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

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