!

For those that don’t know me, my name is Jessie Casella and I am the current President of the Massachusetts Health Sciences Libraries Network (MAHSLIN). I am a clinical librarian at the Dept. of Veterans Affairs Central Western Massachusetts Healthcare System. Our main facility is in Leeds, just outside of Northampton.

Welcome to new MAHSLIN members and welcome back to returning MAHSLIN members! I along with the rest of the MAHSLIN Executive Board are excited that you have joined MAHSLIN this year.

Thank you to everyone who completed the post Annual Meeting survey. Based on that feedback we saw that there was interest in MAHSLIN providing more training for diversity and inclusion, virtual work, aligning with key groups and management, tech tools, creating videos and podcasts, instructional design, and managing collections with
shrinking budgets.

The MAHSLIN Executive Board will do our best to meet your needs. If you do not see topics of interest above, please reach out and let us know what trainings and resources can best support you.

The MAHSLIN Executive Board is committed to working toward an equitable, inclusive, and diverse culture that welcomes all health sciences librarians and those with an interest in health sciences libraries. This is challenging work that requires commitment, continual learning, courage to speak up, humility, accountability, patience, and perseverance.

This year the MAHSLIN Executive Board is committed to:

-Ensuring ADA compliance on documents and recordings
-Outreach recruiting programs to all Massachusetts libraries, MLS/MLIS students, and STEM students to make MAHSLIN membership more representative of Massachusetts’s population
-Making DEI training available to MAHSLIN members either directly through MAHSLIN or through third parties
-Continuing to remove cost barriers to professional development by providing professional development awards

MAHSLIN is a collective of all its members. I hope over the next year that we can each grow in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) by talking with and learning from each other. If you have specific ideas and/or actions for how to grow DEI in MAHSLIN, please reach out to me or another member of the MAHSLIN Executive Board.

Usually in the President’s welcome message, the President will outline plans and goals for the year ahead. One of the major lessons I have learned over the last 16 months is the need to be adaptable with long range planning. While we have your suggestions from the survey, I know that changes occur quickly, and we may need to add or adapt topics as needed. As new challenges come up, please reach out to me or another MAHSLIN Executive Board member and let us know how we can be supporting you.

MAHSLIN is not an executive board. MAHSLIN is YOU! The Executive Board is here to serve you so please let us know how we can do that.

Jessie Casella, MLIS
MAHSLIN President

One week to go until the MAHSLIN annual meeting

Check out the meeting website!

Here is what the day will bring:

The program and speaker biographies are listed.  Check out the list of exhibitors and vendors. 

·        Listen and learn from informative sessions

·        Learn how to use a tourniquet in an emergency

·        Network with your colleagues

·        Play exhibitor BINGO during the breakout sessions and win prizes!

·        Good food and great snacks

Come one, Come all – it’s time to register for the MAHSLIN annual meeting!

Here are my top ten reasons to attend the meeting.

1.     Listen and learn from a national expert on disaster medicine.

2.     Learn about the free resources from the National Library of Medicine’s Disaster Information Management  Research Center.

3.     Lunch is included in the registration!

4.     The meeting is centrally located, right off Route 95/128 in Waltham.

5.     There are great afternoon snacks!

6.     Meet other librarians from New England.

7.     What other way can you celebrate the Ides of March.

8.     Learn what to do with a tourniquet.

9.     MA Health Science Librarians are fun!

10.  Become inspired to learn something new.

Here is the link to the meeting web site.

Here are more TOP TEN REASONS to attend the MAHSLIN annual meeting on Friday, March 15th

Our conference is going to be great!

More from our list of  Top 10 Reasons why you should attend:

10) Libraries can become response centers in your community during a disaster

9) Increase communication about policies and best practices when disaster strikes

8) Learn what to do with a tourniquet

7) Lunch and snacks are included in registration!

More to come.

Here is the link to the meeting web site.  You can check out the program and register.

Time for 2 more reasons to attend our conference!

 

7. Learn what to do with a tourniquet
8. Improve resilience among coworkers during disasters

Register today!

#networking #healthsciences #resiliency

MAHSLIN 2019 Annual Meeting

Massachusetts Health Sciences Library Network

Annual Meeting

Friday, March 15, 2019

Massachusetts Medical Society
Conference Center at Waltham Woods
860 Winter Street
Waltham, MA 02451

Register Here

Program:

8:00 – 9:00        Registration, Coffee, Continental Breakfast / Visit with Exhibitors

9:00 – 9:30        Business Meeting

9:30 – 9:45        Break with Exhibitors

9:45 – 10:45      Eric Goralnick, MD, Medical Director of Emergency Preparedness, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

10:45 – 11:00     Break with Exhibitors

11:00 – 12:00     Stacey Arnesen, MS, Branch Chief, Disaster Information Management Research Center, National Library of Medicine

12:00 – 12:15     Sarah Levin-Lederer, MPH, Outreach and Education Coordinator, National Network of Libraries of Medicine, New England Region

12:15 – 1:15       Lunch

1:15 – 2:00         Exhibitor Lightning Rounds & Final Break with Exhibitors

2:00 – 3:00         Stop the Bleed — Tourniquet Training

3:00 – 3:15         Wrap-Up

MAHSLIN 2018 Annual Meeting: March 16, 2018

Jessica LaBrie

Information, Innovation & You

The MAHSLIN Annual Meeting comes early this year and is right around the corner! If you have not already done so, please register. Early registration is still just $65.00 for MAHSLIN members. As MAHSLIN works to focus on you, our members, the Board has decided that all regular paid attendees of this year’s Annual Meeting will receive free MAHSLIN memberships next year.

As we speed through an age in which more information is communicated more rapidly than ever before, and innovators swiftly devise new ways to reflect contemporary trends and promote continued progress, the relentless pace of change and innovation can feel overwhelming. However, librarians, too, are necessarily innovators, particularly in today’s dynamic world. Not only do we innovate to improve library services and to respond to changes around us, but when significant shifts occur in the education, work, or information habits of our user populations, we creatively adapt to ensure that we continue to serve our patrons effectively.

This year’s program presents a slate of speakers addressing our roles and our opportunities in the context of rapid innovation — innovation in libraries, innovation in health sciences, and how you can effectively become an integral part of continuing innovation.

Callan Bignoli, Assistant Library Director (Technology) for the Public Libraries of Brookline, will deliver a presentation on content strategy for librarians. Ivan Oransky, MD, Distinguished Writer In Residence at NYU’s Carter Journalism Institute and co-founder of Retraction Watch, will discuss the reasons for the dramatic growth of retractions, whether fraud is on the rise, the growth of post-publication peer review, and other related trends. Finally, Jane Blumenthal, Associate University Librarian & Director, Taubman Health Sciences Library at University of Michigan, will speak about how health sciences librarians can respond to a changing landscape by developing creative and innovative ways to meet our users’ information needs, taking the challenges of change and reframing them as opportunities to take advantage of.

We hope to see you on March 16!

Jessica LaBrie
MAHSLIN President-Elect 2017-2018
MAHSLIN 2018 Program Chair

MAHSLIN Professional Development Award – Designing Search Strategies for Systematic Reviews

The support from the MAHSLIN Professional Development Award Fund enabled me to attend an exceptional class earlier this month. Designing Search Strategies for Systematic Reviews is in its second year offering by the Becker Medical Library at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. It’s a two day course offered in person. The course is intended for librarians to be better prepared to develop complex search strategies for systematic reviews.

I’ve also attended the University of Pittsburgh’s Falk Library of the Health Sciences Systematic Review Workshop. I took that class prior to having contributed to any Systematic Reviews and didn’t really know what I didn’t know. It was a really great class that provided a solid foundation for the two Systematic Reviews I worked on afterward. Unfortunately, I had no confidence in the work that I did on those reviews. I still wondered, “Did I create effective searches, I must have done something wrong, how do I know if the searches were actually good or not?”

Those lingering thoughts led me to register for the Search Strategies for Systematic Reviews course. The course was $400 and I had to travel to St. Louis, which could be a barrier for some. With this Professional Development Award and partial funding through my employer, I was able to make it. Thankfully, I did! The first reason I’m so glad I went, is that it definitely made me feel more confident about my work on the Systematic Reviews I supported and much more confident in starting a new one. Secondly, after having worked on those, I knew what I needed to know and where I felt weak. I knew what questions to ask this time around.

This course had a structured agenda that worked through the following topics on the first day: 1. SR Guidelines, 2. Patron Contact & PICO plan, 3. Search Design, Bias, and 4. Recall, Term Harvesting. The second day covered: 5. Designing Concept Hedges, 6. Combining Concept Hedges, 7. Support Software Overview, 8. Grey Literature Resources, 9. Writing the Methods Section, 10. Sending Results, and 11. Final Steps.

We worked through all of theses steps of a Systematic review from beginning to end with a Case Study that was provided to each of the three groups we had been divided into ahead of time. The instructor would perform an example of their own case study and then instruct us to perform those activities with our group’s case study. Each of the three groups had one component of the PICO question, P, I, or C (the study was looking for an outcome) as our concept we worked on. Toward the end of the class we shared our results (combining concept hedges) and worked on the Methods Section and Final Steps with all of the pieces put together. This hands-on method was extremely effective and we were even provided with the tools to take back (i.e., an excel spreadsheet to organize term harvesting, checklists for the methods section) with us for when we need them. The instructors stayed on target with the schedule and with discussions and questions. This organization was another plus of the class.

I highly recommend this course to anyone interested in taking a Systematic Review class and am extremely grateful that MAHSLIN provided me with the funds to make it possible.

Stephanie Friree Ford, MLIS
Reference Librarian

Slack

Submitted by Heather Edmonds, Director of Library Services, New England College of Optometry, edmondsh@neco.edu

is a free communication tool that is part-IM service, part-email, part-shared drive that also integrates with numerous productivity apps and other services.  It’s available as a mobile or desktop app, as well as via the web.  Though primarily marketed as a tool for small businesses and start-ups, the staff at my small library has been using it for nearly a year, and we have found it invaluable.

Slack allows for both group conversations — which can be organized by topic/project/etc. via “channels” — as well as direct messages to individuals on one’s “team” (our “team” is small and consists of only library staff members, but teams can be as large or as small as they need to be to accommodate the user group).  Messages are archived, and fully searchable.

Slack also permits the sharing of files among team members directly in the app.  File sharing is particularly easy when using cloud-based services such as Google Drive or Dropbox, as you need only cut and paste the link to the file into Slack in order to share it.

One of the most useful Slack features for us is the ability to integrate our shared Google Calendars into specific channels that update automatically when an “event” is forthcoming, so that you can see what’s happening on a particular day without having to leave the app.  For example, one of the shared calendars we’ve integrated is our circulation desk schedule, so that it’s easy to keep on top of who is scheduled to cover the desk, and when.

We initially decided to try Slack because we found that email, while useful for many purposes, wasn’t fully addressing our day-to-day communication needs as a staff.  Face-to-face communication is best, of course — but our library is open many hours, and because we cover different shifts we don’t always see each other as much as we’d like.  So we decided to try an IM service, and Slack proved to be the most versatile.  I highly recommend Slack for any library staff interested in communicating outside the email box.